Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments

Science and Suffering in the Holocaust

Paul Weindling

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441189301
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medicina
• Categoría: Teoría, práctica y referencia médicas

While the coerced human experiments are notorious among all the atrocities under National Socialism, they have been marginalised by mainstream historians. This book seeks to remedy the marginalisation, and to place the experiments in the context of the broad history of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Paul Weindling bases this study on the reconstruction of a victim group through individual victims' life histories, and by weaving the victims' experiences collectively together in terms of different groupings, especially gender, ethnicity and religion, age, and nationality. The timing of the experiments, where they occurred, how many victims there were, and who they were, is analysed, as are hitherto under-researched aspects such as Nazi anatomy and executions. The experiments are also linked, more broadly, to major elements in the dynamic and fluid Nazi power structure and the implementation of racial policies. The approach is informed by social history from below, exploring both the rationales and motives of perpetrators, but assessing these critically in the light of victim narratives.

CHAPTER ONE

Exploring experiments

Concealed depths

Two warders pushed me to a bathroom. 3 doctors and about 10 students were already gathered there. After a heart examination I was injected with some red stuff and put in to a bath-tub with a thermometer. They switched on a ventilator. I was covered in water all but head and hands. Two of the physicians took my wrists, controlling my pulse and making notes. I was not able to describe the agony I felt being completely helpless in the hands of the so unscrupulous tormentors to whom the life of a concentration camp inmate meant less than nothing. The last thing I remember before I lost consciousness was that a slight ice-covering began to appear on the surface of the water.¹

Iwan Ageew, a partisan, endured freezing water experiments at the concentration camp of Dachau early in 1943.² His scientist-tormentors focused on how long immersion could be endured – in many cases, taking the subject until the onset of death. For those who survived, the scientists assessed how quickly different rewarming procedures took effect. Ageew survived but felt dehumanized, and expendable, and was rejected for compensation on the basis that the experiment did not affect his earning capacity in later life.³

A photo of freezing water experiments at Dachau shows an unknown research subject wearing the protective jacket and headgear of a pilot. Ice floats on the water surface. Three white-coated academics take measurements. These scientists measured the heart rate, rectal temperature and pulse. For those who survived, the scientists assessed how quickly different rewarming procedures took effect.

This photo of the prisoner has become iconic of the Nazi experiments. It appeared with the caption ‘Human Laboratory Animals’ in Life Magazine’s feature on the Nuremberg Medical Trial. Widely reproduced as representing concentration camp experiments, the photo can be viewed from various angles. One might at first presume that the unidentified victim died, having been measured and monitored to the point of death. But an alternative view is possible: that the prisoner survived, whereas it was the scientist perpetrators who died in the closing stages and the immediate aftermath of war. The photo can be seen either as an image of scientised murder, or of transcendence of victims over their destructive, and ultimately deceased torturers. The history of the Nazi experiments is one of a controlled and measured death, or survival albeit often with severe injuries. Survivors have spoken and written eloquently about their experiences.⁴

FIGURE 1.1 SS Sturmbannführer Dr Sigmund Rascher (right) and Professor Dr Ernst Holzlöhner observe the reactions of a Dachau prisoner, who has been immersed in a tank of ice water to simulate hypothermia, ca. September 1942.

Courtesy of Ullstein Bilderdienst

The photographed prisoner’s life depends on the scientists: a professor of physiology and Nazi activist, Ernst Holzlöhner, and two assistants, the air force doctor, Sigmund Rascher, and Erich Finke, likely the third man holding a thermometer. By the time the Dachau freezing experiments were revealed to a shocked international press in November 1945, the three researchers were dead.⁵ Rascher was executed by the SS (one account was that it was for falsification in launching a blood styptic, and another was that it was for faking paternity of four abducted children). Finke died on 4 April 1945 in a military hospital in the SS enclave of Holstein. After being interviewed by British scientific intelligence about a foam survival suit, Holzlöhner attempted to kill his wife, killed his child and committed suicide in June 1945.⁶

The victim in the tank is unknown: he might have been one of the killed victims aged between eighteen and forty-five – the number of deaths (possibly eighty) relies on fragmentary records and a post-war statement by the prisoner assistant, Walter Neff, rather than on records kept at the time.⁷ Or he might be one of the 133 persons known to have survived. The largest group among these were Polish prisoners, among them many priests.

Medical students were onlookers – there were students in Dachau from the SS Medical Academy in Graz, who subsequently made their careers in concentration camps and in other SS capacities.⁸ In fact, the Dachau experiment block was a visitor’s attraction for Nazi officials and groups from police, education and training institutions.⁹ Newly qualified doctors found research material for their MD and Habilitation dissertations in concentration camps. Doctoral dissertations addressed wider issues such as forced sterilizations and racial pathology, as well as clinical experiments on drug doses and vaccines.¹⁰ The prisoner pathologist František Bláha alleged pathology specimens were sent from Dachau to Munich University. Rascher had a bloodthirsty taste for ‘fresh’ specimens when he researched on low airpressure, and dissected a research subject in the pressure chamber.¹¹ While most experiments occurred in sealed blocks and compounds in concentration camps, they were rendered possible by academic, military and political support. Here, a dense set of power structures of the military, SS and academics shaped the research. The experiments made wider medical circles complicit in the research: patients and prisoners became resources of blood and body parts for research.

The forced immersion in the iron tank was a perverse baptism, as victims were plunged into a hellish world of scientific exploitation of their bodies, bones and internal organs. Experiments were a form of assault causing invalidity, infertility, incapacity and death. But this was violence in distinct, systematized forms that could be camouflaged as being of benefit to the war effort, to science, and the race. The experiments represent neither the random bloodshed, nor sporadic violence of camp guards and brutal punishments. They were closer to torture under medical supervision, or being subjected to medical selections that were a matter of life or death. Experiments were the calculated scientized viciousness of the injection needle or scalpel and meticulously compiled fever charts, and the minutely recorded effects of the freezing water tank and pressure chamber. Their execution was planned, authorized by administrators and funding agencies, or supported by the military and industry, or public health agencies in efforts to prevent infections and promote productive labour on the basis of innovative research.

The freezing experiments were oriented to problems of survival of air crew, and ensuing dry cold experiments to the war in the freezing Russian heartlands. At the same time fundamental problems of the human metabolism were at stake. The scientists plunged into research without boundaries. If they wanted an eye, a testicle, a brain, or a whole skeleton, it was there for the taking. If they wanted to replicate survival at sea, a bullet wound, an epidemic infection, starvation or thirst – again, they could. The possibilities seemed limitless, and at the height of the war, the resources in terms of funding and facilities flowed.

Experiments as exploitation

As the Nazi racial war and the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’ unfolded, medical and racial experts preyed on the blood, bodies and brains of subject populations. German (and the occasional Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Sudeten (i.e. Czechoslovak) German, Baltic German and Romanian German) researchers invaded the minutest structures of the human body, and harvested corpses, foetuses, brains and eyes, and drained vast stockpiles of blood. The motives blended exploitation for the war effort, racial studies to identify and weed out degenerates, and coldly detached scientific aims. Scientists set out to conquer new frontiers: they measured and probed the fragile boundaries between consciousness and the unconscious; between life – under adverse conditions of cold, hunger and exhaustion, high fever or infected wounds – and the physiology of death; and demarcated the boundaries between sanity and ‘idiocy’. The research concerned growth defects, physiological performance under severe stress, the destruction of reproductive organs, genetics of malformations and disease, and the sheer form of the body, not least how the body shape and skeleton from one race would differ to that of another. The experiments thus were part of a wider pattern of coerced research, involving anthropology, brain slicing and analysis of body fluids. The term ‘experiment’ should be construed here in this wider sense.

Such experiments were at the vortex of administrative and political structures, the scientists, and the victims. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler delighted in designing new experiments on topics such as survival and rescuscitation that utilized concentration camp resources. Experiments and hereditary research were designed to support the racial re-ordering of Europe, as well as to reconfigure medical and racial science in a new Germanic form. Bodies were looted as research materials: rapacious medical scientists extracted testicles, chemically destroyed wombs, and extracted foetuses from slave labourers. As military fronts extended and contracted, medical research intensified, and frenetic experiments continued up to the final dying gasps of the Nazi racial collossus.

A battery of scientific techniques was deployed, and innovative knowledge of hormones, genes and viruses was applied. The living body was stressed, and then measured and dissected. Rather than ‘pseudo-science’, scientific ambition drove forward ruthless agendas to advance careers, and to obtain resources and international acclaim. German medical science, for so long world leading and well embedded in military structures, was now set to demonstrate its racial prowess. Himmler and his medical deputy Reichsarzt SS Ernst Grawitz were ambitious for the scientific researches to show the Germanic ability to obtain results in daring ways that no researcher had hitherto dared to deploy – and so, to use a phrase from the period, to make the rarefied academic peaks of medical knowledge higher.

Nazi Germany invested vast resources of skilled personnel, equipment and facilities into experimental medicine. Medical research was designed to cure, prevent and ideally eradicate diseases impeding military operations, to enhance fitness and fertility of the German race and nation for vast resettlement schemes, and ultimately to deliver a wonder weapon in the shape of devastating nerve gas. Such a racially oriented and militarized medicine occupied a central place in the vast schemes of population engineering that provide a rationale for genocidal clearance for ‘living space’. Europe’s population map was being redrawn with grandiose schemes for Germanization of peripheral ethnic groups brought ‘Home to the Reich’ from the Baltics, Eastern Europe and the South Tyrol; the shifting eastwards of Slav populations, and the sterilization and killing of millions of racial undesirables. The relentless destruction of Jews and gypsies, and others deemed pathogenic was ultimately intended to revitalize the Germanic and Nordic races. Auschwitz doctors used the metaphor of excising a diseased organ to restore health. The destruction offered hitherto undreamt of scientific opportunities for the exercise of experimental agendas in clinics, camps and ghettoes, and consequent research on stockpiles of body parts.

By the time the war ended, the Nazi-coerced experiments were notorious in terms of their calculated cruelty. Despite prosecutions of medical perpetrators at Nuremberg, the wider dimensions of the cataclysmic medical destruction have never been mapped.¹² How many victims there were, and when and where the experimental destruction occurred – and the overall delineating of the institutional and political contours of the coerced human research – have rarely been matters of historical concern. For all the ink spilled by authors on the Nazi racial war and the Holocaust, and recent historical efforts to examine Nazi science, the myriad victims of medical research – Jews, gypsies, mixed race German adolescents, Catholic priests, homosexual males, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war and partisans, and psychiatric patients to name just some of the prey of the predatory scientists in camps and clinics – remain if not hidden from history, then incidental casualties. Journalists have engaged with victims – notably Günther Schwarberg for the twenty Jewish children killed in Hamburg, Ernst Klee on psychiatric victims, Hans-Joachim Lang on the Strasbourg skeleton and Auschwitz chemical sterilization victims; but historians have rarely engaged with the experiences and life histories of victims. Schwarberg first identified the twenty Jewish children killed just before war ended, and who for many years were an anonymous group. Klee extended the range of experiments, and compassionately included victims, although his approach was impressionistic and tendentious. What Schwarberg achieved by identifying a single group of twenty child victims, this study seeks to achieve for all victims of the Nazi experiments.

In the late 1980s, Götz Aly rightly drew attention to psychiatric experiment and brain research victims. Although he identified only a fraction of the victims, his radical critique of how the perpetrating elites continued on into the post-war era has ultimately gained acceptance.¹³ Only a few victim clusters, notably the ‘idiot’ children researched by Carl Schneider at Heidelberg, and the several hundred children whose brain tissue was retained after they were killed at the Spiegelgrund in Vienna, have been reconstructed. Despite major German projects on research institutions under National Socialism, none has fully reconstructed the devastation wreaked on victims.¹⁴

Recent research on the German Research Fund has produced valuable case studies, notably on cancer research and genetics. But there has been a momentous failure to investigate the full spectrum of coercive research, the research practices on human subjects and especially the proportion of consensual to coercive research, and to establish fully victim identities. Consequently, the experiment victims are very much a forgotten group in Holocaust and war hist...