19: Experiments On Prisoners

Heinrich Himmler insisted that he abhorred acts of sadism, but he had scientific interests that led to similar tortures in medical experiments. An ambitious doctor named Sigmund Rascher wished to assist the Luftwaffe by researching the effects of extremely high altitudes on fliers. Unfortunately, the physician reported, "no tests with human material had yet been possible as such experiments are very dangerous and nobody volunteers for them." When Himmler found out about the doctor's problem, he offered a supply of prisoners.

Rascher set up a decompression chamber and began his tests. When the atmosphere in the chamber became thin, the prisoners' eardrums would burst and, according to an assistant, the prisoners "would tear their heads and faces with their fingernails in an attempt to maim themselves in their madness." The tests generally ended in the deaths of the subjects. On receiving the doctor's report describing the prisoners' agonies in one fatal test, Himmler jotted "interesting" in the margin.

Rascher also conducted freezing experiments to see how much cold a man could endure. "The business with the blocks of ice in water was most terrible," said a stretcher-bearer for Dr. Rascher. "As a rule, the experimental people fainted after an hour. But one time there were two Russian officers who were forced into the water naked. The Pole who worked with me heard one of the Russians say to the other after three hours, 'Comrade, tell the German he should shoot us.' The other said, 'No, the dog won't have any pity. We don't want to humiliate ourselves by begging.' Then they bade farewell to each other with a handshake. It lasted five hours before they were dead."

Some of the prisoners did not suffer so silently, and their screams hindered the experiments. Rascher thereafter anesthetized the subjects before exposing them to ice and snow.

Himmler informed the doctor that he would like to know what sort of heat was the most effective in reviving the frozen prisoners. Rascher accepted the challenge. He placed naked prisoners, chilled and unconscious, in contact with either one or two naked women prisoners. Rascher and his assistants carefully observed as the prisoners warmed up and regained consciousness, then reported that the test person, if he was able to have sexual intercourse, "warmed up surprisingly fast and also showed a surprisingly rapid return of full bodily well-being."

At Auschwitz, doctors conducted experiments designed to find a production-line method of sterilizing men of "inferior racial stock." Hundreds of healthy young prisoners were brought naked to X-ray machines and the reproductive organs were exposed to high doses of radiation. Some men were burned by unskilled technicians and were sent immediately to the gas chamber. Some survived the process, and doctors periodically took study specimens of the affected tissues.

One corner of Auschwitz was the center for gynecological experiments. Doctors sterilized women or injected experimental fluids into their ovaries. These operations were carried out without any effort to spare the women pain, and some would cower in corners, shrieking in terror at the approach of the medical team. Other women had cancer implanted in the uterus. Then doctors removed the womb, piece by piece, to study the effects of the tumor.

Many doctors pursued highly specialized research.

Dr. Josef Mengele performed studies on twins in an effort to find ways of improving the quality of German racial stock. A Dr. Dohmen cultivated viruses in animals, then injected them into prisoners in order to observe the effects. Doctors in the pharmaceutical branch of I. G. Farben had prisoners infected with typhus to test new drugs. Prisoners were also infected with typhus to determine how different geographical groups reacted; to no one's surprise, all groups perished swiftly. Dr. Fritz Ernst Fischer tried unsuccessfully to transplant bones between living prisoners.

The "experimental people" were also used by Nazi doctors who needed practice performing various operations. One doctor at Auschwitz perfected his amputation technique on live prisoners; after he had finished, his maimed patients were sent off to the gas chamber.

A few Jews who had studied medicine were allowed to live if they assisted the SS doctors. "I cut the flesh of healthy young girls," recalled a Jewish physician who survived at a terrible cost. "I immersed the bodies of dwarfs and cripples in calcium chloride (to preserve them), or had them boiled so the carefully prepared skeletons might safely reach the Third Reich's museums to justify, for future generations, the destruction of an entire race. I could never erase these memories from my mind."

Tens of thousands of Jews, Poles, Russians and other unwanted peoples died in such experiments. And millions of Poles, Russians and others perished along with the Jews in the enormous extermination dragnet of the Final Solution.