by Sarah Helm
What Gebhardt didn’t tell the court was the identity of the relations Himmler was visiting in the neighbourhood, who were almost certainly his mistress, Hedwig ‘Häschen’ Potthast, and the baby boy, Helge, who was born at Hohenlychen on 15 February. After, the birth mother and child were staying at Brückenthin, Himmler’s nearby estate. Here they were safe from the air raids over Berlin and close to their doctor. Not only had Karl Gebhardt delivered Helge at Hohenlychen in February, Himmler had made Gebhardt Helge’s godfather, to further seal family ties.
—
At Ravensbrück in early July 1942, prisoners saw new equipment being installed at the operating theatre, and everyone was ordered to keep away. Soon after a lorry arrived, with a load of wooden crutches. Some said a branch of the Hohenlychen sanatorium was being set up at the camp, to care for wounded officers. Nobody noticed that Sachsenhausen prisoners had been brought there for operations, so strict was the guard.
On the morning of 22 July, seventy-five of the youngest and fittest women from the Lublin transport were called to the Appellplatz. Some were called from the blocks, having just come off the night shift, others from the sewing shops or other work gangs. Stefania Łotocka was working in the fur room when she and others were told to go nach vorn. They lined up in fives. A moment later Koegel walked over with ‘a short, fat SS officer with red hair and lots of medals’. This was Karl Gebhardt. With him was a tall slim man, very fair, with large blue eyes. This was Fritz Fischer, his assistant.
The Ravensbrück camp doctors were also present, Rolf Rosenthal and Gerhard Schiedlausky, as well as the tall blonde Herta Oberheuser. Nobody had ever had anything good to say about Oberheuser. The thirty-year-old, born in Cologne, was a skin specialist and had volunteered for Ravensbrück to see extreme skin diseases but she had never shown any interest in helping prisoners, shouting at them ‘you horse, you cow, don’t come near, you have lice’—or similar. The chance to work alongside Gebhardt was her big career break, though to the prisoners lined up on the Appellplatz it was obvious that Oberheuser was the lowest in the medical pecking order. ‘As she put on her obscene kittenish airs the others ignored her completely,’ recalled Wanda Wojtasik.
The Poles had to lift their skirts and the doctors stooped to inspect their legs. They ‘mocked and abused’ them as they did so. ‘We couldn’t understand why they wanted to look at our legs. Perhaps they had some new work planned and strong legs were needed. We were mystified,’ said Maria Bielicka. The women were sent back to their blocks and heard no more, but rumours multiplied. Some said that they were being chosen for an exchange and would be sent on a transport to Switzerland. Others that the SS was preparing for a mass execution.
Four days later the same group of seventy-five were rounded up again and told this time to report to the Revier. Wanda Wojtasik’s group were the last to get in line, and she joined the end of the last rank of five. The same doctors were present. Koegel checked the names from a list and ‘with a theatrical gesture’ pointed at the prisoners and gave the list ‘to the fat man’. Herta Oberheuser called the names of the first ten, who had to stay behind, and the rest were sent back to their blocks.
Wanda was picked out last from the very back of the lineup. ‘All I could think was that this time I was on my own. Krysia was not going with me.’ The legs of these women were examined more closely and six of them, including Wanda, were told they were to stay the night in the infirmary. The remaining four were sent back. One of them, Zofia Sokulska, a law student from Lublin University, was rejected as too skinny. Maria Bielicka was rejected too but never knew why.
Those dismissed were terrified about what it might mean. ‘We could see no pattern,’ said Maria Bielicka. ‘Nothing made any sense.’ The Sondertransport women were used by now to the idea of imminent death. Since the executions of 18 April, calls had come once or twice a week, usually at morning Appell, and at the evening roll call came the volley of shots.
But this was different. ‘We talked about it all night,’ said Wacława Gnatowska. ‘If there was going to be a mass execution why do it in stages like this?’ The skinny lawyer Zofia Sokulska—known as Dziuba—who had better contacts around the camp than most, had heard that experiments were planned, though she didn’t want to frighten others, so didn’t say.
The next day the six who had stayed at the Revier suddenly reappeared on the Lagerstrasse, walking—staggering—to their blocks. They had clearly been drugged. Wanda Wojtasik seemed drunk. Friends from the Lublin group flocked around her. ‘What did they do to you? Is that all? Do you feel all right inside? What about your head?’ Wanda retorted: ‘Well of course while I was inside they extracted my fifth screw,’ and someone replied: ‘There! Didn’t I tell you they’d come out with a screw loose?’
But the bravado stopped at the next roll call, when Wanda passed out, overcome by the morphine. That night she lay close to Krysia and asked: ‘What will they do to us next? At least it’s me and not you.’
—
Four days later guards come for the same six and take them back to the Revier, where they are made to wait. Wanda looks at Maria Gnaś, who is sickly green. Maria whispers: ‘What are they going to do to us?’
‘Exterminate us,’ says Wanda.
Maria shrieks: ‘No! It can’t be true.’
The women are ordered to undress and step into a warm, soapy bath. This is such luxury that they splash about and can’t help enjoying the warm clean water, but when they are shown six beds, made up with crisp, clean sheets, they begin to feel the deepest dread. They lie talking, chattering, about anything. Memories. Tired of wondering what will happen next, Wanda closes her eyes and is woken by a sudden scream to see a nurse leaning over Maria Gnaś with a razor. Wanda leaps out of bed but the nurse explains she isn’t going to hurt Maria, only shave her. Why shave their legs if they mean to kill them?
One by one the women are injected, and wheeled out on a trolley to the operating theatre. Sinking under the anaesthetic, Wanda repeats over and over: ‘We are not guinea pigs; we are not guinea pigs.’
When Wanda wakes again she is back in the bed, her legs in plaster. On the plaster of one leg are written the letters 111 TK. The other five have similar markings. None are in pain now, but by evening all are writhing, screaming and groaning. Maria Gnaś sees someone at the window and asks the nurse in German: ‘He’s coming for me. Can you see outside the window? He’s there coming for me.’ Maria Zielonka shouts: ‘Oh Jesus. Jesus.’ Wanda shouts back at her friends: ‘Shut up or I’ll squash you flat.’ Their ravings frighten the German nurses in the next room, so much so that when the next prisoners are chosen, the doctors look for non–German speakers.
Now Wanda sees someone at the window. It is Krysia, who has managed to sneak a look in as she returns from night shift. Wanda manages a smile, and painfully rolls back her blanket to show her leg in plaster. Krysia leaves.
Over the days that follow, the women’s legs swell up so that the plaster cuts into their flesh right up to the groin. Oberheuser comes in, bends over Wanda’s legs and sniffs, makes notes and takes some blood. The girls are returned to the operating theatre and the plaster removed, but they can’t see who is doing it because someone has tied sheets over their heads. They can feel the scraping though, and hear the pus dripping out into tin bowls. They sense that things are being extracted from the wounds before the dressings are put on and plaster replaced.
Back on the ward, the women see brown stinking fluid seeping from the plaster of the girls on the nearby beds. They can’t sit up far enough to see that their legs are also leaking the same liquids, but they can smell it. They all have a raging thirst. At midday nurses pass through with the usual meagre camp food, but at night the women are locked in. Shutters are closed because of the air raids. There is no water and nobody to help. They cannot move. Swarms of flies buzz around the rotting flesh. They drift in and out of consciousness.
The days pass and more friends outside come up to the window. Someone brings an a
pple, another a boat carved out of a toothbrush. Jadwiga Kamińska, one of the Lublin group, is organising the support. ‘Anything to keep their spirits up,’ she tells the others in the block, and the Poles in the kitchen are asked to smuggle out bits of extra food.
Then Jadwiga herself is called up for the Revier, as are six more from the block. Wanda and the others try to reassure the newcomers as they lie on clean sheets and await the anaesthetic, and after the operation Jadwiga smiles and says she has no pain. Wanda nods. Within hours Jadwiga too is writhing in pain.
Night falls, the shutters are closed, and older guinea pigs busy themselves to tend to the newer ones. A nurse has left a couple of bedpans and a bucket of water. Hopping in the dark from one bed to another, Wanda takes the bedpans around, but soon they are full. She offers the new guinea pigs water from the single bucket until all that is gone, then heaves herself back on her bed, leaving a trail of brown pus.
One of the new girls won’t wake up, so a nurse is called and she alerts the duty doctor, Rosenthal, who lurches in drunk, his shirt only half buttoned over his hairy chest. He takes a needle from the nurse’s hand and sticks it into the pillow. Laughing, he lurches back out again. Not long after this another nurse comes back and gives the comatose girl an injection, which revives her and she wakes up.
After three weeks, nine guinea pigs have had surgery, and they are all taken through to another room, laid on tables and their bandages removed. They can see their own wounds for the first time, and each stares in disbelief at the swollen lumps of flesh and the incisions on the tibia, so deep they can see bone. One woman pulls out a piece of glass, another a wooden splinter two inches long.
For hours they lie here, sweating, with their wounds exposed. Suddenly nurses cover the guinea pigs’ heads, tight this time, to keep their torturers concealed, but Wanda sneaks a look and sees Gebhardt, plump hands folded behind his back. She also sees Fischer, wearing a blood-stained coat—he must have come straight from an operation.
The doctors pick up and examine labels stuck to each of the girls. There are several other officers here—Wanda counts eleven. One that she doesn’t recognise looks particularly important, and others seem in awe of him. She has no idea that this is Ernst Grawitz, chief SS physician and head of the German Red Cross. One by one, all eleven lean over the women examining and sniffing excitedly at the putrid wounds.
We are more like rats, she thinks. But she is still able to tell herself that at least they may now be spared execution by agreeing to be rats.
—
At their post-war trial Gebhardt and Fischer gave their own accounts of the same inspection. Following the inconclusive tests on the Sachsenhausen men, the doctors had taken the decision to insert a larger amount of bacteria into the women’s legs, with more dirt, glass and splinters to ensure that infection spread further. The wounds were scraped out, cleaned with hydrogen peroxide, and then treated with different sulphonamide drugs, or other drugs, or nothing, and suitable labels placed on the legs. Gebhardt had still not expected the tests to yield anything, but at least their failure this time could not be blamed on the limited amount of bacteria used.
When he examined the women, Gebhardt had found, as he expected, that the results were once again inconclusive. Despite the extensive infection, no proof had emerged that one woman had fared better than another with any particular drug.
Ernst Grawitz, however, the ‘important doctor’, thought the injuries inflicted had still been far too mild to prove anything. The wounds were mere flea bites, he protested. ‘How many deaths have there been?’ ‘None,’ said Gebhardt. So Grawitz ordered Fischer to shoot the subjects in the leg next time and then inject the bacteria. Only this would create the reality of battlefield wounds.
After Grawitz left, Gebhardt and Fischer decided not to shoot the next group’s legs. Instead they planned to intensify the bacteria again and ensure even greater infection by cutting the supply of blood to the wound.
A few days after the doctors’ first inspection Wanda and the other original guinea pigs were ordered back to their blocks. They could barely walk. On arrival they were cared for by friends, but many familiar faces were missing—while the guinea pigs had been in the Revier, more Sondertransport women had been shot.
Krysia nursed Wanda. Friends offered food. Alfreda Prus, a quiet, gentle girl, a student at the university of Zamość, near Lublin, threw Wanda her daily bread ration. Then on 20 September Alfreda and several others were ordered nach vorne. Because it was morning, the time when those selected for shooting were usually called, Irena Krawczyk was so sure she was about to be shot that she shivered violently and could not dress. Marta Baranowska, her Polish Blockova, helped her to muster her last strength and go.
Instead of marching them to the bunker, the waiting room for execution, the guards led the women to the Revier, where they were greeted by Dr Herta Oberheuser, sitting on a table in a black cloak, one leg crossed over the other. When taken to the ward, they found their Polish friends now occupying two rooms, lying prostrate with legs bound in thick bandages, greenish and foul-smelling.
—
The ‘old’ victims tell the new ones they feel better already, but everyone hears the wailing from next door. The next day this group are also sedated. Alfreda Prus, the student from Zamość, begins to sing crazy songs of hot nights and palm trees.
Stefania Łotocka wakes to find her legs grotesquely swollen. She can only see her foot, which has an enormous sore covered with blisters full of colourless fluid. The rest of the leg is covered in thick white dressing. She feels her temperature rising, and with it an excruciating pain. There is a buzzing and thumping in her ears. Have they amputated her legs? And there is a terrible thirst, but nobody cares, until Jadwiga Kamińska, operated on earlier, and now slightly stronger, drags herself out of bed and with a face twisted in pain, hops to help the latest victims. Jadwiga has taken over from Wanda as the guinea-pig nurse.
In the morning Herta Oberheuser appears, to draw blood from the ear and finger for testing. She stands back, noting what she sees. Her face is a mask, her eyes glassy. She shows no shadow of pity and leaves wounds undressed for days, so the women feel they are rotting away inside the plaster, but when at last the dressings are changed it is the worst torture of all.
The Hohenlychen doctors usually do the dressings, and the women’s faces are as always covered with a sheet. But before they cover Stanisława Młodkowska she notices that the nurse holding the sheets in place is Gerda Quernheim, the midwife baby-killer. Abruptly, Stanisława feels bandages being roughly torn off and wounds opened even wider as a doctor takes something out, and it feels as if he is raking around in the wound with a sharp instrument, squeezing the leg. She passes out.
On return to the ward Stanisława is groaning and Jadwiga Kamińska bangs on the door to get help. Eventually Dr Oberheuser comes in, lifts Stanisława’s blanket, shakes her head, goes away, returns and injects something, so she begins to revive. Soon Stanisława is strong enough to worry about what is happening to her friend Alfreda Prus. The girl from Zamość lies quiet. On her small face Stanisława sees only enormous eyes, bright with fever. Whenever she moves, Alfreda breaks into hiccups.
Friends are now appearing more and more often at the infirmary window. Word has got out that Alfreda from Zamość is in a dreadful state. By a miracle someone hands a spoonful of jam in a mug to Stefania Łotocka and Stefania now tries to persuade Alfreda to eat it, as she remembers her mother telling her it helps stop hiccups. Alfreda refuses the jam. ‘It won’t help me anyway,’ she says. ‘I shall die whether I eat it or not.’
For four days the women are delirious with fever and are regularly taken to the operating theatre, each time for more injections. They cry out for water, with lips so parched they bleed. Eventually Oberheuser orders water to be brought and the women drink thirstily, but it makes their cracked lips sting. The water has vinegar in it, which gives them a greater thirst, as Oberheuser knew it would.
On the fifth day the injections stop. A big commotion erupts in the next room, where Weronika Kraska gives out a terrible moan and makes a loud rattle. Weronika, whom few had worried about because she seemed so strong, is complaining of a stiff neck. Dr Schiedlausky is on duty and says there is nothing to be done for her, so the ward is shut down for the night.
Jadwiga Kamińska hops into the other room and returns to report that Weronika looks strangely stiff and horrible. The code on her leg is E11. Jadwiga and some of the stronger ones are beginning to realise that the codes must specify a bacterium of some sort, and some have been given a stronger dose than others. A stiff neck could mean tetanus, which will kill Weronika, although she is still fighting it.
By morning Weronika is dying. She knows it herself. She can barely speak and water has to be poured into her locked jaw. Summoning a last ounce of strength, she manages to utter words through clenched teeth about her two small children. As her words fade, there is a harsh rattle in her throat and her face contorts. She gives out a final, terrible scream, unlike anything human that anyone has heard. Her face twists in a fearsome grimace and her head coils around on her stiffened neck.
Gerda Quernheim runs in with a needle, and inserts it, gently, releasing Weronika from her misery. Her face softens and the tension in her body eases swiftly. The hospital falls silent.
News of Weronika’s death spreads fast around the Polish blocks, while inside the Revier the girls are now worrying about Alfreda Prus, who grows paler by the minute. Her code is K1, and someone says she seems to have gangrene. Still hiccuping, she keeps saying: ‘I’m dying. I’m dying.’
Outside, everyone waits to hear news of Alfreda, and Eugenia Mikulska, who comes from the same town of Zamość, runs to the infirmary window as soon as she can. Before the war she trained as a nurse with Alfreda’s sister. Alfreda turns and sees Eugenia’s face smiling encouragement. The next day Eugenia returns to the window and Alfreda lifts a hand and says: ‘Remember me to our friends in Zamość.’
