Medical experiments in Auschwitz

published 23/05/2013 at 18:32 contributed by Irena Strzelecka  



The participation of numerous German physicians in criminal medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners was a particularly drastic instance of the trampling of medical ethics. The initiators and facilitators of these experiments were Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, together with SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Grawitz, the chief physician of the SS and police, and SS-Standartenführer Wolfram Sievers, the secretary general of the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) Association and director of the Waffen SS Military-Scientific Research Institute.

The SS-WVHA (SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, in charge of concentration camps from March 1942) had administrative and financial authority. Support in the form of specialized analytical studies came from the Waffen SS Hygiene Institute, directed by SS-Oberführer Joachim Mrugowsky, an M.D. and professor of bacteriology at the University of Berlin Medical School.

Experiments were planned at the highest levels to meet the needs of the army (some were intended to improve the state of soldiers’ health) or postwar plans (including population policy), or to reinforce the bases of racial ideology (including advancing views as to the superiority of the “Nordic race”). Aside from experiments planned at the highest levels, many Nazi doctors experimented on prisoners on behalf of German pharmaceutical companies or medical institutes. Others did so in pursuit of their personal interests, or to advance their academic careers.

During the Second World War, Nazi doctors pandered to the expectations of the Third Reich leadership by supporting the regime’s demographic policies. They initiated wide-ranging research on methods of mass sterilization that would be applied to peoples regarded as belonging to a lower category.

A conference attended by Himmler, Professor Karl Gebhardt, and Richard Glücks (the inspector of concentration camps) entrusted the search for the best method of sterilization—one that would make it possible to sterilize an unlimited number of people in the shortest possible time, and in the simplest way possible—to Professor Carl Clauberg, an authority in the treatment of infertility who worked during the war as head of the department of women’s diseases at the hospital in Chorzów (then Königshütte, Germany).

Clauberg set to work in barracks no. 30, part of the hospital complex in the women’s camp (sector BIa) in Birkenau, at the end of 1942. In April of the following year, Rudolf Höss put  block no. 10 in the main camp at Clauberg’s disposal. Between 150 and 400 Jewish women from various countries were held in two upstairs rooms.

Clauberg developed a method of non-surgical mass sterilization. Under the pretext of performing a gynecological examination, he first checked to make sure that the Fallopian tubes were open, and then introduced a specially prepared chemical irritant, which caused acute inflammation. This led to the growing together of the tubes within a few weeks, and thus their obstruction. X-rays were used to check the results of each procedure.

These procedures were carried out in a brutal way. Complications were frequent, including peritonitis and hemorrhages from the reproductive tract, leading to high fever and sepsis. Multiple organ failure and death frequently followed. While some of Clauberg’s Jewish patients died in this way, others were deliberately put to death so that autopsies could be carried out.

At almost the same time as Clauberg, SS-Sturmbannführer Horst Schumann, a Luftwaffe lieutenant and a physician, began his own sterilization experiments at Auschwitz. He was the former head of the institution for the “incurably ill” at Grafeneck hospital in Wurtemberg and at Sonnenstein, after which he became a member of a special “medical commission” that selected sick and overworked concentration camp prisoners for the gas chambers.

Schumann moved into barracks no. 30 in the Birkenau women’s camp (sector BIa), where an “x-ray sterilization” station had been equipped with two Siemens x-ray machines, connected by cables to a lead-shielded control cabin where Schumann could run the machines.

Jewish men and women prisoners in groups of several dozen at a time were regularly brought there and subjected to sterilization experiments consisting of the exposure of the women’s ovaries and the men’s testicles to x-rays. The x-rays left them with severe radiation burns on the abdomen, groin, and buttocks, and suppurating lesions that resisted healing.

Complications led to numerous deaths. Some of the experimental subjects were sent to the gas chambers during selection in the camp. After the passage of several weeks, some of Schumann’s male and female experimental subjects had their testicles or ovaries removed surgically (unilaterally or bilaterally) for laboratory examination and in order to obtain histological samples.

Only a small portion of the victims of Clauberg and Schumann’s experiments, fully aware of how they had been permanently harmed, survived Auschwitz.

While Clauberg and Schumann were busy with experiments designed to develop methods for the biological destruction of people regarded by the Nazis as undesirable, another medical criminal, SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele, M.D., Ph.D., was researching the issues of twins and the physiology and pathology of dwarfism in close cooperation with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Genetics, and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem. He was also interested in people with different colored irises (heterochromia iridii), and in the etiology and treatment of the gangrenous disease of the face known as noma Faciei (cancrum oris, gangrenous stomatitis), a little understood disease endemic to the Gypsy prisoners in Auschwitz.

In the first phase of the experiments, pairs of twins and persons with inherited anomalies were put at the disposal of Dr. Mengele and subjected to all imaginable specialist medical examinations. They were also photographed, plaster casts were made of their jaws and teeth, and they were toe- and fingerprinted. As soon as these examinations were finished, they were killed with lethal injections of phenol to the heart so that the next phase of the experimentation could begin: autopsies and the comparative analysis of their internal organs.

Prisoners were also put to death for research purposes in connection with diseases resulting from the effects of starvation on the human organism, particularly “brown liver atrophy” (braune Atrophie). A professor of anatomy from the University of Münster who lectured there on anatomy and human genetics, SS-Obersturmführer Johann Paul Kremer, carried out this research. He chose prisoners who struck him as suitable research subjects from those who asked to be admitted to the hospital, or he simply chose them from among the patients in the hospital.

Dr. Eduard Wirths carried out oharmacological experimens and also attempted to boost the scientific career of his younger brother, a gynecologist from Hamburg, by joining him from the spring of 1943 in experiments on cervical cancer. He chose subjects from among the Jewish women prisoners held upstairs in block no. 10 in the main camp.

In the late summer of 1944, the Wehrmacht sent Emil Kaschub, a physician with the rank of corporal, to Auschwitz in an effort to unmask the various methods of malingering that were becoming widespread among German soldiers, especially on the eastern front. These methods included self-inflicted wounds, abscesses, fever, and infectious hepatitis. He experimented on Jewish prisoners by rubbing various toxic substances into their skin or injecting them into their limbs, and giving them oral medicine (Atebrine) in order to provoke the same symptoms being presented by German soldiers.

In 1942, SS-Hauptsturmführer August Hirt, a professor and head of the department of anatomy at the Reich University in Strasbourg, set about assembling a collection of Jewish skeletons under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe Foundation. Himmler gave him permission to choose as many prisoners in Auschwitz as he needed. The selection of 115 prisoners (79 Jewish men, 30 Jewish women, 2 Poles, and 4 “Asiatics”—probably Soviet POWs) and the initial “processing” of them was carried out by SS-Hauptsturmführer Bruno Beger, who came to Auschwitz in the first half of 1943.

From 1941 to 1944, the camp SS physicians Friedrich Entress, Helmuth Vetter, Eduard Wirths, and to a lesser extent Fritz Klein, Werner Rhode, Hans Wilhelm König, Victor Capesius (head of the camp pharmacy), and Bruno Weber (director of the SS Hygiene Institute in Rajsko) used Auschwitz prisoners in tests of the tolerance and effectiveness of new medical preparations or drugs designated by the code names B-1012, B-1034, B-1036, 3582, and P-111. They also used prisoners as experimental subjects in tests of the drugs Rutenol and Periston. They were acting on behalf of IG Farbenindustrie, and mostly of Bayer, which was a part of IG Farbenindustrie. They gave these drugs in various forms and doses to prisoners suffering from contagious diseases. The patients forced to take them suffered from disturbances of the digestive tract including bloody vomiting, painful bloody diarrhea containing flecks of mucous membranes, and impairment of the circulatory system.

The medical experiments surely include, as well, the operations carried out by SS physicians Friedrich Entress, Horst Fischer, Heinz Thilo, and Fritz Klein, who did not possess qualifications as surgeons. The operations were completely unnecessary from the medical point of view, and were only carried out for practice. Other procedures carried out for training purposes included inducing pneumothorax (collapsed lungs) in prisoners with tuberculosis, and performing spinal taps on prisoners with meningitis. Accounts and memoirs by former prisoners also include descriptions of other sorts of experiments, the purposes of which cannot be objectively established.

The prisoners were already living under conditions that were extreme in every imaginable way, and these experiments were a death sentence for many of them. The fate of their experimental subjects was a matter of indifference for the SS physicians. In order to cover their tracks, they often ordered the victims of their experiments killed by lethal injection of phenol to the heart, or in the gas chambers.