Ravensbruck

by Sarah Helm

  Content to use the other Ravensbrück women, Rascher prepared for the experiments, keeping Himmler informed of progress. First, eight male prisoners were placed in a large tank of near-freezing water and left there until they passed out. Each of the men was removed from the tank, unconscious, and placed between two Ravensbrück women lying naked in a spacious bed. The women were told to nestle as close as possible to the moribund man. All three were covered with blankets. The result was that the men quickly revived. Once the subjects regained consciousness they did not lose it again, but ‘very quickly grasped the situation’, as Rascher put it later, and ‘snuggled up to the naked female bodies’.

  The rate at which the men’s body temperature rose was about the same as if they had been warmed by packed blankets. ‘But in four cases the men performed an act of sexual intercourse with the women.’ The chilled men’s temperature rose faster after intercourse. Experiments using only one woman instead of two showed an even faster re-warming, perhaps, according to Rascher, because inhibitions were removed and the woman snuggled closer to the man. In none of the cases was the re-warming of the man any more effective than if they had been placed in a hot bath. And in one of the cases the man had a cerebral haemorrhage and died.

  —

  In early November a man called Ludwig Stumpfegger turned up at Hohenlychen, and any hopes that the Ravensbrück experiments might come to an end were dashed. The access to female material for experimentation had tempted Stumpfegger to come and do some tests himself: he wanted to break bones and see if they would grow back together again. Stumpfegger, another Himmler favourite, proposed the experiments to Gebhardt. Gebhardt knew Stumpfegger well—they had worked on the German medical team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics—but he claimed later that he opposed Stumpfegger’s tests on the grounds that such experiments had already been done.

  But Stumpfegger had Himmler’s approval. The Reichsführer had recently carried out a tour of convalescent homes for wounded soldiers, and believed more could be done to mend broken bones. He proposed to Stumpfegger that he experiment on young Polish prisoners at Ravensbrück.

  On 2 November a sixteen-year-old Polish dancer called Basia Pietrzyk, the baby of the Lublin transport, became one of Stumpfegger’s first victims. Basia was a slight, graceful figure whose dark hair and black eyes had earned her the nickname ‘Pepper’ in the Polish block. During her operation Stumpfegger chiselled pieces of bone out of her right and left tibias before plastering over the legs up to the groin and scribbling on the cast the code 1A, to signal the start of his series of experiments. He took the pieces of Basia’s legs away in his car to Hohenlychen to study them.

  Once again the operations were conducted in supposed secrecy, but once again the secrecy misfired. Not only was the Polish radiographer Zofia Mączka able to observe as before, but now she was even brought in to participate, as it was she who was ordered to take the X-rays before and after each operation.

  Over the next weeks, as more and more Polish women were called to the Revier, Zofia recorded three different sorts of operation: bone-breaking; bone grafts and bone splinters. The breaking lasted up to three hours, during which the shinbones of both legs were smashed with hammers on the operating table. The bones were set—either with or without clamps—and the wounds sewn shut and put in casts. After a few days the casts were removed and the bones left to heal without the cast. In other operations a whole fibula or tibia was just taken out.

  Operations on muscles began at the same time, also at Stumpfegger’s instigation. In these the victim would be recalled several times. First a piece of muscle was excised from the shin and thigh, and in later operations larger and larger pieces were taken.

  Izabela Rek was called to the Revier and entered to see five of her friends already undressed, lying with their faces turned to the wall, with thermometers in their anuses. She was soon the sixth to lie there. After an operation on one of her legs (she had operations on both) Dr Rosenthal picked up a knitting needle from a nearby table and tapped an area of exposed bone, while Izabela looked on.

  With the new series of experiments under way, the sound of bones being smashed and splintered, and muscles grafted onto bone, came from the operating theatre every day, accompanied by Herta Oberheuser’s whistling, especially if Dr Fischer was around.

  When Maria Grabowska was wheeled up to the theatre door to await her operation, she heard the sound of drilling from inside. She waited an hour, and Oberheuser opened the theatre door, ‘her white overall soaked in blood’. Maria was left with pain so acute that it felt as if her shinbone had been pierced with a nail and drilled, which was near enough what had been done to her. It was so unbearable that she felt her heart contracting.

  —

  Eugenia Mikulska is held down by nurses as the doctors cut into her shin, even though the anaesthetic has clearly not worked. Days later, when she summons the strength to look at her leg, she sees the bone completely uncovered from just under the knee to her ankle, with folds of green flesh all around it. Sent for new dressings a few days later, she waits outside the operating theatre and hears her friend Jadwiga Dzido screaming from inside, so Eugenia tries to run away but finds her legs won’t carry her and she falls. A nurse comes up and asks: ‘Why are you running away? You know you’ve got to go in there like her and he’ll cut you up too.’

  Before Rosenthal begins on Eugenia, he notices her small foot and high instep and asks if she is a ballet dancer. ‘No, I’m a nurse,’ she says. ‘Oh, Krankenschwester, Krankenschwester,’ he repeats, as he cuts away the living muscle. When Eugenia gets back to the ward she shouts out, ‘There is no God’ but Jadwiga Dzido is shouting far louder. ‘Give me a sword, give me a sword, I must defend myself. All Poland is bleeding and I am bleeding,’ she cries over and over again.

  Jadwiga is delirious. She is also haemorrhaging badly. Blood is flowing from her mutilated leg, which is locked in an iron splint, so Eugenia forces herself out of bed, hobbling and falling, to reach Jadwiga. On the third attempt she gets there and, propped up on Jadwiga’s mattress, she makes some kind of tourniquet for her friend’s leg. But Jadwiga looks nearly finished. Oberheuser comes in soon, and the look on her face shows she thinks so too.

  The next day, Jadwiga is still delirious and fading, so Eugenia, who is mending, hops through to the other room to tell other friends about Jadwiga Dzido. When she turns again, to go back to her bed, she stops at the door in horror. Oberheuser and Gerda Quernheim are standing over Jadwiga holding a syringe that is about to slide in. ‘And I kept thinking: “You must not kill her.” ’

  Eugenia and others now shout out: ‘Don’t kill her. She’s not going to die,’ and Oberheuser and Quernheim look over towards Eugenia. There is silence. Oberheuser pulls Gerda Quernheim’s hand away from Jadwiga and they walk off.

  Eugenia looks at Jadwiga, now thinking the only hope is that she will come out of her delirium. Miraculously, almost at that very moment, she opens her eyes, looks at Eugenia and says, quite normally: ‘Where am I? What is happening?’

  When supper comes Eugenia persuades Jadwiga to eat, and she does. Four years later Jadwiga Dzido becomes one of four Polish rabbits to give evidence at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial.

  —

  The rabbits’ accounts not only detail the butchery they themselves were subjected to but also throw light on other atrocities going on inside the Revier at the same time; in particular their reports reveal how the Ravensbrück doctors were increasingly and habitually using injections to kill.

  That doctors and nurses in the camp were reaching for syringes to murder mutilated Polish rabbits was obviously no surprise to prisoners working in the Revier. Ever since the days of Dr Sonntag, the use of injections to kill the sick had been commonplace and the new medical team—Schiedlausky, Oberheuser and Rosenthal—thought nothing of murdering a patient by injecting her with phenol, Evipan or even petrol. All had been told this was an efficient means of getting rid of useless lives.*

  Neverthel
ess, it is clear from the rabbits’ observations that in the autumn of 1942 the practice of murder by injection was being stepped up. For one thing, the prisoner nurse Gerda Quernheim now seemed to be authorised to carry out injections and was doing so at will. The Polish radiologist Zofia Mączka thought Quernheim might be killing her victims ‘to liberate them’ from their suffering, although she added: ‘This was the danger—she lost internal control over whom to kill and whom not to kill.’

  Other Revier staff believed that Quernheim knew exactly who to kill and was deliberately murdering prisoners in partnership with Rolf Rosenthal. In the early days Rosenthal and Quernheim worked together on abortions, and this continued, but by mid-1942 they were spending more of their time killing patients, using lethal injections, which prisoners noticed they seemed to enjoy.

  It had become the practice to place prisoners to be injected in a small Revier room called the Stübchen. The Czech prisoner nurse Hanka Housková recalled walking into the Stübchen during the period of the medical experiments:

  A little Gypsy girl lay on the bed. Gerda Quernheim and Dr Rosenthal were bent over her. The child called to me for help and as I came toward her I saw Gerda Quernheim with a syringe in her hand injecting into a vein. Dr Rosenthal held the child’s hand with a piece of rubber tubing. The child wept and struggled. Dr Rosenthal shouted at me to get out, as I would get in their way, or did I want an injection too? After a while I could still hear the child crying, Dr Rosenthal and Gerda Quernheim went back to her, and then came unpleasant giggling.

  Afterwards the Gypsy’s body was brought out, with blue spots on her body.

  Milena Jesenska was keeping the closest eye on Quernheim and Rosenthal. In order to count the killings she made it her habit to open coffins that were placed each morning in the Revier yard. In late 1942 she began to notice bodies of those who had obviously been killed overnight. On these bodies were ‘marks of hypodermic needles, smashed ribs, bruised faces and suspicious gaps in their teeth’, she told Grete Buber-Neumann. The only prisoner allowed to move about the Revier at night was Quernheim, and it soon became apparent that Rosenthal was joining her in there and the two had sex. Then they often murdered a prisoner—‘not only for the perverse pleasure of it,’ said Milena, but for profit. Milena was convinced that during the day the couple selected their victims—usually those with gold teeth or gold crowns—which were removed before the women were killed, and Rosenthal sold the gold.

  Others were also aware that murder by injection had grown commonplace. ‘I often saw Gerda Quernheim with a syringe going into the Stübchen,’ said the Czech doctor Bozena Boudova, whose job it was to make up the lethal solutions. Nor was Quernheim the only one who helped the SS doctor with the killings. ‘One knew that not only the doctors were giving the injections, but also prisoner nurses themselves.’

  Since the early autumn prisoners noticed another pattern in the injection murders: the victims were often Jews. Hitler had by now ordered that Germany was to be ‘judenfrei’—cleared of Jews—by the end of 1942, and Himmler likewise ordered that each of his camps on German soil must be judenfrei. One by one the camps were sending their Jewish prisoners east, mostly to Auschwitz.

  During the Bernburg gassings, which were wound down in early summer 1942, Ravensbrück was largely cleared of Jews, but more had then arrived, rounded up with other incoming groups. Some were foreign—including eighty-two Dutch Jews brought in over the summer months. In the autumn, as the camp prepared for a final Jewish evacuation, orders had obviously been given to doctors to hasten the death of as many Jewish inmates as possible—ahead of the clear-out—in order to save on transport costs. Magdalene Hoffmann, a senior nurse, noticed the Jewish women were put to the hardest labour, such as digging graves: ‘They were often sick, with swollen legs, but treatment by SS doctors and SS nurses was forbidden. At this time these Jewish women began to be given a lethal injection of Evipan, and Gerda Quernheim assisted.’ Hoffmann said she herself was ordered by Rosenthal to give injections to all Jewish women suffering from dysentery, and all of them died. In the first days of October the last remaining 522 Ravensbrück Jews were deported to Auschwitz.

  —

  By November 1942 the medical experiments had moved into another phase and the horror in the Revier deepened further. First, a second round of bacteria experiments was carried out on the Poles. Soon after other nationalities were brought to the experiments ward: random women—Ukrainians, Czechs, Germans—some young and some old. Nurses called these women ‘the lunatics’ but nobody seemed to quite know why they were there. The Poles tried to befriend them.

  Amongst the group was a Russian woman who was black all over with frostbite, but she wouldn’t speak. Also brought in was a frail little woman who cringed and trembled violently when anyone even tried to go near her. This woman was Yugoslavian, the rabbits discovered, and they learned that her husband was shot before her eyes.

  And there was an old German—a ‘green’—who it turned out used to be an opera singer.

  She must have been a great beauty in her day, they all said. And on a good day she sang an aria or two for the others and handed out her bread. But mostly she was in a bad mood and shouted out loudly: ‘Hitler kaputt’ or ‘Heil Hitler’ and hid under the bedclothes and laughed.

  Later, one by one, the young amongst the so-called ‘lunatics’ were taken away and the word was that they were going for ‘special experiments’. These special operations were carried out by Stumpfegger, assisted sometimes by Fischer, and involved the amputation and removal of entire limbs. The victim was killed outright on the operating table by lethal injection and the limbs packed into operating sheets and taken to Hohelychen for further use.

  One of the first ‘special experiment’ victims was a Ukrainian girl whose name was Hania.

  Hania told the Polish girls she had been brought to Germany as a forced labourer and had been made to stand for hours on a damp cold factory floor, which had inflamed her hip joints and prevented her working, so she had been brought here. She was a strong girl, nevertheless, and refused to be sedated by Rosenthal, fighting him off as the Poles watched on. When he came with his needle she struggled so hard to get away from him that Rosenthal had to call the German nurse, Dora, to help him, but Hania fought them both off.

  She held on to the sides of the bed to stop them putting her on the stretcher, and as she levered herself with all her strength to push Rosenthal away, Rosenthal lost his temper and leapt forward hitting Hania in the face as hard as he could and grabbing her hair shouting: ‘Ukraine, Ukraine.’

  Still she resisted, so Rosenthal grabbed her by the neck of her nightdress and threw her on the stretcher. The nurse, Dora, had backed away by now, watching in horror, and she turned and ran out.

  Hania was now crying and screaming for her mother as she was tied down and wheeled away. Hania never returned. But Dora returned to the ward some time later and told the Lublin girls she was ashamed of being German and didn’t want to work here any more. Dora soon left the camp. Shortly after, a second Ukrainian woman had an entire collarbone removed.

  As if the scene at the camp infirmary were not already macabre enough, prisoners now noticed Fischer and other doctors getting into vehicles, carrying whole limbs, barely hidden under blankets, and driving off towards Hohenlychen. A few hours after Hania was taken away, Zofia Mączka, the radiologist, observed Dr Fischer in the Hohenlychen car holding a leg wrapped in a sheet.

  Once again, Karl Gebhardt, the chief surgeon, would try to deny at his trial that he had any involvement in these operations, referring at one point to ‘these Ravensbrück prisoners, with whom I am always being reproached, I don’t know why’. He also claimed that Stumpfegger alone had taken the ‘special experiments’ on, as a follow-up to his splinter operations, and directly on the orders of Himmler. The Reichsführer had heard about research done by a Russian doctor in Kiev involving transplanting whole limbs, or pieces of limbs, and wanted Stumpfegger to copy the technique, but Ge
bhardt claimed to know no more.

  As Stumpfegger had committed suicide at the end of the war, and as all his ‘special experiment’ victims were dead, there might have been no knowledge of these cases at all, without the testimony of Zofia Mączka, and other prisoners.

  However, Fritz Fischer’s testimony also proved crucial in the trial, as under cross examination he admitted to having taken part in at least one of the ‘special operations’, saying he had opposed the operation ‘on medical and humanitarian grounds’ but was ordered to perform the surgery by Gebhardt, and therefore had no choice.

  The operation involved a young male German patient at Hohenlychen who had lost a shoulder blade and collarbone due to a tumour, so a plan was devised to give the patient a shoulder blade from one of the Ravensbrück ‘lunatics’ and graft it on, ‘giving him a good chance of survival’.

  The shoulder blade was to be taken from a woman’s shoulder, which was not functioning quite normally, due to a previous amputation of the hand. Originally Stumpfegger was to have performed the amputation, but Fischer was called in at the last minute to do so.

  The court heard that Fischer amputated the shoulder blade at Ravensbrück, killed the victim with a lethal injection, drove to Hohenlychen with the shoulder blade wrapped in a blanket, and passed it to Gebhardt. Asked by the judge if the limb belonged to a man or a woman, Fischer said he didn’t know: ‘the subject’ had been covered during the operation.

  At Hohenlychen, Gebhardt sewed the shoulder blade onto the sick man, helped by Stumpfegger and one other. The man later died. During the course of the trial, the victim’s identity was never established, and the court heard simply that the shoulder blade ‘was removed from an insane female inmate of the camp’.