The Third Reich at War (101 page)

Experiments were also carried out to try to find a way of treating phosphorous burns caused by incendiary bombs. With Himmler’s approval, Ernst Grawitz got an SS doctor to smear phosphorous on the arms of five inmates of the Buchenwald camp in November 1943 then set it alight. The pain, according to survivors, was excruciating. The ointment then put on the wounds seems to have had little effect, and some of the subjects died.
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At Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler, mustard gas, which had caused such suffering in the First World War, and which, it was feared, might be used in Allied bombing raids, was injected into some inmates, while others were made to drink it in liquid form, or forced to inhale it. Some had wounds inflicted on them and infected with the gas. Three inmates had died in the experiments by early 1943, but the scientists, working for the SS Ancestral Heritage organization, reported some success with treatment. In subsequent experiments involving phosgene gas, four Russian prisoners were killed, and there were further prisoner deaths in December 1944 in mustard gas experiments conducted at the Neuengamme camp. Carried out under the auspices of Karl Brandt and the SS, in many cases with the knowledge of Hitler himself, these dangerous, often painful, and sometimes fatal experiments were inflicted on people who had no choice about undergoing them. None of this research ever brought any benefit to the German soldiers, sailors and airmen it was intended to help.
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IV

Camp inmates were also used for pure research without any obvious or immediate practical implications. The leading figure here was Dr Josef Mengele, camp doctor in Auschwitz. Mengele was a scientific assistant to the prominent racial hygienist Otmar Baron von Verschuer at the University of Frankfurt am Main. Mengele had published scientific articles arguing for racial differences in the structure of the lower jaw, cleft palate and a deformity of the ear known as
fistulae auris
. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the SS, and joined the Military SS in 1940, where he served as a medical officer on the Eastern Front. Here he won the Iron Cross, First Class, and was wounded in action. In May 1943 he was transferred to the Economy and Administration Head Office of the SS and at the end of the month posted to Auschwitz, where he made an immediate impression on the inmates with his youthful, handsome appearance, his well-tailored uniform and highly polished boots, his politeness and his elegance. All of this set him apart in the most dramatic possible way from the mass of the ill-kempt and undernourished inmates. He saw in Auschwitz the chance to resume his career as a scientific researcher after his break at the front. One of his research projects focused on noma, a disease in which severe malnutrition caused the lining of the cheek to atrophy and a gangrenous hole to open up, exposing the teeth and the jaw. In the search for supposed hereditary elements in the disease, which he thought might affect Gypsies more than other groups, Mengele treated a large number of children suffering from this disease at Auschwitz, giving them vitamins and sulphonamide and effecting a considerable improvement in their condition.
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For Mengele, however, such treatment was a means to a scientific end, not an end in itself. As soon as it had brought about an improvement sufficient to provide convincing evidence of its effectiveness, he stopped it, and the children returned to their former condition and fell victim to the disease again. For him they were experimental subjects, not medical patients. Energetic and workaholic, Mengele developed many further research projects, some of which were supported by the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin, where his teacher Verschuer received regular reports on his work in the camp.
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He considered his most important project to be the one that built on Verschuer’s proposal that hereditary influences could best be studied by research on twins. Auschwitz offered Mengele a unique opportunity for collecting subjects for this research. He could often be found inspecting new arrivals on the selection ramp even when he was off duty, looking for fresh sets of twins. Plunging into the mass of arriving Jews, shouting ‘twins out!’, he would pluck twins of any age out of the mˆl’e of frightened families and take them off to one of the three offices he used for the project. Here he would have each of them tattooed with a special prisoner number, and put into living quarters separated from the rest of the camp. They were allowed to keep their own clothes and did not have to have their heads shaved. If they were very young, their mother was saved from the gas chamber in order to look after them.

Mengele did not allow the twins to be beaten or maltreated in case this interfered with his experiments. He would have them measured in minute detail before injecting them, sometimes in the spine, with a variety of chemicals to see if they reacted differently, or applying chemicals to the skin to observe their effect. Such experiments caused deafness, collapse or even, if the children were very young, death. On occasion, if twins fell ill and there was a disputed diagnosis, Mengele would give them a fatal injection and carry out an autopsy to determine the nature of their ailment. On the whole, however, he kept the twins alive. The older ones were evacuated from Auschwitz in January 1945 and their fate is uncertain. One estimate puts the proportion of those who died as a result of experimentation at around 15 per cent. Although Mengele intended his research to form the basis for his ‘Habilitation’, the second doctorate required in Germany to qualify for an academic career, its value was dubious in scientific terms. He was, for example, unable to determine whether the twins he collected were identical or not, and indeed some siblings who were close in age and appearance to one another managed to save themselves from the gas chamber by passing themselves off as twins even though they were not.
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Mengele acquired his notoriety among camp survivors not so much from his experiments as from his role in selecting prisoners for extermination. Standing on the ramp, often alone, immaculate in his appearance, and carrying a riding-crop, he would cast his glance briefly at each arrival before pronouncing ‘left’ or ‘right’ according to what he perceived to be their physical state and usefulness (or otherwise) for the camp’s labour programmes. So frequently was he there that many inmates assumed, quite wrongly, that he was the only camp doctor to carry out this duty. Some thought he looked like a Hollywood movie star. Only if he encountered resistance would he break his elegant pose, beating people with his riding-crop if they refused to be separated from their family, or on one occasion drawing his gun and shooting a mother who physically attacked an SS man trying to separate her from her daughter. Mengele shot the daughter as well and then, as a punishment, sent all the people from the transport to the gas chamber, shouting: ‘Away with this shit!’ Touring the wards in the camp hospital, with a spotless white coat over his SS uniform, smelling of eau de Cologne and whistling snatches of Wagner, he would indicate with a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down which patients were to be selected for the gas chamber. Often he would select them on merely aesthetic grounds, consigning them to their death if they had an ugly scar or a rash on their body. On one occasion he drew a horizontal line on the wall of the children’s block and sent all those whose heads could not reach the line to the gas chamber. Sometimes he would not wait, but would inject people with a deadly solution of phenol himself. What struck inmates was the evident sense of enjoyment with which Mengele approached his work. Here was a man completely at ease with the power he was wielding over life and death.
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Mengele did not confine his hereditarian researches to work on twins. He also collected people with physical abnormalities, hunchbacks, transsexuals, and the like, some of whom he had shot so that he could anatomize their bodies on the dissecting table. He was particularly enthusiastic in his search for dwarfs, whom he kept in the twins’ quarters for experimentation in his search for hereditary causes of their condition. Mengele also used his position to supply eyes from dead inmates to a research project at his institute in Berlin, where scientists were studying the phenomenon of heterochromia (the two eyes of one person having different colours). If Mengele discovered any inmates with this condition, he ordered them to be killed. On one occasion, when his prisoner assistant put the eyes of all eight members of a Gypsy family together after their death, for shipment to Berlin, the clerk in charge of the shipment discovered that it only contained seven pairs of eyes; the assistant, terrified of what Mengele might do if he found out, scoured the morgue for Gypsy corpses, excised one blue eye from one and one black eye from another, and had them packed up with the rest. Here too, therefore, the scientific work was less than wholly reliable. Characteristically, Mengele took his work a step further, and tried to create perfect Aryan specimens from children he found with blond hair and brown eyes by injecting their eyes with methylene blue. The procedure, of course, failed to bring about any permanent change of eye-colour; but it did cause considerable pain, in some cases damage to the children’s eyesight, and in at least one recorded instance, death. In all of these projects, Mengele regarded himself as a normal scientist, even holding a regular research seminar with his assistants, who included medically qualified camp prisoners. Mengele would chair the meeting and ask the prisoner-doctors to discuss particular cases. Freedom of debate was naturally restricted, however, by the fact that, as one of them later remarked, they were reluctant to disagree with Mengele because he could have any of them killed at any moment and on the slightest whim.
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Josef Mengele has come to stand in the decades since the Third Reich as a symbol for the perversion of medical science. Yet his experiments were only a few among a much greater number carried out by a variety of doctors on the inmates of the camps. These included research conducted by Dr Kurt Heissmeyer in the concentration camp at Neuengamme, in which twenty Jewish children between the ages of five and twelve, taken from Auschwitz, were infected with virulent tuberculosis and treated in a variety of ways, including the surgical removal of swollen glands. At the end of the war, in order to try to destroy the evidence of these experiments, the surviving children were taken on 20 April 1945 by one of the doctors to a sub-camp at Bullenhuser Damm and injected with morphine, after which an SS man accompanying them hanged the sleeping children from a hook one by one, pulling on their bodies to make sure they would die. Other medical experiments were carried out at the direct behest of Himmler, for policy rather than scientific purposes. At Auschwitz, for example, doctors working for Himmler experimented on female inmates with injections and x-ray treatment in the search for a quick and cheap means of mass sterilization, resulting in many cases in the loss of their hair and teeth, the complete disappearance of sexual feeling, or in the most serious cases the onset of cancer. Men were bombarded with x-rays aimed at their testicles, often leading to impotence or causing serious physical damage that made it difficult for them to urinate. Senior SS officers fantasized about such methods being applied to 10 million racially inferior people, or to Jewish men needed for labour, but they never got beyond the experimental stage.
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Medical scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes also carried out research on the brains of hundreds of patients killed in the ‘euthanasia’ action, to see whether they exhibited any consistent signs of degeneracy.
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And in November 1942 complaints by the anatomical institutes of German universities that they did not have enough cadavers for dissection in teaching and research led to a ruling of the Ministry of Justice that they could have the remains of offenders executed in German prisons without having to obtain the permission of their relatives, a ruling that less than a year later was leading to further complaints by the institutes, this time that ‘the massive deliveries of corpses of executed offenders during the last months has led to a complete overcrowding of our storage facilities’.
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Were any of the medical experiments carried out in the camps of any medical or scientific value? Some, like Mengele’s, were clearly scientifically flawed. Others obviously had no defensible medical application. So it was, for example, with the experiments at the SS hospital in Hohlenlynchen, where a way of injecting people with live tuberculosis bacilli was developed that would kill them quickly and allow physicians to record tuberculosis as the cause of death; this was required because the usual method of killing people by injecting them with phenol or gasoline caused the corpse to emanate a suspicious smell. Sigmund Rascher’s invention of small cyanide capsules for suicides was to have wide application at the end of the war, but could hardly be called scientifically or medically useful. However, other experiments carried out on concentration camp inmates in Germany were regarded in Germany as normal science, their results presented at conferences and published in reputable medical journals. Standard experimental protocols were employed in evaluating the experiments carried out, for example, by the Bayer Pharmaceutical Company on women inmates of Auschwitz whom it had purchased for this purpose from the SS at a premium of 700 Reichsmarks each. When Karl Gebhardt and Fritz Fischer had women prisoners injected with gas bacilli, staphylococcus or malignant oedema at Ravensbr̈ck and then tested new drugs on them, the results were discussed at a subsequent conference and with leading physicians such as the famous surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch. Yet to suggest that such work was in accordance with the normal scientific protocols of the day in no way legitimizes the methods it employed. Medical research in these cases was unethical because it caused pain and often death in people who had no choice but to participate in it: indeed, it would still have been unethical had the subjects participated in it of their own free will, given the fundamental moral commitment of medicine to preserve life and not to end it.
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