by Edwin Black
CHAPTER 16
Buchenwald
Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. The “Little Camp”-the isolation and quarantine section of Buchenwald. Block 57. One morning in late May of 1944.1
Three-tiered geometric boxes lined the barrack. Each housed as many as sixteen emaciated humans per shelf. A thirsty and exhausted Frenchman named Oliv struggled to climb down from the top level for his day’s work. But he was too weak to climb out and negotiate the eight feet down. As Oliv lay limp, a fat, well-fed inmate doctor walked in. The other French prisoners pleaded with the doctor that Oliv was too ill and suffered from severe rheumatism, making his every movement painful. The frail man needed medical attention. A small infirmary, stocked with medicines and called “the hospital,” had been established in the Little Camp. The doctor controlled access to the facility and the drugs. Those admitted to the hospital could be excused from work until nursed back to working strength-and thereby live another day.2
But the doctor, himself a prisoner yet reviled as a barbaric stooge of the SS, was known for refusing admission to the hospital except to those he favored-or those who could bribe their way in by turning over their relief packets. Most of all, the doctor hated the French communists. They-and their diseases-were everywhere in the Little Camp. The doctor believed that each inferior national group was a carrier of its own specific set of diseases. Frenchmen, he thought, brought in diphtheria and related throat diseases as well as scarlet fever. Simply put, the Little Camp doctor was unwilling to use his limited hospital to lessen the prisoners’ loads, extend their lives or relieve their suffering. The prisoners’ job was to work. His job was to ensure they kept working-until they could work no more.3
Furious and impatient, the Little Camp doctor pushed the others out of the way, stepped onto the lowest of the three tiers, reached up and grabbed Oliv’s emaciated foot as it dangled over the edge. He then yanked Olivover the short sideboard and down the eight feet to the floor. Oliv tumbled to the floor like a doll and cracked his skull. Blood soaked down the back of his shirt. As the life seeped out of Oliv, his comrades hauled him onto the lowest bunk, and then hurried out to their backbreaking labors at the quarry. When they came back to Block 57 that night, Oliv was dead. Next to the bathroom was a makeshift morgue; they moved his body there. Later, Oliv’s body waited its turn at the crematorium.4
The French inmates of the Little Camp never forgot the brutality the doctor showed them, while exhibiting seemingly incongruous medical compassion to others. They never forgot that while most of them were worked and starved into skeletons, the doctor ate well. Many prisoners lost 40 percent of their weight shortly after arriving in the Little Camp. But the doctor arrived at Buchenwald fat and stayed fat. No one could understand how a talented physician could render his skills so effectively to some, while allowing others to die horrible deaths. After Buchenwald was liberated in April of 1945, the stories about Dr. Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen emerged in French reports and then in occupation German newspapers and the Allied armed forces media. Katzen-Ellenbogen was accused of murdering a thousand prisoners by injection.5
The United States military conducted war crimes trials at Dachau for a variety of lesser-known concentration camp Nazis and their inmate collaborators, especially the medical killers. Katzen-Ellenbogen was among them, and was found guilty of war crimes, right along with the other so-called “butchers of Buchenwald.” He was sentenced to a long term in prison. The court finding, however, was not an easy one. It was complicated by conflicting stories of Katzen-Ellenbogen’s outstanding academic background and prewar record.6
Many found Dr. Katzen-Ellenbogen and the many lives he led incomprehensible. How could he alternately function as a gifted psychiatrist and as a murderous man of medicine? At the time, none understood that Katzen-Ellenbogen viewed humanity with multiple standards. He was an American eugenicist. Nor was he just any eugenicist. Katzen-Ellenbogen was a founding member of the Eugenics Research Association and the chief eugenicist of New Jersey under then-Governor Woodrow Wilson.7
Viewing humanity through a eugenic prism, Katzen-Ellenbogen was capable of exhibiting great compassion toward those he saw as superior, and great cruelty toward those he considered genetically unfit. In Buchenwald, the French, with their Mediterranean and African hybridization, were eugenically among the lowest. They were not really worthy of life. At the same time, in Katzen-Ellenbogen’s view, those of Nordic or Aryan descent were treasured-to be helped and even saved. It all followed classic eugenic thought. But in Buchenwald, it was the difference between life and death.
How did one of America’s pioneer eugenicists wend his way from New Jersey to Buchenwald’s notorious Little Camp? The story begins in late nineteenth-century Poland. Katzen-Ellenbogen was the name of a famous line of Polish and Czech rabbis going back centuries. However, as the doctor’s life was built, he-or perhaps his immediate branch of the family-obscured any connection with a Jewish heritage. Like many EuropeanJews who had drifted from tradition, he spelled his last name numerous ways, hyphenated and unhyphenated, and sometimes even signed his name “Edwin K. Ellenbogen.” He was probably born as Edwin Wladyslaw Katzen-Ellenbogen in approximately 1882, in Stanislawow, in Austrian-occupied Poland.8
As a youth, Katzen-Ellenbogen developed severe vision problems. But he achieved academic success despite the affliction, attending fine schools and developing extraordinary powers of observation and ratiocination. First, he studied at a Jesuit high school in Poland. Then he attended the University of Leipzig, where he secured his medical degree in 1905. While in medical school, he became engaged to a girl from Massachusetts, Marie A. Pierce, daughter of a judge and scion of a prominent family of Americans dating back to the Minutemen. In 1905, Katzen-Ellenbogen sailed for America, settling briefly in Massachusetts, where he married Marie. He added “Marie” to his various middle names, and utilized her family’s connections to further his academic pursuits. Various letters of introduction were provided, as was the money Katzen-Ellenbogen needed to continue his university work in Europe. There he studied psychiatry with some of the best names in the field, during the formative years of the profession, and he also learned the mystifying medical art of hypnosis.9
In 1907, Katzen-Ellenbogen returned to the United States, where he was naturalized as a citizen and started work in state institutions, such as the Danvers State Hospital of Massachusetts. One of the early exponents of Freud in America, Katzen-Ellenbogen became a Harvard lecturer in abnormal psychology. He developed expertise on fake symptoms. He authored an article in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology on “The Detection of a Case of Simulation of Insanity by Means of Association Tests.”10
Katzen-Ellenbogen began to specialize in epilepsy, especially with regard to mental deficiency. His expert testimony was pivotal in convicting a murderer who claimed diminished mental capacity due to an epileptic attack; the convicted man was electrocuted in 1912. He authored numerous articles on the subject and became a coeditor of the international quarterly, Epilepsia. One of his articles asserted that different races should have their own standards for imbecility. A child, he posited, “may be inferior as to race, but be up to the mark for its own racial standards… especially… in America. “11
In 1911, Woodrow WIlson became governor of New Jersey. Katzen-Ellenbogen was asked to become scientific director of the State Village for Epileptics at Skillman, New Jersey. It was there that he would develop his eugenic interests. “While there,” recalled Katzen-Ellenbogen, “I particularly studied… the hereditary background of epilepsy.” As the state’s leading expert, Katzen-Ellenbogen was then asked by Wilson to draft New Jersey’s law to sterilize epileptics and defectives. In the process, he became an expert on legal and legislative safeguards and jurisprudence.12
As a leading member of the National Association for the Study of Epilepsy, Katzen-Ellenbogen delivered an address on epilepsy and feeble-mindedness at Goddard’s Vineland Training School. In 1913, Katzen-Ellenbogen became charter memb
er #14 of the Eugenics Research Association at Cold Spring Harbor. The doctor continued his active membership even after he sailed for Russia in 1915, never to return to the United States.13
Katzen-Ellenbogen bounced around the capitals of Europe for the next few years. He was about to board a ship in Holland when he received a telegram informing him that his only son had died in America after falling from a roof. Katzen-Ellenbogen was never the same. He became morose and introspective, questioning the value of human life, at least his own. “I contemplated to offer myself as physician to the leprosy colony in the upper State of New York,” he recounted. He also considered suicide. At the same time, Katzen-Ellenbogen deepened his fascination with things Catholic, purchasing a valued copy of a rare Madonna.14
As Katzen-Ellenbogen wandered through Europe, he impressed many people as a kind humanitarian. He met one woman briefly on a train in 1921 and discussed his favorite Madonna. More than two decades later, even after learning of his notorious war crimes, she wrote him, “I cannot believe that anyone who likes a picture of the Madonna can be entirely bad.” Years later, another woman, recalling their fond encounter in Germany, insisted, “There still are people in this world who believe in you.”15
In 1925, Katzen-Ellenbogen developed a relationship with a woman named Olga. She described him as “the companion of my life.” He described her as “my old housekeeper.” By any measure, Katzen-Ellenbogen developed deep parental feelings for Olga’s two orphaned grandsons, and raised them as though they were his own. Together with his daughter, Katzen-Ellenbogen led an ad hoc family of five.16
They were living in Germany when Hitler rose to power. Despite his Catholic observances, after the 1935 Nuremberg Laws Katzen-Ellenbogen found himself defined as Jewish and subject to encircling anti-Jewish decrees. Like many practicing Christians of Jewish ancestry, he fled across the Czech border in 1936, establishing a clinic in Marienbad. When anti-Jewish agitation spread into Czechoslovakia, Katzen-Ellenbogen moved again, this time to the democratic stronghold of Prague, where in 1938 he began working with refugee groups.17
After Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, Katzen-Ellenbogen followed a typical route of flight. First, he crossed into Italy. After war broke out in September of 1939, he escaped to France. But when the Nazis bifurcated France in 1940, Katzen-Ellenbogen was caught in the occupied zone in Paris. As a result of his many recent relocations, he was a suspicious refugee in a city teeming with Gestapo agents. In 1941 he was arrested by Gestapo counter-intelligence corps, but he was soon released. Like many foreigners living in Nazi-occupied Paris, Katzen-Ellenbogen was ultimately arrested several times for questioning or detention. He was denied permission to leave for neutral Portugal. Finally, just as he was planning to leave for Prague in the late summer of 1943, Nazi security agents came for him. The knock on the door came at six in the morning.18
Many eugenicists considered Nazi racial policies a biological ideal. Katzen-Ellenbogen discounted his Jewish ancestry, considering himself a eugenicist first and foremost. This made him different, and almost appealing to the Gestapo, especially under the circumstances.
Although a prisoner, he was given access to top Nazi generals in Paris to discuss his detention status. The war-stretched Nazis needed doctors, especially in occupied lands. As a distinguished physician and psychiatrist who spoke German and also enjoyed American citizenship, Katzen-Ellenbogen became very useful to both the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht. Twice he was brought to the Reich military prison in France to examine a German soldier suffering from mental problems. Katzen-Ellenbogen even testified as an expert at the soldier’s court martial.19
Katzen-Ellenbogen found himself in a somewhat unique position. “I was the only doctor in France, a psychiatrist,” he recalled, “who was [also] qualified in Germany as a doctor, and they didn’t have anybody [with those skills] in the army.” Eventually, the overworked regular German army doctor visiting the military prison asked Katzen-Ellenbogen, “As you speak French anyway and other languages, relieve me here. And when something very important happens, they can telephone for me.” Thus, Katzen-Ellenbogen became a general practitioner for the German military in Paris even as he remained in custody. Eventually, Katzen-Ellenbogen’s services were requested for German military men outside the prison. For all intents and purposes, he was at the disposal of the German medical staff. But in September of 1943, when orders came from Berlin to transfer prisoners in France to slave labor camps in the Reich, Katzen-Ellenbogen was put on a train and shipped to the dreaded Buchenwald.20
Buchenwald functioned for two purposes: to inflict cruelty on the Nazis’ enemies and to systematically work its inmates to death in service of the Reich-in that order. In the hierarchy of hell, Buchenwald was considered among the worst of Nazi labor camps. Hundreds to thousands of people died within its confines each week from beatings, disease, starvation, exhaustion or execution.21
Cruel and painful medical experiments were conducted at Buchenwald, especially in Block 46, known for its frosted windows and restricted access. Nazi doctors deliberately infected prisoners with typhus, converting their bodies into so many living test tubes, kept alive only as convenient hosts for the virus. Doctors then carefully observed the progress of the disease in order to help evaluate potential vaccines. Some six hundred men died from such infections. In addition, Russian POWs were deliberately burned with phosphorus to observe their reactions to drugs. As part of the Reich’s program to develop mass sterilization techniques, fifteen men were castrated to observe the effects. Two died from the operation. Experimental Section V employed gland implants and synthetic hormones on homosexuals to reverse their sex drive; the SS officers delighted in joking about the men. Those who survived these heinous tests, or otherwise outlived their usefulness, were often murdered with injections of phenol.22
Horrible punishments were everyday occurrences. Many were hung from their wrists with their hands tied behind their backs, thus painfully tearing arms from their sockets. Weakened inmates who did not die quickly enough were bludgeoned with a large blood-encrusted club. Russian POWs were systematically shot in the back of the neck through a small hole as they stood at the height-measuring wall.23
Large electric lifts continuously shuttled corpses to waiting crematoria, which operated ten hours a day and produced prodigious heaps of white ash. Death was an hourly event at Buchenwald-ultimately more than 50,000 perished. More French died than any other national group. But before the victims were burned, they performed additional service to the Reich. Pathologists in Block 2 dissected some 35,000 corpses so their body parts could be studied and then stored in various jars on shelves. Tattooed prisoners were especially prized. In Block 2, their skins were stripped off, tanned and stretched into lampshades and other memorabilia.24
Nuremberg Trial judges denounced “conditions so ghastly that they defy description. The proof is overwhelming that in the administration of the concentration camps the German war machine, and first and foremost the SS, resorted to practices which would shame the most primitive race of savage barbarians. All the instincts of human decency which distinguished men from beasts were forgotten, and the law of the jungle took command. If there is such a thing as a crime against humanity, here we have it repeated a million times over.”25
In assessing Buchenwald just after liberation, a British Parliamentary delegation declared, “We have endeavored to write with restraint and objectivity, and to avoid obtruding personal reactions or emotional comments. We would conclude, however, by stating… that such camps as this mark the lowest point of degradation to which humanity has yet descended. The memory of what we saw and heard at Buchenwald will haunt us ineffaceably for many years.“26
Most new arrivals at Buchenwald were instantly shocked by the camp’s brutality and the physical cruelty heaped upon them by the guards. Upon initial entry, it was common for new prisoners to run a two-hundred-meter gauntlet of guards, who viciously beat them with clubs and truncheons as they passed. But Kat
zen-Ellenbogen seemed fascinated. Recalling his first moments in the camp, he said, “I was really amazed about the efficiency and quickness about everything that happened there.” He added, “We were treated not badly there…. “ Katzen-Ellenbogen was in fact privileged from the moment he entered the camp. While other prisoners at that time were forced into tattered zebra-stripe uniforms, the doctor was permitted to wear civilian attire, including a three-piece suit and tie. But he complained that the shirt with its button-down collar was too small, and the trousers too long. His warm furry hat and medical armband gave him a distinctive look as he toured the barracks.27
Early on, Buchenwald administrators learned through the prisoner grapevine of Katzen-Ellenbogen’s helpfulness to the Gestapo in France. He quickly became a trusted prisoner to the camp’s medical staff as well as its SS officers, especially chief camp doctor Gerhard Schiedlausky. Katzen-Ellenbogen announced to everyone that he was an American doctor from New Jersey, and a skilled hypnotist to boot. None of this failed to impress the camp administrators, who often referred to him by the name Dr. K. Ellenbogen. One senior Nazi medic dared Katzen-Ellenbogen to demonstrate his skill as a hypnotist. A test subject was brought over, and within five minutes Katzen-Ellenbogen successfully placed him in a trance.28
Thereafter, Katzen-Ellenbogen was assigned to the hospital at the Little Camp, which functioned as the segregated new prisoner intake unit. Unlike the other inmates who slept sixteen-deep on stark wooden shelves and were fed starvation rations, Katzen-Ellenbogen enjoyed a private room with a real bed that he shared with only one other block trustee. He ate plenty of vegetables and even meat purchased through black market sources in Weimar. From time to time he cooked his own meals, an almost unimaginable prisoner luxury. The doctor was able to count SS and Gestapo officers among his friends even as fellow prisoners detested him and despised their Nazi taskmasters. He was widely believed to be a Gestapo spy.29
