Medicine in Auschwitz

published 23/05/2013 at 18:31 Contributed by Irena Strzelecka


When they organized the camp in Oświęcim in 1940, the SS gave it the same administrative makeup as the concentration camps that were already operating. Its structure thus included a Department V—camp medical service. The garrison physician (SS-Standortärzte) was head of this department. Until March 1942, he was under orders from the SS Medical Service, and afterwards from the head physician of the concentration camps; that is, the director of Office Group DIII (camp medical and hygiene) in the SS Main Economic-Administrative Office (SS-WVHA). On an everyday basis, the garrison physician cooperated closely with the camp commandant, advising him on medical, sanitation, and hygiene matters. The head physician had overall responsibility for the state of hygiene in the camp and headed the extensive medical service, which included the SS camp doctors. These doctors directed the camp hospitals (known as rewirs or infirmaries) with the help of SS orderlies and prisoner functionaries, at the head of whom stood the Lagerälteste HKB.

The SS physicians were formally responsible for the medical service for the prisoners, but in reality they paid scant heed to the needs of the prisoners or their basic medical responsibilities. They only cared about creating the appearance of competent medical care. They were mainly occupied with camp extermination operations, carrying out the selection of the arriving Jewish transports and the patients in the prisoner hospitals, supervising the killing of Jews in the gas chambers, being present at executions, conducting experiments on prisoners on behalf of German pharmaceutical companies or out of their own private interests, and signing thousands of prisoner death certificates with fictitious causes of death.

The foundation of the extensive network of camp hospitals at Auschwitz was the infirmary set up in the second half of June 1940, several days after the arrival of the first transport of Polish political prisoners. The first patients were prisoners who had been badly beaten or who were near the point of collapse because of the murderous exercises (called “sport”) that were characteristic of the preliminary quarantine period. As more transports arrived and the number of patients rose, the hospital expanded. In the final form assumed by the hospital in the Auschwitz I main camp, it was made up of block 19, the Schonungsblock for convalescent prisoners; block 20, the contagious diseases block; block 21, the surgical block; and block 28, the internal medicine block.

In line with the expansion of Auschwitz from 1942 to 1944, new hospitals opened in the Auschwitz main camp (for the Soviet POWs and women prisoners held there at various times), Birkenau (in the camps for men, women, Roma, and Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto), and in the sub-camps.

At various times, the heads of the camp “hospitals” included SS physicians Max Popiersch, Siegfried Schwela, Oskar Dienstbach, Kurt Uhlenbroock, and Eduard Wirths in the Auschwitz main camp; Erwin von Helmersen, Heinz Thilo, and Rudolf Horstman in the Birkenau men’s camp; and Werner Rohde, Fritz Klein, and Hans Wilhelm König in the Birkenau women’s camp. Josef Mengele started out as the head doctor in the Zigeunerlager (“Gypsy camp”), and ended up in charge of all the hospitals and infirmaries in Birkenau.

The overall conditions of camp life ensured that many people fell sick from the very first months, and their numbers rose steadily over time. Physical harassment of the prisoners resulted in numerous broken limbs and suppurating sores on the buttocks, usually after flogging.

The winter, and also late fall and early spring, saw numerous cases of colds, pneumonia, and frostbite which developed not infrequently into gangrene. The dreadful sanitation conditions caused skin diseases, and above all scabies.

Almost all prisoners suffered from boils, rashes, and abscesses that resulted mostly from vitamin deficiency and infections.

1942-1943 (and especially 1942) went down in the history of the camp as a period of raging epidemics, and especially typhus, which claimed the greatest number of lives. Many prisoners suffered from tuberculosis, ague (malaria), meningitis, pemphigus, dysentery, and Durchfall, a disorder of the digestive system caused by improper and inadequate food.

In camp conditions, all these illnesses were highly acute. A characteristic camp illness was starvation sickness. It was usually accompanied by diarrhea (often bloody), swollen legs, impaired vision and hearing, memory loss, nervous breakdown and, above all, exhaustion to the point of collapse. The majority of prisoners suffered from several medical conditions simultaneously.

The conditions for patients in the camp hospitals in the early phase were an affront to every known concept of caring for the sick. The prisoners, most of them extremely exhausted, often unconscious or in agony, lay in overcrowded rooms, in shirts darkened with filth or, often naked, on paper pads soaked with excrement, urine, and pus.

Fleas and lice filled the hospital premises. In addition to this, rats prowled the Birkenau hospitals. At night, they gnawed the limbs of the dead women and attacked the unconscious or weakest prisoners. Patients received smaller food rations than prisoners with work assignments. All of them, but especially those with fever, suffered torments of thirst.

In connection with the increasing labor requirements of the German wartime economy, the SS began taking various steps in the second half of 1942 to decrease the death rate. Generally, these were superficial measures. In this second phase, however, the SS assigned the camp hospitals the role of reducing the prisoner death rate—in relation to prisoners who seemed likely to return to labor in a short time. For the gravely ill, the camp hospitals continued to be instruments of annihilation.

In 1943-1944, prisoners who were interested in helping their sick fellow-prisoners began to play a leading role in both the medical “self-government” and among the staff on the wards. Through November 1944, SS doctors undermined their efforts through selection, which sent the sickest prisoners (only Jews after August 1943) to die in the gas chambers. To the end of their existence, the hospitals played a key role in camp life. They were the place where some patients spent their last days and hours. For a few, they represented survival.

The first selection in Auschwitz, within the framework of the euthanasia program, took place on July 28, 1941. A special medical commission came to the camp that day and chose 575 disabled, chronically ill, and elderly prisoners, mostly from among the hospital patients. The commission sent them to the Sonnenstein mental institution in Saxony, where they were put to death with carbon monoxide.

As a follow-on to this selection, there were trials in 1941 of killing seriously ill prisoners by injecting highly concentrated solutions into their veins, using hydrogen perhydrol, ether, hydrogen peroxide, benzene, Evipan, and phenol. SS physicians found that the most efficient killing method was injecting phenol into the prisoners’ hearts. A room in block 20 called the Behandlungszimmer soon became the place for the regular killing of prisoners in this way. The method was also applied in Birkenau (barracks 8 in sector BIb and barracks 25 and 28 in sector BIa).

At almost the same time as the introduction of phenol to kill prisoners, the SS began testing the effectiveness of Zyklon B. This method was used in the cellars of block 11 to kill some 250 sick prisoners selected from the hospital, along with about 600 Soviet POWs, on September 3, 1941.

As a way of combating a typhus epidemic, SS doctors selected 746 patients suffering or recovering from typhus in the hospital blocks on August 29, 1942. They sent them to the Birkenau gas chambers. When carrying out selection in the hospitals, until November 1944, SS doctors sometimes picked several thousand prisoners at a time. As indicated above, only Jews were subject to such selection after August 1943.

The prisoners assigned to work in the camp hospital offices had to keep extensive documentation that helped the SS supervise the hospitals, while also camouflaging the extermination function. On a regular basis, false causes of death, or none at all, were entered in the documentation prepared after the death of prisoners.

For example, the camp records state that the cause of death of St. Maximilian Kolbe was myocardia. The putative causes of the death of the underage prisoners Mieczysław Rycaj and Tadeusz Rycyk, killed by phenol injection on January 21, 1943, were bilateral pneumonia and septic pharyngitis.

When larger groups of prisoners were put to death, the dates of death were also falsified, so that they would be distributed over a period of 2 or 3 weeks, a dozen or so per day.

In a statement as an expert forensic witness in 1946, Dr. Jan Olbrycht, a former prisoner, characterized the Auschwitz hospital records: “If it had not been for the defeat of Nazism, a detached observer studying the history of the prisoners’ sicknesses and the protocols of the treatment they received would conclude that the Auschwitz camp was a model of good sanitary, hygienic, and medical practice, and that prisoners received care that embodied the latest achievements of science and medicine. The death certificates issued for specific registered prisoners can serve as an example of the deliberate falsification of camp records, and should be a warning to young researchers, who should use all imaginable caution in drawing conclusions from those records.”