- The physicians referred to in the text practically believed what they were doing was right. - People today fundamentally are able to follow an equally wrong route, even worse. The fundamental wrongness is in the inability to identify false thinking as what it is. - Relying on conclusion making alone without actually being able to estimate a whole picture in a living attitude may be disastrous. - The Doctors in Germany at the time were living in a society where new ideas have been accepted while - not them only - were imagining overcoming the actual notion of things not being reasonable and distracting the natural tendency of observing reality - this overcoming was imagined to be a sign of progress. - The same phenomenon is obviously present today too and gaining power from day to day.
- The very notion one should have been able to tell would warn him or her from dry intellectualism misleading the view has become - on the contrary, - popularly, - a feeling many believe the acceptance of is a sign of wisdom. It is like preferring plastic plants to real plant life. - It is the sickness making the fools think themselves wise and dismissing healthy mentality as being characterized by primitivity. - The fact today the thought the LGTB is free from wrongness has spread as it did with such solid confidence is an amazing example of the situation. - I will not argue about that. - But still seeing which is a wrong conception in spite of any popularity it might have gained all around where you are is not to be lost. - The necessity is for a living core of spirit within a person's being by which one can know real consideration from what is merely apparent, and for those who cannot yet have this there ought to be a standard in society - a norm, - telling that the notion many still can quite easily notice is not a sign of true scientific gifts bestowed off some actual higher understanding but a thing to beware of handed by those devoid of eyes. So far.
THE MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS
There were some practices of the Germans during the short-lived New Order that resulted from sheer sadism rather than a lust for mass murder. Perhaps to a psychiatrist there is a difference between the two lusts though the end result of the first differed from the second only in the scale of deaths.The Nazi medical experiments are an example of this sadism, for in the use of concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war as human guinea pigs very little, if any, benefit to science was achieved. It is a tale of horror of which the German medical profession cannot be proud. Although the “experiments” were conducted by fewer than two hundred murderous quacks – albeit some of them held eminent posts in the medical world – their criminal work was known to thousands of leading physicians of the Reich, not a single one of whom, so far as the record shows, ever uttered the slightest public protest.
In the murders in this field the Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration camp inmates, women as well as men, and even Germans. The “experiments” were quite varied. Prisoners were placed in pressure chambers and subjected to high-altitude tests until they ceased breathing. They were injected with lethal doses of typhus and jaundice. They were subjected to “freezing” experiments in icy water or exposed naked in the snow outdoors until they froze to death. Poison bullets were tried out on them as was mustard gas. At the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women hundreds of Polish inmates – the “rabbit girls” they were called – were given gas gangrene wounds while others were subjected to “experiments” in bone grafting. At Dachau and Buchenwald gypsies were selected to see how long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water. Sterilization experiments were carried out on a large scale at several camps by a variety of means on both men and women; for, as an S.S. physician, Dr. Adolf Pokorny, wrote Himmler on one occasion, “the enemy must be not only conquered but exterminated.” If he could not be slaughtered – and the need for slave labor toward the end of the war made that practice questionable, as we have seen – then he could be prevented from propagating. In fact Dr. Pokorny told Himmler he thought he had found just the right means, the plant Caladium seguinum, which, he said, induced lasting sterility.
The thought alone [the good doctor wrote the S.S. Fuehrer] that the three million Bolsheviks now in German captivity could be sterilized, so that they would be available for work but precluded from propagation, opens up the most far-reaching perspectives.
Another German doctor who had ”far-reaching perspectives” was Professor August Hirt, head of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Strasbourg. His special field was somewhat different from those of the others and he explained it in a letter at Christmas time of 1941 to S.S. Lieutenant General Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s adjutant.
We have large collections of skulls of almost all races and peoples at
our disposal. Of the Jewish race, however, only very few specimens of skulls are available . . . The war in the East now presents us with the opportunity to overcome this deficiency. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik commissars, who represent the prototype of the repulsive, but characteristic, subhuman, we have the chance now to obtain scientific material.
Professor Hirt did not want the skulls of “Jewish-Bolshevik commissars” already dead. He proposed that the heads of these persons first be measured while they were alive. Then-
Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head should not be damaged, the physician will sever the head from the body and will forward it . . . in a hermetically sealed tin can.
Whereupon Dr. Hirt would go to work, he promised, on further scientific measurements. Himmler was delighted. He directed that Professor Hirt “be supplied with everything needed for his research work.”He was well supplied. The actual supplier was an interesting Nazi individual by the name of Wolfram Sievers, who spent considerable time on the witness stand at the main Nuremberg trial and at the subsequent “Doctors’ Trial,” in the latter of which he was a defendant. Sievers, a former bookseller, had risen to be a colonel of the S.S. and executive secretary of the Ahnenerbe, the Institute for Research into Heredity, one of the ridiculous “cultural” organizations established by Himmler to pursue one of his many lunacies. It had, according to Sievers, fifty “research branches,” of which one was called the “Institute for Military Scientific Research,” which Sievers also headed. He was a shifty-eyed, Mephistophelean-looking fellow with a thick, ink-black beard and at Nuremberg he was dubbed the “Nazi Bluebeard,” after the famous French killer. Like so many other characters in this history, he kept a meticulous diary, and this and his correspondence, both of which survived, contributed to his gallows end.
By June 1943 Sievers had collected at Auschwitz the men and women who were to furnish the skeletons for the “scientific measurements” of Professor Dr. Hirt at the University of Strasbourg. “A total of 115 persons, including 79 Jews, 30 Jewesses, 4 ’Asiatics’ and 2 Poles were processed,” Sievers reported, requesting the S.S. main office in Berlin for transportation for them from Auschwitz to the Natzweiler concentration camp near Strasbourg. The British cross-examiner at Nuremberg inquired as to the meaning of “processing.”
“Anthropological measurements,” Sievers replied.
“Before they were murdered they were anthropologically measured? That was all there was to it, was it?”
“And casts were taken,” Sievers added.
What followed was narrated by S.S. Captain Josef Kramer, himself a veteran exterminator from Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau and other camps and who achieved fleeting fame as the “Beast of Belsen” and was condemned to death by a British court at Lueneburg.
Professor Hirt of the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute told me of the
prisoner convoy en route from Auschwitz. He said these persons were to be killed by poison gas in the gas chamber of the Natzweiler camp, their bodies then to be taken to the Anatomical Institute for his disposal. He gave me a bottle containing about half a pint of salts – I think they were cyanide salts – and told me the approximate dosage I would have to use to poison the arriving inmates from Auschwitz. Early in August 1943, I received eighty inmates who were to be killed with the gas Hirt had given me. One night I went to the gas chamber in a small car with about fifteen women this first time. I told the women they had to go into the chamber to be disinfected. 1 did not tell them, however, that they were to be gassed.
By this time the Nazis had perfected the technique.
With the help of a few S.S. men [Kramer continued] I stripped the women completely and shoved them into the gas chamber when they were stark naked.
When the door closed they began to scream. I introduced a certain amount of salt through a tube . . . and observed through a peephole what happened inside the room. The women breathed for about half a minute before they fell to the floor. After I had turned on the ventilation I opened the door. I found the women lying lifeless on the floor and they were covered with excrements.
Captain Kramer testified that he repeated the performance until all eighty inmates had been killed and turned the bodies over to Professor Hirt, “as requested.” He was asked by his interrogator what his feelings were at the time, and he gave a memorable answer that gives insight into a phenomenon in the Third Reich that has seemed so elusive of human understanding.
When the door closed they began to scream. I introduced a certain amount of salt through a tube . . . and observed through a peephole what happened inside the room. The women breathed for about half a minute before they fell to the floor. After I had turned on the ventilation I opened the door. I found the women lying lifeless on the floor and they were covered with excrements.
I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received an order to kill the eighty inmates in the way I already told you.
That, by the way, was the way I was trained.
Another witness testified as to what happened next. He was Henry Herypierre, a Frenchman who worked in the Anatomical Institute at Strasbourg as Professor Hirt’s laboratory assistant until the Allies arrived.
The first shipment we received was of the bodies of thirty women . . .
These thirty female bodies arrived still warm. The eyes were wide open and shining. They were red and bloodshot and were popping from their sockets- There were also traces of blood about the nose and mouth. No rigor mortis was evident.
Herypierre suspected that they had been done to death and secretly copied down their prison numbers which were tattooed on their left arms. Two more shipments of fifty-six men arrived, he said, in exactly the same condition. They were pickled in alcohol under the expert direction of Dr. Hirt. But the professor was a little nervous about the whole thing. “Peter,” he said to Herypierre, “if you can’t keep your trap shut, you’ll be one of them.”Professor Dr. Hirt went about his work nonetheless. According to the correspondence of Sievers, the professor severed the heads and, as he wrote, “assembled the skeleton collection which was previously nonexistent.” But there were difficulties and after hearing them described by Dr. Hirt-Sievers himself had no expert medical or anatomical knowledge – the chief of the Ahnenerbe reported them to Himmler on September 5, 1944.
In view of the vast amount of scientific research involved, the job
of reducing the corpses has not yet been completed. This requires
some time for 80 corpses.
And time was running out. Advancing American and French troops were
nearing Strasbourg. Hirt requested “directives as to what should be done with
the collection.”
The corpses can be stripped of the flesh and thereby rendered
unidentifiable [Sievers reported to headquarters on behalf of Dr.
Hirt]. This would mean, however, that at least part of the whole
work had been done for nothing and that this unique collection would
be lost to science, since it would be impossible to make plaster casts
afterwards.
The skeleton collection as such is inconspicuous. The flesh parts
could be declared as having been left by the French at the time we
took over the Anatomical Institute and would be turned over for
cremating. Please advise me which of the following three proposals
is to be carried out: 1. The collection as a whole to be preserved;
2. The collection to be dissolved in part; 3. The collection to be
completely dissolved.
“Why were you wanting to deflesh the bodies, witness?” the British prosecutor
asked in the stillness of the Nuremberg courtroom. “Why were you
suggesting that the blame should be passed on to the French?”“As a layman I could have no opinion in this matter,” the “Nazi Bluebeard” replied. “I merely transmitted an inquiry from Professor Hirt. I had nothing to do with the murdering of these people. I simply carried through the function of a mailman.”
“You were the post office,” the prosecutor rejoined, “another of these distinguished Nazi post offices, were you?”
It was a leaky defense offered by many a Nazi at the trials and on this occasion, as on others, the prosecution nailed it.
The captured S.S. files reveal that on October 26, 1944, Sievers reported that “the collection in Strasbourg has been completely dissolved in accordance with the directive. This arrangement is for the best in view of the whole situation.”
Herypierre later described the attempt – not altogether successful – to hide the traces.
In September, 1944, the Allies made an advance on Belfort, and
Professor Hirt ordered Bong and Heir Maier to cut up these bodies
and have them burned in the crematory . . . I asked Herr Maier
the next day whether he had cut up all the bodies, but Herr Bong
replied; “We couldn’t cut up all the bodies, it was too much work.
We left a few bodies in the storeroom.”
They were discovered there by an Allied team when units of the U.S. Seventh
Army, with the French 2nd Armored Division in the lead, entered Strasbourg a
month later.Not only skeletons but human skins were collected by the masters of the New Order though in the latter case the pretense could not be made that the cause of scientific research was being served. The skins of concentration camp prisoners, especially executed for this ghoulish purpose, had merely decorative value. They made, it was found, excellent lamp shades, several of which were expressly fitted up for Frau Use Koch, the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald and nicknamed by the inmates the “Bitch of Buchenwald.” Tattooed skins appear to have been the most sought after, A German inmate, Andreas Pfaffenberger, deposed at Nuremberg on this.
. . . All prisoners with tattooing on them were ordered to report to
the dispensary . . . After the prisoners had been examined the ones
with the best and most artistic specimens were killed by injections.
The corpses were then turned over to the pathological department
where the desired pieces of tattooed skin were detached from the
bodies and treated further. The finished products were turned over
to Koch’s wife, who had them fashioned into lamp shades, and other
ornamental household articles.
One piece of skin which apparently struck Frau Koch’s fancy had the words
“Haensel and Gretel” tattooed on it.At another camp, Dachau, the demand for such skins often outran the supply. A Czech physician prisoner, Dr. Frank Blaha, testified at Nuremberg as to that.
Sometimes we would not have enough bodies with good skin and
Dr. Rascher would say, “All right, you will get the bodies.” The
next day we would receive twenty or thirty bodies of young people.
They would have been shot in the neck or struck on the head, so that
the skin would be uninjured . . . The skin had to be from healthy
prisoners and free from defects.
It was this Dr. Sigmund Rascher who seems to have been responsible for
the more sadistic of the medical experiments in the first place. This horrible
quack had attracted the attention of Himmler, among whose obsessions was the
breeding of more and more superior Nordic offspring, through reports in S.S.
circles that Frau Rascher had given birth to three children after passing the
age of forty-eight, although in truth the Raschers had simply kidnaped them at
suitable intervals from an orphanage.In the spring of 1941, Dr. Rascher, who was attending a special medical course at Munich given by the Luftwaffe, had a brain storm. On May 15, 1941, he wrote Himmler about it. He had found to his horror that research on the effect of high altitudes on flyers was at a standstill because “no tests with human material had yet been possible as such experiments are very dangerous and nobody volunteers for them.”
Can you make available two or three professional criminals for these
experiments . . . The experiments, by which the subjects can of
course die, would take place with my co-operation.
The S.S. Fuehrer replied within a week that “prisoners will, of course, be
made available gladly for the high-flight research.”They were, and Dr. Rascher went to work. The results may be seen from his own reports and from those of others, which showed up at Nuremberg and at the subsequent trial of the S.S. doctors.
Dr. Rascher’s own findings are a model of scientific jargon. For the highaltitude tests he moved the Air Force’s decompression chamber at Munich to the nearby Dachau concentration camp where human guinea pigs were readily available. Air was pumped out of the contraption so that the oxygen and air pressure at high altitudes could be simulated. Dr. Rascher then made his observations, of which the following one is typical.
The third test was without oxygen at the equivalent of 29,400 feet
altitude conducted on a 37-year-old Jew in good general condition.
Respiration continued for 30 minutes. After four minutes the TP
[test person] began to perspire and roll his head.
After five minutes spasms appeared; between the sixth and tenth
minute respiration increased in frequency, the TP losing consciousness.
From the eleventh to the thirtieth minute respiration slowed
down to three inhalations per minute, only to cease entirely at the
end of that period . . . About half an hour after breathing had
ceased, an autopsy was begun.
An Austrian inmate, Anton Pacholegg, who worked in Dr. Rascher’s office,
has described the “experiments” less scientifically.
I have personally seen through the observation window of the decompression
chamber when a prisoner inside would stand a vacuum until
his lungs ruptured . . . They would go mad and pull out their hair
in an effort to relieve the pressure. They would tear their heads and
face with their fingers and nails in an attempt to maim themselves
in their madness. They would beat the walls with their hands and
head and scream in an effort to relieve pressure on their eardrums.
These cases usually ended in the death of the subject.
Some two hundred prisoners were subjected to this experiment before Dr.
Rascher was finished with it. Of these, according to the testimony at the “Doctors’
Trial,” about eighty were killed outright and the remainder executed somewhat
later so that no tales would be told.
This particular research project was finished in May 1942, at which time
Field Marshal Erhard Milch of the Luftwaffe conveyed Goering’s “thanks” to
Himmler for Dr. Rascher’s pioneer experiments. A little later, on October 10,
1942, Lieutenant General Dr. Hippke, Medical Inspector of the Air Force, tendered
to Himmler “in the name of German aviation medicine and research” his
“obedient gratitude” for “the Dachau experiments.” However, he thought, there
was one omission in them. They had not taken into account the extreme cold
which an aviator faces at high altitudes. To rectify this omission the Luftwaffe,
he informed Himmler, was building a decompression chamber “equipped with
full refrigeration and with a nominal altitude of 100,000 feet. Freezing experiments,”
he added, “along different lines are still under way at Dachau.”
Indeed they were. And again Dr. Rascher was in the vanguard. But some
of his doctor colleagues were having qualms. Was it Christian to do what
Dr. Rascher was doing? Apparently a few German Luftwaffe medics were
beginning to have their doubts. When Himmler heard of this he was infuriated
and promptly wrote Field Marshal Milch protesting about the difficulties caused
by “Christian medical circles” in the Air Force. He begged the Luftwaffe Chief
of Staff to release Rascher from the Air Force medical corps so that he could be
transferred to the S.S. He suggested that they find a “non-Christian physician,
who should be honorable as a scientist,” to pass on Dr. Rascher’s valuable
works. In the meantime Himmler emphasized that he
personally assumed the responsibility for supplying asocial individuals
and criminals who deserve only to die from concentration camps
for these experiments.
Dr. Rascher’s “freezing experiments” were of two kinds: first, to see how
much cold a human being could endure before he died; and second, to find
the best means of rewarming a person who still lived after being exposed to
extreme cold. Two methods were selected to freeze a man: dumping him into a
tank of ice water or leaving him out in the snow, completely naked, overnight
during winter. Rascher’s reports to Himmler on his “freezing” and “wanning”
experiments are voluminous; an example or two will give the tenor. One of the
earliest ones was made on September 10, 1942.
The TPs were immersed in water in full flying uniform . . . with
hood. A life jacket prevented sinking. The experiments were conducted
at water temperatures between 36.5 and 53.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
In the first test series the back of the head and the brain stem
were above water. In another series the back of the neck and cerebellum
were submerged. Temperatures as low as 79.5 in the stomach
and 79.7 in the rectum were recorded electrically. Fatalities occurred
only when the medulla and the cerebellum were chilled.
In autopsies of such fatalities large quantities of free blood, up to a
pint, were always found inside the cranial cavity. The heart regularly
showed extreme distention of the right chamber. The TPs in such
tests inevitably died when body temperature had declined to 82.5,
despite all rescue attempts.
These autopsy findings plainly prove the importance of a heated
head and neck protector for the foam suit now in the process of
development.
A table which Dr. Rascher appended covers six “Fatal Cases” and shows the
water temperatures, body temperature on removal from water, body temperature
at death, the length of stay in the water and the time it took the patient
to die. The toughest man endured in the ice water for one hundred minutes,
the weakest for fifty-three minutes.Walter Neff, a camp inmate who served as Dr. Rascher’s medical orderly, furnished the “Doctors’ Trial” with a layman’s description of one water-freezing test.
It was the worst experiment ever made. Two Russian officers were
brought from the prison barracks. Rascher had them stripped and
they had to go into the vat naked. Hour after hour went by, and
whereas usually unconsciousness from the cold set in after sixty minutes
at the latest, the two men in this case still responded fully after
two and a half hours. All appeals to Rascher to put them to sleep
by injection were fruitless. About the third hour one of the Russians
said to the other, ’Comrade, please tell the officer to shoot us.’
The other replied that he expected no mercy from this Fascist dog.
The two shook hands with a ’Farewell, Comrade’ . . . These words
were translated to Rascher by a young Pole, though in a somewhat
different form. Rascher went to his office. The young Pole at once
tried to chloroform the two victims, but Rascher came back at once,
threatening us with his gun . . . The test lasted j. least five hours
before death supervened.
The nominal “chief” of the initial cold-water experiments was a certain Dr.
Holzloehner, Professor of Medicine at the University of Kiel, assisted by a Dr.
Finke, and after working with Rascher for a couple of months they believed
that they had exhausted the experimental possibilities. The three physicians
thereupon drew up a thirty-two-page top-secret report to the Air Force entitled
“Freezing Experiments with Human Beings” and called a meeting of German
scientists at Nuremberg for October 26-27, 1942, to hear and discuss their findings.
The subject of the meeting was “Medical Questions in Marine and Winter
Emergencies.” According to the testimony at the “Doctors’ Trial,” ninety-five
German scientists, including some of the most eminent men in the field, participated,
and though the three doctors left no doubt that a good many human
beings had been done to death in the experiments there were no questions put
as to this and no protests therefore made,Professor Holzloehner and Dr. Finke bowed out of the experiments at this time but the persevering Dr. Rascher carried on alone from October 1942 until May of the following year. He wanted, among other things, to pursue experiments in what he called “dry freezing.” Auschwitz, he wrote to Himmler,
is much better suited for such tests than Dachau because it is colder
there and because the size of the grounds causes less of a stir in the
camp. (The test persons yell when they freeze.)
For some reason the change of locality could not be arranged, so Dr. Rascher
went ahead with his studies at Dachau, praying for some real winter weather.
Thank God, we have had another intense cold snap at Dachau [he
wrote Himmler in the early spring of 1943]. Some people remained
out in the open for 14 hours at 21 degrees, attaining an interior
temperature of 77 degrees, with peripheral frostbite . . .
At the “Doctors’ Trial” the witness Neff again provided a layman’s description
of the “dry-freezing” experiments of his chief.
A prisoner was placed naked on a stretcher outside the barracks in
the evening. He was covered with a sheet, and every hour a bucket
of cold water was poured over him. The test person lay out in the
open like this into the morning. Their temperatures were taken.
Later Dr. Rascher said it was a mistake to cover the subject with
a sheet and to drench him with water . . . In the future the test
persons must not be covered. The next experiment was a test on
ten prisoners who were exposed in turn, likewise naked.
As the prisoners slowly froze, Dr. Rascher or his assistant would record
temperatures, heart action, respiration and so on. The cries of the suffering
often rent the night.
Initially [Neff explained to the court] Rascher forbade these tests to
be made in a state of anesthesia. But the test persons made such
a racket that it was impossible for Rascher to continue these tests
without anesthetic.
The TPs (test persons) were left to die, as Himmler said they deserved to,
in the ice-water tanks or lying naked on the ground outside the barracks at
Dachau on a winter evening. If they survived they were shortly exterminated.
But the brave German flyers and sailors, for whose benefit the experiments were
ostensibly carried out, and who might find themselves ditched in the icy waters
of the Arctic Ocean or marooned in some frozen waste above the Arctic Circle in
Norway, Finland or northern Russia, had to be saved if possible. The inimitable
Dr. Rascher therefore took to performing on his human guinea pigs at Dachau
what he termed “wanning experiments.” What was the best method, he wanted
to know, for warming a frozen man and thus possibly saving his life?Heinrich Himmler, never backward in offering “practical” solutions to his corps of busy scientists, suggested to Rascher that warming by “animal heat” be tried, but at first the doctor did not think much of the idea. “Warming by animal heat – the bodies of animals or women – is much too slow,” he wrote the S.S. chief. But Himmler kept after him.
I am very curious [he wrote Rascher] about the experiments with
animal heat. Personally I believe these experiments may bring the
best and the most sustained results.
Though skeptical, Dr. Rascher was not the man to ignore a suggestion from
the leader of the S.S. He promptly embarked on a series of the most grotesque
“experiments” of all, recording them for posterity in every morbid detail. Four
inmates from the women’s concentration camps at Ravensbrueck were sent to
him at Dachau. However there was something about one of them – they were
classified as prostitutes – that disturbed the doctor and he so reported to his
superiors.
One of the women assigned showed impeccably Nordic racial characteristics
. . . I asked the girl why she had volunteered for brothel
service and she replied, “To get out of the concentration camp.”
When I objected that it was shameful to volunteer as a brothel girl,
I was advised, “Better half a year in a brothel than half a year in
the concentration camp . . . ”
My racial conscience is outraged by the prospect of exposing to
racially inferior concentration camp elements a girl who is outwardly
pure Nordic . . . For this reason I decline to use this girl for my experimental
purposes.
But he used others, whose hair was less fair and the eyes less blue. His
findings were duly reported to Himmler in a report marked “Secret” on February
12,1942.
The test persons were chilled in the familiar way – dressed or undressed
– in cold water at various temperatures . . . Removal from
the water took place at a rectal temperature of 86 degrees.
In eight cases the test persons were placed between two naked women
on a wide bed. The women were instructed to snuggle up to the
chilled person as closely as possible. The three persons were then
covered with blankets . . .
Once the test persons regained consciousness, they never lost it
again, quickly grasping their situation and nestling close to the naked
bodies of the women. The rise of body temperature then proceeded
at approximately the same speed as with test persons warmed by
being swathed in blankets . . . An exception was formed by four
test persons who practiced sexual intercourse between 86 and 89.5
degrees. In these persons, after coitus, a very swift temperature rise
ensued, comparable to that achieved by means of a hot-water bath.
Dr. Rascher found, somewhat to his surprise, that one woman warmed a
frozen man faster than two women.
I attribute this to the fact that in warming by means of one woman
personal inhibitions are avoided and the woman clings more closely
to the chilled person. Here too, return of full consciousness was
notably rapid. In the case of only one person did consciousness fail
to return and only a slight degree of warming was recorded. This test
person died with symptoms of a brain hemorrhage, later confirmed
by autopsy.
Summing up, this murderous hack concluded that warming up a “chilled”
man with women “proceeds very slowly” and that hot baths were more efficacious.
Only test persons [he concluded] whose physical state permitted sexual
intercourse warmed up surprisingly fast and also showed a surprisingly
rapid return of full bodily well-being.
According to the testimony at the “Doctors’ Trial” some four hundred “freezing”
experiments were performed on three hundred persons of whom between
eighty and ninety died directly as a result thereof, and the rest, except for a
few, were bumped off subsequently, some of them having been driven insane.
Dr. Rascher himself, incidentally, was not around to testify at this trial. He
continued his bloody labors on various new projects, too numerous to mention,
until May 1944, when he and his wife were arrested by the S.S. – not for his
murderous “experiments,” it seems, but on the charge that he and his wife had
practiced deceit about how their children came into the world. Such treachery
Himmler, with his worship of German mothers, could not brook – he had sincerely
believed that Frau Rascher had begun to bear her three children at the
age of forty-eight and he was outraged when he learned that she had kidnaped
them. So Dr. Rascher was incarcerated in the political bunker at his familiar
Dachau camp and his wife was carted off to Ravensbrueck, from which the doctor
had procured his prostitutes for the “warming” tests. Neither survived, and
it is believed that Himmler himself, in one of the last acts of his life, ordered
their execution. They might have made awkward witnesses.A number of such awkward witnesses did survive to stand trial. Seven of them were condemned to death and hanged, defending their lethal experiments to the last as patriotic acts which served the Fatherland. Dr. Herta Oberheuser, the only woman defendant at the “Doctors’ Trial,” was given twenty years. She had admitted giving lethal injections to “five or six” Polish women among the hundreds who suffered the tortures of the damned in a variety of “experiments” at Ravensbrueck. A number of doctors, such as the notorious Pokorny, who had wanted to sterilize millions of the enemy, were acquitted. A few were contrite. At a second trial of medical underlings Dr. Edwin Katzenellenbogen, a former member of the faculty of the Harvard Medical School, asked the court for the death sentence. “You have placed the mark of Cain on my forehead,” he exclaimed. “Any physician who committed the crimes I am charged with deserves to be killed.” He was given life imprisonment.
(Footnotes and endnotes have been omitted)
