This witness said:
I noticed on many occasions a very strange wound at the back of the thigh of many of the dead. First of all I dismissed it as a gunshot wound at close quarters, but after seeing a few more I asked a friend and he told me that many of the prisoners were cutting chunks out of the bodies to eat. On my very next visit to the mortuary I actually saw a prisoner whip out a knife, cut a portion out of the leg of a dead body and put it quickly into his mouth, naturally frightened of being seen in the act of doing so. I leave it to your imagination to realize to what state the prisoners were reduced, for men to risk eating bits of flesh cut from black corpses.
It is not proposed to describe existence in this camp; there was little variation in the rhythm of life in any concentration camp and Belsen was not much worse and certainly no better than most of them.
But a description of the sight which met the gaze of the first British officers to enter after its capitulation will convey a vivid picture of what existence, for one cannot call it life, was within those wire fences.
With the first troops to enter the camp went Captain Derek Sington, then in command of No. 14 Amplifying Unit, in order to make any announcements which were thought necessary or desirable and to act as interpreter to Lieut.-Colonel Taylor, the officer in command of the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery, who moved in with one of his batteries to take over direction of the camp.
At the gate, Captain Sington was met by the Commandant, Joseph Kramer, who said that there were 40,000 in No. 1 Camp and a further 15,000 in No. 2 camp, mostly habitual criminals, felons, and homosexuals but that there were also Schutzhäftlinge1—the political prisoners. These comprised, of course, ninety-nine per cent of the inmates and came from every country the Germans had invaded since 1939.
When Brigadier Glyn Hughes the Deputy-Director of Medical Services, British Army of the Rhine, entered the camp a few hours after Lieut.-Colonel Taylor, the conditions he found were indescribable. ‘No description nor photograph,’ he said, ‘could really bring home the horrors that were there outside the huts, and the frightful scenes inside were much worse.’
Piles of corpses were lying all over the camp, outside and inside the huts, some of them in the same bunks as the living. Near the crematorium were massed graves which had been filled in, and there was one open pit full of corpses.
The huts were filled to overflowing with prisoners in every stage of emaciation and disease; in some, which were only suitable to accommodate a hundred people, there were as many as a thousand.
There was no sanitation and the condition inside the huts was revolting because most of the prisoners were suffering from some form of gastro-enteritis and were too weak to go outside. In any event, the hut lavatories had long been out of use. In the women’s compound there was a deep trench with a pole over it but no screening or form of privacy at all.
Those who were strong enough could get into the compound : others performed their natural activities where they lay. The compounds were covered with human excreta.
In one compound there were 8,000 male prisoners and typhus was rife. In one of the women’s compounds there were 23,000 women and many corpses were still lying about. In one hut, which was close to a pile of corpses, there were dead women lying in the passage; in one room leading out of the passage there were so many bodies that it was impossible to squeeze in even one more.
Seventy per cent of the inmates required hospitalization and it was probable that 10,000 of these would die before they could be admitted.
Every form of disease was prevalent but those most responsible for the hopeless condition of the patients were typhus, tuberculosis, and starvation. The conditions in the camp must have been bad for several months to produce death in persons who were fit and well.
The morning after his inspection, Brigadier Glyn Hughes made a further tour of the camp with Kramer who took him to one of the open graves. The Commandant appeared quite callous and indifferent. ‘I have been a doctor for thirty years,’ said Brigadier Glyn Hughes, ‘and have seen all the horrors of war, but I have never seen anything to touch it.’ He also stated that there appeared to have been no attempt made at all to preserve the lives and health of the inmates.
Within a short time of the arrival of the British Army at the camp a film was taken and this was shown at the Belsen trial. Speaking of this film the chief British prosecutor at the trial, Colonel T. M. Backhouse, said:
This film will give you some idea of the conditions and the degradation to which the human mind can descend. You will see thousands of corpses lying about and the condition of the bodies. You will also see the well-fed condition of the SS who were stationed there. You will see people fishing for water with tins in a small tank. What you will not see is that the water was foul and there were dead bodies in it. That was all the water that was available to drink. You will see the dead; you will see the living, and you will actually see the dying. What the film cannot give you is the abominable smell, the filth and squalor of the whole place which stank to high heaven.
This same film was also shown to an audience of Germans in Lüneberg, where the trial took place. It appeared to cause some of them no little amusement, and many of them thought it was propaganda.
BUCHENWALD
On a wooded hill six miles from Weimar, one of the shrines of German culture and freedom, a new concentration camp was established in the summer of 1937. Dachau and Sachsenhausen were doing flourishing business and Hitler wanted another ‘dungeon of democracy’ in central Germany.
For nearly eight years this camp was the scene of daily barbarism and brutality. The inmates were experimented upon like human guinea pigs; thousands were shot to death; many inmates, driven mad by the misery and horror which was life, rushed through the cordon of guards when out on working parties eagerly courting death, for them the only release from an agony of body and mind.
At Buchenwald they were crushed with rocks, drowned in manure, whipped, starved, castrated, and mutilated. But that was not all. Every tattooed inmate was ordered to report to the dispensary. At first no one knew why, but the mystery was soon explained. Those who carried on their skin the most decorative specimens of the tattooer’s art were detained and then killed by injections administered by Karl Beigs, one of the Kapos.
The corpse was then handed over to the pathological department where the skin was removed and treated. The finished products were given to the Commandant’s wife, Use Koch, who had them made into lampshades, bookcovers, and gloves.
Another discovery made at Buchenwald when the American Army reached it in April 1945 were the preserved skulls of many of the victims. Someone in the camp had decapitated two Poles who had been hanged for having sexual relations with German girls. The skull bones were removed and the heads shrunken, stuffed and preserved. The heads were the size of a fist and the hair and the marks of the rope were still there.1
In April 1947, SS Obergruppenführer and Waffen-SS General Josias Prince zu Waldeck and thirty members of the camp staff, including Frau Koch, were brought to trial before a United States Military Tribunal. The venue of the trial was the concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich, which many of the accused had previously visited in very different circumstances. The charge against them allegeds inter alia, that they had subjected many thousands of prisoner, from at least twelve different nations to ‘killings, beatings, tortures, starvation, abuses, and indignities’.
In this camp for about eight years every type of horror known to man was practised with sadistic pleasure. Whether simple extermination as in the earlier years, or extermination by ‘working to death’, as later on, the pattern followed was always the same. ‘Break the body: break the spirit: break the heart.’2
And what did the German people know of these things? It has often been suggested that they knew nothing. That probability is as unlikely as its converse, that they knew everything.
It has been said, ‘You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the
people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’, and there is an abundance of evidence that a large number of the Germans knew a great deal about what went on in concentration camps. There were still more who had grave suspicions and perhaps even misgivings but who preferred to lull their consciences by remaining in ignorance.
As the shortage of labour grew more acute it became the policy to free German women criminals and asocial elements from the concentration camps to work in German factories. It is difficult to believe that such women told no one of their experiences. In these factories the forewomen were German civilians in contact with the internees and able to speak to them. Forewomen from Auschwitz who subsequently went to the Siemens sub-factory at Ravensbrück had formerly been workers at Siemens in Berlin. They met women they had known in Berlin and told them what they had seen in Auschwitz. Is it reasonable to suppose that these stories were never repeated? Germans who during the war indulged in careless talk used to be told—’You had better be careful or you’ll go up the chimney’. To what could that refer but the concentration camp crematoriums?
The concentration camp system had been in existence in Germany for several years before the war and many Germans had had friends and relatives confined in the camps, some of whom were subsequently released.
From Buchenwald, prisoners went out daily to work in Weimar, Erfurt, and Jena. They left in the morning and came back at night. During the day they mixed with the civilian population while at work. Did they never converse, and if they did, was the subject of concentration camps always studiously avoided?
In many factories where parties from concentration camps worked, the technicians were not members of the armed forces and the foremen were not SS men. They went home every night after supervising the work of the prisoners all day. Did they never discuss with their relatives or friends when they got home what they had seen and heard during the day?
And what of the SS executive staff and guards. It is true that they had all signed statements binding themselves never to reveal to anyone outside the concentration camp service anything which they had seen inside their camp.
But is it reasonable to believe that none of them was human enough to break that undertaking? The bully is ever a braggart.
In August 1941 the Bishop of Limburg wrote to the Reich Ministries of the Interior, of Justice, and of Church Affairs as follows:
About 8 kilometres from Limburg in the little town of Hadamar … is an institute where euthanasia has been systematically practised for months. Several times a week buses arrive in Hadamar with a considerable number of such victims. The local school children know the vehicle and say, ‘There comes the murder box again.’ The children call each other names and say, ‘You are crazy, you will be sent to the baking ovens in Hadamar.’ Those who do not want to marry say ‘Marry? Never! Bring children into the world so that they can be put into the pressure steamer?’ You hear the old folks say, ‘Do not send me to a state hospital. After the feeble minded have been finished off, the next useless eaters whose turn it will be are the old people.….’
If the local inhabitants knew so much in Hadamar is there any doubt that the inhabitants of Bergen, Dachau, Struthof, and Birkenau knew something of what was happening at their very doors in the Belsen, Dachau, Natzweiler, and Auschwitz concentration camps?
Höss himself said of Auschwitz, ‘the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at the concentration camp.’
Day after day trainloads of victims travelled in cattle trucks over the whole railway system of the Reich on their way to extermination centres. They were seen by hundreds of railway workers who knew whence they had come and whither they were going.
Whatever horrors have remained hidden behind the camp walls, such things as these went on in broad daylight and all those Germans who had eyes to see and ears to hear can have been in little doubt of what crimes were being committed in their name throughout the land.
DACHAU
Dachau, one of the earlier concentration camps, was situated near the village of its name and about twelve miles from Munich. At the side of the main road was a signpost showing the way. It was here that so-called medical experiments were carried out on hundreds of inmates who became human guinea pigs.
Between 1941 and 1942 some five hundred operations were performed on healthy persons. The object was to instruct SS doctors and medical students. Many of the operations were of a serious nature, for example, removal of the gall bladder, and were performed by students of only two years’ standing. Such operations should not normally be performed except by doctors with at least four years’ practice of surgery. Many of these patients either died while the operation was in progress or from post-operative complications.
Malaria experiments were also carried out on some 1,200 inmates, none of whom volunteered. These experiments were carried out by a Dr Schilling, on the personal instructions of Himmler. The victims were either bitten by mosquitoes or given injections of malaria sporozoites taken from mosquitoes. The object of the experiment was to test out certain drugs as specific for malarial fever. Thirty to forty of these ‘patients’ died from the malaria itself and several hundreds later died from other diseases as a result of their constitution having been undermined by the disease. A number were also poisoned by overdoses of neosalvarsan and pyramidon, two of the experimental drugs.
Other experiments were carried out in Dachau by Dr Sigmund Rascher, a major in the Luftwaffe. Twentyfive men were put into a specially constructed van in which air pressure could be increased or decreased. The object of the experiment was to watch the effects on the victims of high altitude or a rapid descent by parachute.
Many of the inmates who were subjected to this experiment, which must have been pure torture, died from hæmorrhage of lung or brain. Those who survived were coughing blood when removed from the van. The internal organs of those who had died were sent to Munich for examination; the survivors were generally put to death.
Other tests conducted by Dr Rascher were to observe the effect of immersion for long periods in very cold water. These were described1 by Dr Franz Blaha from Czechoslovakia who was arrested by the Germans in 1939 and became an inmate of Dachau. He was present at a number of these experiments.
The subject was placed in ice cold water and kept there until he became unconscious. Blood was taken from his neck and tested each time his body temperature dropped one degree…. The lowest body temperature reached was 19° centigrade but most men died at 25° or 26°. When the men were removed from the icy water attempts were made to revive them with artificial sunshine, hot water, electro-therapy, or by animal warmth. For this last experiment prostitutes were used and the body of the unconscious man was placed between the bodies of two such women.
This was considered most entertaining and Himmler on occasions brought parties of his friends to see it. He even took sufficient interest in the experiment to write to SS General Pohl to tell him of its progress and that he had given orders that suitable women—but not Germans—should be earmarked at Dachau for the purpose of reviving those who had been so exposed. ‘Four girls were set aside,’ he wrote, ‘who were in the concentration camp for loose morals and because, as prostitutes, they were a potential source of infection.’1
Further experiments were conducted there by a Dr Schütz and others on large numbers of Polish, Czech, and Dutch priests. A group of these were selected and given intravenous injections of pus. No after-treatment was allowed so that inflammation or general blood poisoning set in. Various drugs were then used to attempt to deal with this condition. Great pain was suffered during this experiment and most of those who did not die of septicæmia became permanent invalids.
A large number of Hungarians and Gipsies were, in 1944, subjected to salt water experiments which consisted of being given nothing to eat or drink except salt water, during which t
ime their blood, urine, and excrement were analysed.
Provided certain basic requirements are observed medical experiments upon human beings are in accordance with the ethics of the medical profession. To satisfy these requirements the experiments must first and foremost be conducted upon volunteers, persons who are entirely free to give their consent, not under duress; who are in a position to withdraw from the experiment at any stage; and who fully realize the implications and possible hazards. The experiment must also be calculated to produce results which will be beneficial to society and could not be obtained by other means. Finally, the experiment must be conducted by highly competent, qualified doctors and the highest degree of skill and care must be exercised during and after the operation.
The experiments carried out by doctors in the concentration camps were not of this kind. The subjects were not volunteers; compulsion was always brought to bear on them and often physical violence was used. The operations were sometimes performed by unqualified persons and generally in unhygienic conditions.
No steps were taken to prevent or minimize suffering and whether the patients lived or died mattered not. The experiments generally resulted in death and the survivors were often disfigured or mutilated, or became permanent invalids. Finally, many of the experiments were of no medical or scientific importance.
NEUENGAMME
The camp at Neuengamme was founded in 1938 and its population grew so in numbers that by 1942 there were three times as many inmates as the camp could properly accommodate, despite the fact that no less than 55 satellites had been added to the ‘Neuengamme Ring’, satellite camps which included such well-known names as Banterweg, Bullenhausendamm, Hannover-Ahlem, and Schandelah.
The Scourge of the Swastika Page 20
