Child Victims of Nazi Medical Experimentation

A Child’s Lamentation

Jeffrey Daniel Mucha

University of Amsterdam

Master’s Thesis in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

30 June 2017 2

Master’s Thesis I History: Holocaust and Genocide Studies

University of Amsterdam

By: Jeffrey Daniel Mucha

Word count: 19874

Student number: 11314346

Date: 30 June 2017

Adviser: Prof. Dr. Karol Berkhoff

Second Reader: Prof. Dr. Johannes Houwink ten Cate 3

Contents

…As a guinea pig… ...... 4 Abstract ...... 5 …Into the fire… ...... 7 Introduction ...... 7 Conflagration ...... 9 Life Unworthy of Life ...... 9 Nazification of German Medicine ...... 12 Euthanasia and Detachment ...... 13 “The Most Simple Method” ...... 15 Foundations of the Holocaust ...... 16 Incineration ...... 18 The Means to the End ...... 18 Beginnings of Human Experimentation ...... 19 The Case of the AHNENERBE ...... 20 Paradox of Using Sub-Humans for Experiments ...... 24 A Children’s Story ...... 27 Advent Children ...... 27 Ruminations ...... 31 Immolation ...... 33 The “Lucky Ones” ...... 34 The Experience of the Experiments ...... 38 Notes and Measurements ...... 38 The Blood Lab ...... 40 “Dirty Blood” ...... 41 Extended Isolations ...... 42 Reactions to Stimuli ...... 42 Injections ...... 43 Eye Color Experiments ...... 45 Pathogens and Inoculations ...... 45 Psychological Experiments ...... 48 Lamentations ...... 50 …the Broken Dolls… ...... 50 4

The Fate of Newborns ...... 50 The Grievous Experiments ...... 52 Starvation and Child Cannibalism ...... 52 Forced Sex Changes ...... 53 Creating Conjoined Twins ...... 53 Lethal Injections ...... 53 Surgeries Without Anesthesia ...... 55 Mutilation ...... 57 Body Harvesting ...... 58 Conclusion ...... 59 Reflections ...... 59 Bibliography ...... 62

…As a guinea pig…

I was the only one picked that day personally by Mengele and his assistant. They took me to his [laboratory], where I met other children. They were screaming from pain. Black and blue bodies covered with blood. I collapsed from horror and terror and fainted. A bucket of cold water was thrown on me to revive me. As soon as I stood up I was whipped with a leather whip which broke my flesh, then I was told the whipping was a sample of what I would receive if I did not follow instructions and orders. I was used as a guinea pig for medical experiments.1

1 “Mrs. M”. Testimony for The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. She requested that her real name not be used. http://www.claimscon.org/about/history/closed-programs/medical-experiments/personal- statements-from-victims/ last accessed: 6/22/17 5

Abstract

During the Nazi era, some 1.5 million children were murdered. This number includes over one million Jewish children, along with hundreds of thousands of German children with various disabilities, tens of thousands of Sinti and Roma children, as well as thousands of others deemed Lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy of life).2 Although virtually all of the children were killed outright by bullets or gas chambers, or by starvation and privation in the ghettos and concentration camps, a select few, however, were chosen for medical experimentation. While much has been researched and written about the Nazi doctors themselves and their experiments, little attention has been paid to the child victims of Nazi medical research. This thesis seeks to answer the questions of how and why children were selected as human test subjects, and whether this represents a nadir in humane medical practices. Further, this thesis will examine the experiences of such medical experiments from the perspectives of the children and what they understood to be happening to them. To answer the questions how and why I will discuss the development of human testing. For the scope of this paper I will be following the vein as it pertains to the ethics of human medical testing progressing from animals to adult males to females and finally into experimenting on children. To shed light on the experiences of the children I will discuss their suffering for each procedure and experiment as a narrative created from the testimonies of the survivor themselves.

2 Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi doctors: Medical killing and the psychology of genocide. Basic Books, 2000. Pg. 46. As translated and cited from Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebebsunwerten Lebens: Ihr Mass und ihre Form (Leipzig F. Meiner, 1920). On Binding and Hoche see Ernst Klee, “Euthana sie” im NS-Staat: Die "Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 1983), pp. 19-25. 6

Part One

Human Experimentation

7

…Into the fire…

Introduction Much has been written regarding the medical experiments conducted in the concentration camps on adult male, and female, prisoners. Likewise, the experiments conducted on twins in Auschwitz are generally well known amongst Holocaust historians and Nazi history “buffs.” The story of the doctors and their experiments are well documented, as well as the development of informed consent and medical human rights. While there are a few excellent books and studies conducted about experiments on children, there has not been much research done into the experiences of the children themselves. Indeed, historian Paul Weindling comments on this dark area in Holocaust research: “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 matter of historical concern…but historians have rarely engaged with the experiences and life histories of victims.”3 This thesis will tell the story of the development and implementation of using children as medical testing subjects, and what they experienced. I will use the testimonies of the survivors to narrate their stories from their perspective, and what they experienced.

Chapter One is entitled, Conflagration, which means a great flame, or fire. This title was chosen as a term to embody the rise of Nazi racial ideology and its perversion of the traditional moral, ethical, and humane medical practices. The debasement of human life caused by the rise in popularity of the new sciences of race and natural law resulted in the notion of “life unworthy of life” being incorporated into official policy. Beginning with deformed newborns, the Nazis would murder thousands of young children. This notion of mercy killing, called euthanasia, would lay the foundations of the methods of mass murder later implemented during the Holocaust. The influence of this program on the radicalization of medical practices is important to the understanding of the plight of child victims of Nazi medical experimentation by highlighting the utter detachment from the medical welfare of children. Those individuals whose lives were deemed “unworthy,” and served no purpose to the state, were the most vulnerable of society – newborns and deformed children.

3 Weindling, Paul. Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments: Science and Suffering in the Holocaust. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 5. 8

For Chapter Two, the title Incineration -- to burn completely with fire – was chosen to convey the destruction of the traditional norms of medicine, from curative to murder. This chapter will illustrate the consumption of moral values as “scientific” experimentation on human beings became acceptable, and even desirable. This chapter follows the vein of the progression from animal testing to human experimentation using the translated transcripts of the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial. The ends of implementing the biological vision of Nazi ideology would be achieved through means of establishing medical and scientific legitimacy. The means were the specially created institutions designed to handle the processing and approval of applications for human test subjects. This chapter will also discuss the medical perpetrators and their aspirations requiring human beings. Further, those involved from the Nazi physicians conducting experiments to those responsible for the organizing and management of human test subjects will be discussed. Furthermore, this chapter will briefly address the paradoxical nature of gathering results meant for the “super-humans” derived from experimentation on “sub-humans.”

Chapter Three is titled, A Children’s Story. This chapter will further follow the progression of human experimentation as children are slowly brought into the fold. The story of the children will answer the questions of when children were first used as test subjects, how they were selected, where the experiments occurred, and why children were ultimately favored as prime candidates for medical experimentation.

Chapter Four is entitled, Immolation, which means to be annihilated by fire, and is appropriate because it reflects how the children likely viewed the changing world through their experiences of the experiments. This chapter will narrate the story of the children through the stories and interviews of those fortunate enough to survive. The non-lethal experiments will be discussed, and the child’s experience narrating the specific experiments, procedures, and testing.

Chapter Five is titled, Lamentations. A lamentation is a passionate expression of grief, or sorrow. This chapter will narrate the grievous and deadly medical experiments conducted, of which, the vast majority of children did not survive. These experiments range from privation, to surgeries, to lethal injections, to body harvesting. The torment of the child victims cry out in this chapter as they share the horrific experiences.

9

Conflagration

Chapter One

--If one imagines…a battlefield covered with thousands of dead youths…and then our institutes for idiots and their care…one is most appalled by…the sacrifice of the best of humanity while the best care is lavished on life of negative worth.4

Life Unworthy of Life At the turn of the 20th century Germany was one of the world leaders in medicine. And using arguments advanced in the 1920’s, the Nazis murdered in the name of euthanasia, “mercy death”, and enlisted within their ranks professionals and academics from across a range of scientific disciplines. The new science of eugenics was being argued and debated across the world as the way forward for civilized man. These ideas were initially well intentioned and logical as a notion of limiting heredity diseases and naturally producing the healthiest offspring possible. This notion, however, would be taken to its logical extreme under Nazi radicalization. Indeed, many early proponents of eugenics who had once denounced killing would eventually come to support murder during in wartime, “for the good of the Fatherland.” The first victims were the most vulnerable – newborns and young children with severe birth defects.”5

From the beginning, German medical research had two primary objectives: the first was to cure, prevent, and ideally eradicate diseases impeding military operations; the second was to enhance the overall fitness and fertility of the German race for preparation for the vast resettlement schemes.6 For the latter, such a project had been discussed from the time of Darwin’s theories and the dawn of “scientific racism” amongst intellectuals beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Darwinian evolutionary theory posited that only the strongest and healthiest of organisms would survive and prosper. The natural world followed a simple law: only the strongest survive. Thus, for a species to prosper

4 Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebebsunwerten Lebens: Ihr Mass und ihre Form (Leipzig F. Meiner, 1920). On Binding and Hoche see Ernst Klee, “Euthana sie” im NS-Staat: Die "Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 1983), pp. 19-25 5 Bloomfield, Sara J. Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Museum 2004). Pg 10 6 Weindling, Victims and Survivors, 5. 10

and survive, the offspring would need to be as strong as possible. This theory was applied to the “social organism.”

Integral to the development of the new ranges of medicine was the idea of the Volk as an organic, social organism. The people, or nation, were inherently endowed, not only with natural biological fitness, but also with a racial and cultural imminence. Extrapolating these natural laws transformed the collective group into an “organism” whose “life” must be preserved at all costs, even in such ways that transcend individual fate.7 Darwinism reinforced the importance of health and fitness as objective criterion for measuring a species’ likelihood to triumph in the struggle for survival. Thus, Social Darwinism offered “objective” criteria for evaluating prosperity and welfare in the struggle to survive in an urban and commercial life. Naturally, Darwinism had a popular appeal, and at the same time it offered to expand the scope of medicine.8

The medicalizing of racial science gave the legitimization for radical reformist railing against the modern industrialized world which they believed was thoroughly corrupt. The horrors of mud and blood from the First World War left a generation bitter from its soul-destroying mechanization of destruction of human life and its existence. Life in the new nation was held in contempt as being immoral and decadent, being the result from the degradation of traditional values by the growing working class. Youthful dissidents began to scheme solutions for the degenerative effects of modern civilization. Moral and political remedies would be applied. However, to achieve a truly comprehensive change, it would be necessary to purify the cultural and scientific structures that had also been so tarnished by industrialization.9 Thereby, biological health and racial hygiene became a key component of the reformation strategy.

In 1920, two distinguished German professors, Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding, published a book entitled The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life. In the book, the authors carefully and logical argued, in numbered-paragraph form, that “unworthy life” was not only the “incurably ill, but also large segments of the mentally ill, the feebleminded, and retarded and deformed children.”10 In doing so, the authors professionalized and medicalized the entire concept and stressed the therapeutic goal of that

7 Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 46. 8 Weindling, Paul. Health, Race and German politics between national unification and Nazism, 1870-1945. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pg. 25 9 Ibid., 62. 10 Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebebsunwerten Lebens: Ihr Mass und ihre Form (Leipzig F. Meiner, 1920). On Binding and Hoche see Ernst Klee, “Euthana sie” im NS-Staat: Die "Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 1983), pp. 19-25. 11

concept: destroying life unworthy of life is “purely a healing treatment” and a “healing work.”11 The notion that some life was unworthy certainly received influence from the debasement of human lives during The Great War.

The value assigned to human life had been drastically changed due to the waste and squander of the senseless slaughter in the trenches. The authors, Binding and Hoche, posit their argument for the relative value of worthy life, and unworthy, to the nation in a poignant and patriotic contrast to the devastating losses of ‘fit’ Germans during the war: “If one imagines…a battlefield covered with thousands of dead youths…and then our institutes for idiots and their care…one is most appalled by…the sacrifice of the best of humanity while the best care is lavished on life on negative worth.” In 1920 the authors were arguing of what use these invalids were for society when their strongest offspring had all died fighting for the nation; at no time did the authors mention race.12

There was considerable advocacy elsewhere of “mercy killing,” including in the United States.13 Anyone trained in American medicine at the time would have had personal experience of doctors and staff collaborating in the death of acutely mentally and physically impaired patients, usually children. However, those practices had been restrained by legal limitations and strong public outcry, however unlike Nazi Germany, they did not developed into a systematic program of mass murder.14

Likewise, in Germany there was a strong backlash against the euthanasia of adults, but curiously, not of children. Also, there were codified regulations regarding medical informed consent and human experimentation. The Final Circular of the Reich Minister of the Interior concerning Guidelines for New Therapy and Human Experimentation was issued on 28 February 1931 and it recognized the necessity for clinical human trials albeit within limits.15 Specifically, section (c): “experimentation involving children or young persons under 18 years of age shall be prohibited if it in any way endangers the child or young person.”16 These laws and public opposition would reverse themselves through the process of Nazifying the medical profession. In fact, a small number of psychiatric institutional orderlies even said that, in

11 Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 46. 12 Bloomfield, Deadly Medicine, 128. 13 See Foster Kennedy, “The Problem of Social Control of the Congenital Defective Education Sterilization Euthanasia,” American Journal of Psychiatry 99 (1942):13-16. Kennedy was rebutted by Leo Kanner, the leading American child psychiatrist of the time who did, however, favor sterilization. “Exoneration of the Feebleminded,” American Journal of Psychiatry 99 (1942):17-22 14 Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 46. 15 Weindling, Victims and Survivors, 18. 16 German Guidelines on Human Experimentation 1931. “reichsrundschreiben_1931.pdf”. artnscience.us. available online: http://artnscience.us/Med_Ethics/reichsrundschreiben_1931.pdf. Last accessed 28 June 2017 12

theory, they would not object to the state covertly killing their children, ironically foreshadowing later Nazi practice.17

Nazification of German Medicine In the late 18th century, the German anatomist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, had the idea of measuring skull form. He used his findings to establish the existence of five main archetypes of man’s origin: the Caucasian, Mongoloid, Ethiopian, American, and Malayan, which he regarded as descended from a single human type.18 Further, he postulated that these “races” were adaptable in response to varying influences, and could thus be altered by human impetus. Among each of these were species, or races, which held respective characteristics, were groups which ranged from “inferior” or “superior.” One hundred years later a Hamburg journalist, Wilhelm Marr, coined the term “anti-Semitism” to convey the idea that Jews were a distinct Semitic race.19 This rift between the civilized European cultures and the other “primitive” societies was exacerbated by the ethnological studies of language. Those of the Semitic languages were postulated to be inferior to those of the Indo-Germanic family of languages. All the latter were called Aryan, meaning “noble” in Sanskrit.20 The Aryan people were now seen as a distinctly superior “organism” whose vitality must be purified and protected; the individual would be acquiescent to the collective. Individuality was removed from the moral sphere and redefined in scientific terms with the individual subsumed in a “race.”21 The historian, Robert Lifton, identifies five stages through which the Nazis transgressed in their pursuit of the principle of “life unworthy of life.” Coercive sterilization was the first. Then followed the killing of “impaired” children in hospitals; and then killing of “impaired” adults, mostly collected from mental hospitals, in centers specially equipped with carbon monoxide gas. This project was extended (in the same killing centers) to “impaired” inmates of concentration camps, and, finally, to the mass killings, mostly of Jews, in the extermination camps themselves.22 While most of these stages are beyond the scope of this thesis, the stages of killing children highlights the lack of moral value held by the Nazis regarding a child’s life.

17 Bloomfield, Deadly Medicine, 129. 18 Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 50. 19 Ibid., 58. 20 Ibid., 255-61 21 Ibid., Pg 49 22 Lifton, Nazi Doctors. 21. 13

Euthanasia and Detachment To implement the purification of the Volk, it was necessary to create a registry of all “unworthy” life. Thus, on 18 August 1939, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Diseases was created, as part of the health administration, to function as a collection center for data on “deformed etc. newborns.”23 It was not long before the Reich Committee began organizing the killing of handicapped infants in so-called “Pediatric Departments.” The directive for the Reich Committee stated that, “for the clarification of scientific questions in the field of congenital malformation and mental retardation, the earliest possible registration was required for all children under three years of age in whom any of the following ‘serious hereditary diseases’ were ‘suspected’: idiocy and mongolism (especially when associated with blindness and deafness); microcephaly; hydrocephaly; malformation of all kinds, especially of limbs, head, and spinal column; and paralysis, including spastic conditions.”24 By doctors reporting disabilities to the governmental department, the Reich Committee began to make their lists of children to be killed. However, the reports took the form of questionnaires that originated in the Reich Health Ministry. The wording of the questionnaires and the lack of a traditional medical history led many physicians and staff to assume, at least at first, that affected children would merely be registered for statistical purposes.25

From the beginning, this program circumvented regular administrative channels and was associated directly with Hitler himself. The first “mercy death” of the entire “euthanasia project was the petition of killing an infant named “Knauer,” born blind, with one leg and part of one arm missing, and apparently an ‘idiot.’26 This paved the way for official requests and it seemed easier and more “natural” to begin with the very young.27

The process was streamlined and rather short. The Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care which was located at Tiergartenstrasse, Number 4 in Berlin, became cryptically and colloquially known as the T4 program. After receiving the questionnaires from local physicians regarding disabled children, three central medical experts would make their either-or judgments. Their decision was

23 Aly, Gotz, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross. Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. Translated by Belinda Cooper (Baltimore, 1994), 36. 24 Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 52/ 25 Ibid., 52. 26 Ibid., 50. 27 Ibid., 51. 14

made solely by the basis of the questionnaires without examining the children or even reading their medical records. On the form with the names of the three doctors were three columns under the word “treatment,” that is, killing the child. If an expert decided upon ‘treatment’ he put a plus sign (+) in the left column. If he decided against killing the child, he put a minus sign (-) in the middle column. If he was uncertain then he put a question mark (?), and then initialed his opinion. The same form was passed along in sequence to the three experts. A unanimous opinion was necessary for a child to be killed, which was generally encouraged.28 When a decision for killing was not unanimous, these children were sent for observation to the same children’s unit where the killing was done. This process was referred to as obtaining an “expert opinion.” This arrangement also encouraged a decision for “treatment.” The units where the killing was done were parts of the children’s institutions whose chiefs and prominent doctors were known to be politically reliable and ‘positive’ towards the Reich Committee’s goals. These centers were euphemistically referred to as “Reich Committee Institutions,” “Children’s Special Institutions,” or even “Therapeutic Convalescence Institutions.” 29 In reality, there was no difference amongst these establishments. The children selected for “special treatment” would, purportedly, receive the best and most modern therapy available.30 However, the fact of the matter was that they were starved to death, subjected to fatal injections, and experimented on. The first “special care unit” was at the Brandenburg clinic in Görden, and along with approximately twenty other such facilities, murdered several thousand children.31 These child-killing clinics became resources for experimentation and research on the murdered child’s body parts.32 This would be the beginning of using children’s bodies for medical and scientific experimentation. One of the most significant aspects of the whole process of the T4 program was that it was structured to diffuse individual responsibility. In the entire sequence, from reporting the child’s case by midwives or doctors, to the institutional bureaucracy of managing the reports, to expert opinions regarding “treatment,” to the killing of the child at the Reich Committee institution, there was at no point a sense of personal responsibility for, or even involvement in, the murder of another human being.33 This

28 Ibid., 53. 29 Ibid., 53. 30 Ibid., 54. 31 Weindling, Victims and Survivors, 36. 32Ibid., 37. 33 Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 55. 15

departmentalization was commonplace amongst Nazi hierarchies and served well to expand the scope of the killing program.

“The Most Simple Method” Before being killed, children were generally kept for a few weeks in the institution in order to convey the impression that they were being given some form of therapy. The killing was usually done with luminal tablets dissolved in water and given to the child to drink over a few days until the they slipped into a coma and passed away.34 One doctor commented that, “If one does not know what is going on, he [the child] is sleeping. One really has to be let in on it to know that…he really is being killed and sedated. And with these sedatives…the child sleeps.”35 According to the reasoning of the time, the case for killing children seemed somehow justifiable, whereas killing the mentally ill adults was viewed definitely as murder. The idea of being sedated, and falling asleep, and going gently into the “good night” sounds humane; however, this would not be the case.36 As the age range of the euthanasia program expanded, older children were bought into these children’s care institutions. Former child patients later described these care centers as a “cruel, even sadistic institutional environment, [wherein] corporal punishment for misbehavior and electric shocks for bed wetting [were administered.]”37 This suffering was certainly unnecessary as the children were to be put to death anyway. Of particular notoriety was Dr. Hermann Pfannmüller, the senior psychiatrist and director of the institution at Eglfing-Haar. As per one account, he held up a starving, nearly dead three- year-old child by the legs and declared, laughing: “This is the most simple method.”38 In the fall of 1939, a non-medical personnel visited an important Reich Committee institution, where the director Dr. Pfannmüller had developed a policy of starving the designated children rather than wasting medication on them. He gave this account of what he witnessed, I remember the gist of the following general remarks by Pfannmüller: These creatures (he meant the children) naturally represent for me as a National Socialist only a burden for the healthy body of our Volk. We do not kill (he could have here used a euphemistic expression for this word kill) with poison,

34 Ibid., 55. 35 Ibid., 57. 36 Thomas, Dylan. Do Not Go Gently into That Good Night, 1947. Available online: www.poets.org, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night. Last accessed 29 June 2017 37 Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 56. 38 Ibid.,119-20. 16

injections, etc.; then the foreign press and certain gentlemen in Switzerland would only have new inflammatory material. No, our method is much simpler and more natural, as you see. With these words, he pulled, with the help of a ... nurse, a child from its little bed. While he then exhibited the child like a dead rabbit, he asserted with a knowing expression and a cynical grin: For this one it will take two to three more days. The picture of this fat, grinning man, in his fleshy hand the whimpering skeleton, surrounded by other starving children, is still vivid in my mind. The murderer explained further then, that sudden withdrawal of food was not employed, rather gradual decrease of the rations. A lady who was also part of the tour asked — her outrage suppressed with difficulty — whether a quicker death with injections, etc., would not at least be more merciful. Pfannmüller then praised his methods again as more practical in view of the foreign press. The openness with which Pfannmüller announced the above-mentioned method of treatment is explicable to me only as a result of cynicism or clumsiness [Tölpelhaftigkeit]. Pfannmüller also did not hide the fact that among the children to be murdered ... were also children who were not mentally ill, namely children of Jewish parents.39

Foundations of the Holocaust Inevitably, the net cast for killing broadened as the age range for the children increased. Further, many conditions not originally listed were added to encompass even the most limited impairments to those simply designated as “juvenile delinquents.” Jewish children were caught in the net simply for being Jewish. After 1941, Hitler officially ordered the end of the euthanasia program. However, the killing of children continued and even increased. It is estimated that five thousand children were murdered.40 The Nazi regime practiced and perfected their means of mass murder through the T4 program. In fact, the original commandants of the extermination camps Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka came from the T4 and were on its payroll.41 The dispersion of responsibility further served to alleviate apprehension regarding the murder of children at the hands of the institutional doctors. One doctor noted his learned sense of helplessness

39 Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 61-2. As quoted from Lehner testimony, cited in Klee, “Euthanasie” [3], pp. 88-89 40 Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 55. 41 Aly, Gotz, Cleansing the Fatherland, 23. 17

within the process by commenting that, ‘these children were already marked for killing on their transfer reports, so I did not even bother to examine them.”42 Indeed, whatever examinations he performed were perfunctory since he did not have the authority to question the judgment of the three-man panel of experts. In the pursuit of racial hygiene and purity of the Volk, the Nazi medical killers carefully planned and covertly executed an operation with specific objectives, and succeeded in murdering thousands of disabled children. Moreover, in this process the Nazi regime also pioneered the techniques and methods necessary for the murder of millions in the Holocaust later to come.43 Perhaps most poignantly, the singular fact remains that numerous German families were prepared to accept the murder of their closest relatives without protest; in fact, they accepted it with approval. This laid the moral and ethical foundations for the policies of genocide. If people did not protest even when their own relatives were murdered, they could hardly be expected to object to the murder of minority groups such as Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs.44 Once the moral inhibitions towards the sanctity of human life were lifted new possibilities opened, such as using human beings for medical and scientific experimentation.

42 Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 55. 43 Bloomfield, Deadly Medicine, 152. 44 Aly, Gotz, Cleansing the Fatherland, 93 18

Incineration

Chapter Two

– “These experiments revealed nothing which civilized medicine can use. It was indeed ascertained that phenol or gasoline injected intravenously will kill a man inexpensively and within sixty seconds. This and other ‘advances’ are all in the field of ‘thanatology’. Apart from these deadly fruits, the experiments were not only criminal but a scientific failure.”45 -- Brigadier General Telford Taylor

The Means to the End Racial-biological science was central to the tenants of National Socialism, indeed its very foundations. Therefore, the philosophy of medicine within the Nazi state was to be promoted and incentivized, with the aim of advancing the field at all costs as. The radical racial theories professed by the Nazi elite needed to be validated and proved: Nazi ideology sought evidence to show the differences amongst human species. However, medical practices at the time were inhibited by rules regarding humane treatment and human experimentation. This would change slowly through direct involvement from Hitler and Himmler, the SS, through the creation of new government departments, and through the doctors themselves.

Hitler took personal interest in using human beings as test subjects, as did Himmler and the SS, with their unlimited resources of human beings. Dr. Karl Gebhardt, Heinrich Himmler’s personal physician and Chief Surgeon on the Staff of the Reich during the war, said,

Hitler approved of the idea to carry out medical experiments upon people because he considered It important to the state. The moment a doctor began an experiment he was protected by law. Hitler thought, as did Himmler, that concentration camp prisoners could not simply be left undisturbed while soldiers

45 WWIIPublicDomain. War Crimes Trials: Case No. 1 (Medical Case), Nuremberg, Germany, 12/10/1946. Filmed 12/10/1946. YouTube video, 10:40. Posted 16 October 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwGgro9zqrY. Last accessed 6 June 2017 19

were dying at the front and their wives and children suffered air attacks and bombardments. The doctor who carried out experiments was not subject to sanctions, on the contrary, the doctor who refused an order to perform an experiment was punished…46

Indeed, the ends were to justify the means. That is, the purification of the Aryan race would be accomplished through the eradication of debilitating diseases and abnormalities, and the elimination of all undesirable groups.47 The “means” by which the Nazis sought were not constricted by any moral or ethical conundrums. The bodies of human test subjects would be the foundation for the new Nazi state lain by the medical and scientific professions. During his famous speech in Posen, Himmler underscored his conviction with these chilling words: “That is how I would like to indoctrinate this SS, and, I believe, have indoctrinated, as one of the holiest laws of the future: our concern, our duty, is to our people, and to our blood.”48 In the introduction of the report of the Medical Case of the Nuremburg Trials, it is further stated that the primary abettor of the medical experiments was the SS: “This society [the SS] exists to promote the genealogical and biological research and the dissemination of Nazi racial theories. It is believed to have had some connection with medical experiments on concentrations camp inmates at KL Natzweiller.”49 50

Beginnings of Human Experimentation The introduction on the report for the Medical Case to the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) reads:

“It must be stated at the beginning that there was no overall organization dealing with this work, probably because of the need for complete secrecy. We

46 Hoedeman, Paul. Hitler or Hippocrates: Medical Experiments and Euthanasia in the Third Reich. (1991), 55. 47 Ibid., 55 48 Himmler, Heinrich. “Heinrich Himmler's Posen Speech from 04.10.1943”. Translation of Document No. 1919-PS, Nuremberg Trial. Translated by Carlos Porter. www.codoh.com. Available online: https://codoh.com/library/document/891/. 49 “Case 1: ‘The Medical Case’”. CINFO Report No. 5. United Nations War Crimes Commission (Research Office). June 1946. Page 2. From The Wiener Library, London, UK. War crimes trials: Document transcripts and other papers. Item Reference number: 1208/1. Accessed 1-8 June, 2017 50 The experiments conducted at the concentration camp Natzweiller involved adult test subjects, and therefore is beyond the scope of this thesis. However, they do highlight the complicity of the SS in delivering human beings for medical trials. 20

also attract the attention of the reader to the reason why the SS was doing this work. It was the only organization in Germany which could produce human guinea pigs in unlimited quantities. Very likely many party organizations and individual scientists would have liked to have done this work on their own (some actually did, in fact), but eventually they were forced to go to the SS for help. This was given gladly, of course, but on the condition that it should be done under the auspices of the SS, which wanted to take all the credit for any scientific or achievements that could result from this work.”51 The progression from animal testing to human testing can be traced through the creation of new government departments such as the Ahnenerbe, through personal correspondence between Himmler and many physicians, and through the monopoly of the SS on human test subjects.

The Case of the AHNENERBE The Ahnenerbe, known as the Ancestral Heritage Society, was originally founded by Himmler in Berlin on 1 July 1935 and assumed a significant financial and ideological role in the conduct of experiments in concentration camps. In the beginning of 1942, as more physicians began to take an increased interest in human testing, a number of problems were encountered. The primary two were the procurement of funds and centralized supervision of their work. The problems were settled when, on 7 July 1942, Himmler signed an order creating a new department within the AHNENERBE, namely the Institute for Scientific Research for War Purposes (abbreviated in German as WwZF.)52 This new institute was to provide the framework for that part of the experiments, the results of which could possibly be useful for the execution of the war.53 The leadership of the new WwZF institute was entrusted to a former bookdealer named Wolfram Sievers.54 The Ahnenerbe would be the supervisory office and the WwZF would function as the administrative office. Although, the Ahnenerbe was initially established for the purpose of implementing Nazi racial ideology by determining the origins and heritage of the Aryan race, it would metamorphose into a scientific research center particularly involved with medical research. The WwZF financed experiments and supplied the necessary materials, or, arranged their supply.55

51 The Medical Case, 2. 52 The Medical Case, 5. 53 The Medical Case, 2-3. 54 Pasternak, Inhuman Research, 237. 55 Ibid., 237. 21

Unfortunately, all the Ahnenerbe archives were destroyed by the Germans shortly before they capitulated to the Allies. However, there are other sources from which the story of the development of human testing can be traced. Fortunately, Himmler’s private files produced invaluable information regarding his personal involvement in authorizing and, at times, directing the activities of the SS doctors conducting their research.56 In fact, on orders from Himmler himself, the Ahnenerbe directed doctors in the camps to perform experiments on human beings. Consequently, it was through the WwZF and under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe that thousands of defenseless concentration camp inmates were murdered.57 Further, the WwZF was a unique institution which provided special opportunities and privileges for doctors who were willing to embrace the racial ideology of the Nazi state and apply their talents towards implementing it. Doctors whose research on animals had run into their respective logically humane conclusions would now have the opportunity to test their hypotheses in human trials. The experiments authorized by the institute offered unprecedented opportunities for medical experimentation that were otherwise previously unthinkable. Moreover, should the participating doctors be troubled by conflicts of conscience, then they could find solace in the knowledge that they were working for the greater good of the Reich.58 Initially, some doctors found it difficult to acquire human test subjects. Many were protesting that they were not getting the assistance that they needed in the procurement of human test subjects. Because of the initially unstructured power hierarchy regarding human experimentation, some doctors sought solutions by requesting higher authority and greater autonomy to carry out their research. Sievers sent a letter to Dr. Brandt complaining about this particular issue regarding human test subjects: We were also advised that we would have to pay for the use of the prisoners used in the experiments. We must make an application that prisoners who are under the Lost Test to put on a full subsistence diet, the same diet the guards are getting, so as to enable us to carry out the experiments under the same condition which would be prevalent among the troops….We intend to make initial experiments on 10 prisoners…After all, we are not making these tests as some wild scientific

56 The Medical Case, 3-4. 57 Pasternak, Inhuman Research, 238. 58 Ibid., 238. 22

idea but in order to derive results which will be of benefit for the German troops and even for the German people itself.59

From this letter, it could be inferred that a bureaucratic bottle neck was creating confusion amongst the doctors who had been given permission to conduct their experiments, and the Ahnenerbe, which was providing the necessary human test subjects. The doctors were completing their research and test trials using animals and now wanted to verify their results with humans. Sigmund Rascher, one of the SS doctors conducting high altitude experiments in Dachau, sent a report to Himmler on 11 May 1942. In an attached letter, he wrote that the report was not complete due to trials ending with only results gained from animal experimentation, and the practical and theoretical results would have to be further evaluated. He wrote, “Based on results of experiments which up to now several scientists had conducted on animals only, the experiment in Dachau were to prove those results would maintain their validity on human beings…”60 By proving that trials conducted on humans held scientific value, the case was being firmly made for escalating experiments to included human beings. Himmler’s direct involvement stems from his own personal interest in advancing the racial notions of National Socialism. Of keen interest to Himmler were the theories and prospects regarding sterilizations.61 A Nazi physician by the name of Dr. Madaus had been experimenting with various methods of forced sterilization, ranging from chemical solutions to x-ray exposure. After Dr. Madaus had published the results of his research on medical sterilization, the immense potential of this drug became apparent to the Nazi elite. Dr. Pokorny, one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, took note of this potential: “If we should succeed on the basis of these experiments…a new effective weapon would be at our disposal after a short time. The mere thought [that] the three million Bolsheviks now in German captivity could be sterilized so that they would be excluded from propagation, but still remain usable workers, opens up wide perspectives.”62 As the war was deteriorating in the East, the Nazis were becoming desperate to utilize as much slave labor as they could acquire. In a letter sent to Himmler in October 1941, Dr. Pokorny specifically recommended and requested “immediate tests on human beings (criminals) in order to determine the dose and the duration of the treatment [sterilization].”63 Thus,

59 The Medical Case, 12. 60 Ibid., 21. 61 “Ibid., 25. 62 Ibid., 25. 63 Ibid., 25-26 23

Himmler became personally interested in the experiments, and in March 1942, offered the opportunity to Dr. Madaus to conduct his experiments on human beings.64 The “necessity” for the progression from animal testing to human experimentation can be clearly discerned in an observation of Dr. Madaus’ research. In a letter sent to Himmler by Dr. K. Gerland, another SS physician, on 24 August 1942, contains this recommendation, “On the basis of extensive experimentation on rats, rabbits, and dogs it was established at what stage after injection or feeding with caladium seguinum, male animals became impotent and when females animals became incapable of conception…If changes in the potency or capability of conception could be produce in the human being through the consumption of caladium seguinum extract, the potential immense importance of these observations is quite obvious, however, it would be necessary to conduct experiments directly on human beings…the necessary examinations and experiments on human beings could be conducted on the inmates of the gypsy camp Lackenbach in Niederdonau...”65 In fact, it was from the concentration camp population that the supply for needed test subjects would be provided. Himmler wanted the subjects for experimentation to be men that had been condemned to death. When Himmler became interested in the high-altitude experiments being conducted at Dachau, he specifically ordered on 13 April 1942 that “this experiment [high altitude pressure] is to be repeated on other men condemned to death.” There was some glimmer of hope for the condemned men that they might be pardoned. Himmler wrote as an addendum, “Considering the long continued action of the heart of the experiments should be specially exploited in such a manner as to determine whether these men could be recalled to life. Should such as experiment succeed then, of course, the [prisoner] condemned to death shall be pardoned to concentration camp for life.”66 By mid-1943, the advances gleamed from using human beings for medical trials was being touted as a success by many Nazi doctors. While researching new vaccines for spotted-fever, a serum had been developed that showed promising results in animals and now was ready for the next stage of testing. Sievers, once again applying for test subject procurement, wrote,

64 Ibid., 26 65 Ibid., 26. 66 Ibid., 20 24

“Following our application of 30 September 1943, you granted us permission on 25 October 1943, to conduct experiments on the production of a new type of spotted-fever injection and put one hundred prisoners at our disposal at the Natzweiler KL….…The new serum is already in production so the new experiments can be started as soon as new suitable [emphasize original] human guinea pigs have been put at our disposal. Therefore, I would like to request that a new group of inoculates be sent to Natzweiler for this purpose. In order to obtain precise results…two hundred prisoners would have to be put at our disposal this time. It would again be necessary, however, that these persons be in the same physical condition as the average member of the Wehrmacht…”67 Initially, Himmler wanted only adult males to be used for medical testing; however, the changing reality of the war would force the doctors to seek out other groups for human testing. Thus, it was in the summer of 1942, that the Nazis began to use female prisoners for experiments such as in the sulphonamide [sic] tests in Ravensbrück and later the sterilization experiments in Auschwitz. In fact, the first tests were carried out on 20 July 1942 in Ravensbrück concentration camp on seventy-five women nicknamed “rabbits.”68 As the war persisted, even children were eventually exploited in concentration camps for medical experiments.69 The story of the children will be the focus of the next chapter.

Paradox of Using Sub-Humans for Experiments It is worth noting the paradoxical nature of Nazi racial medicine ascertaining any worthy results from such “inferior” specimens. The prisoners used in the human experiments were considered sub- human. It therefore begs the question as to what good would their results be if they could not be compared and applied to the German übermensch? When the proposal of using Roma and Sinti prisoners came to be discussed, there were those who were reluctant to the idea. Dr. Grawitz was morally opposed to the idea of using Gypsies as test subjects because of the logical conclusion which he based firmly in Nazi ideology. His disapproval was expressed in a letter to Himmler, “As far as the proposal of using gypsies for these experiments is concerned, I should like to make

67 Ibid., 24. 68 Hoedeman, Hitler or Hippocrates, 55. 69 Ley, Astrid. “Children as Victims of Medical Experiments in Concentration Camps." From Clinic to Concentration Camp: Reassessing Nazi Medical and Racial Research, 1933-1945 (2017), 209. 25

the following objection: The results of experiments conducted on gypsies would not necessarily be applicable to our men, on account of their partially different racial origin. For that reason, it would be desirable to use as subjects inmates who are racially comparable to the European population.”70 Himmler also saw the unpleasant, yet infallible truth of Grawitz’s logic. Therefore, he forwarded his approval for human testing on 26 July 1944. And with a penciled annotation, he wrote, “Right, gypsies and three others as a check.”71

Many in the medical and scientific circles at the time also came to the similar conclusion that their experiments may not be usable or useful for the pure German racial stock. The idea, I believe, behind using biologically inferior human beings was the same as animal testing: that is, the doctors could work out the problems and issues associated with developing new medicines using testing samples that were ‘close enough’ before trying the experiments on healthy superior organisms. The concentration camp inmate population would absorb the brunt of the deaths to be expected with inhumane medical trials. After which, the promising (and survivable) results would be refined and retested on “actual” human beings of comparable racial quality.

70 The Medical Case, 38. 71 Ibid., 38 26

Part Two

Child Experimentation

27

A Children’s Story

Chapter Three

GERMAN GUIDELINES ON HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION 1931

section (c): “experimentation involving children or young persons under 18 years of age shall be prohibited if it in any way endangers the child or young person.”72

Advent Children The Nazi doctors medically murdered children by the thousands throughout the euthanasia program. However, the activities of the T4, while combining German medicine with Nazi racial ideology, were medicalized killings, and were not medical experiments. They do, however, illustrate the fact that Nazi medicine had no qualms violating the sanctity of children’s lives and well-being. That experiments were eventually conducted on children is well within the grasp of imagination when considering the other medicalized Nazi practices. However, unlike the T4 program which followed a rather linear path set with defined goals, the progression towards using children for medical testing was haphazard and reactionary. There was no straightforward progression in the selection of groups to be used for medical experimentation. Experiments began on healthy adult male inmates condemned to death; later came women for differing experiments, and finally the children. In order to understand the development of how children came to be used as human guinea pigs for horrific testing, it is necessary to understand what it was that the SS doctors were looking for, and why they needed human beings for their experiments. Thus, the scientific and medical reasoning of the Nazi logic will be examined, as well as their perspectives as to what they were investigating.73 It was a cold and simple logic that as the milieu of German scientific circles began to be increasingly radicalized, so did medicine and experiments. Thus, through the principles of Social Darwinism, guinea pigs evolved in human beings. Experiments with concentration camp prisoners began immediately following the outbreak of the war in 1939. But actual child experimentation came rather relatedly, first occurring in mid-1943.

72 German Guidelines on Human Experimentation 1931. “reichsrundschreiben_1931.pdf”. artnscience.us. available online: http://artnscience.us/Med_Ethics/reichsrundschreiben_1931.pdf. Last accessed 28 June 2017 73 Ley, Children as Victims, 210. 28

Such experiments could be seen as the abyss of ethical and moral abandonment in regards to humane medical practices in which children, particularly Jewish children, were used as test subjects due to being considered a member of “sub-human” species.74 Other historians, notably Dr. Astrid Ley, have argued, however, “that despite the brutal testing practices and their ethical reprehensibility, these experiments cannot be considered as senseless, pseudo-medical cruelty, as most of them corresponded in terms of their purposes and methods to the state of scientific practice at that time.”75 I concur with the former position and further agree with Primo Levi when he describes the experiments as being a “form of torture resulting in invalidity, incapacity, death, and psychological scarring. This form of violence was very different from the random and arbitrary form given out by SS guards and camp kapos: it was calculated, “scientific,” authorized, funded, and meticulously recorded.”76 Himmler and the SS held the monopoly on the supply of human beings as experimental subjects. There were three ways to request human test subjects. The first was through an application via the SS Ahnenerbe Association which carried out human experiments from 1942 onward that were “important for the war effort.”77 The second was an application via SS Reich Physician Dr. Ernst Grawitz, whose scope of responsibilities included medical testing in concentration camps. And the third way was an application directly to Heinrich Himmler, who had the ultimate decision, if the individual had personal access to him.78 From the very beginning, Himmler held a personal interest in the potential medical breakthroughs that could be possible with unlimited human testing. For determining potential testing subjects for a research experiment, two conflicting issues arose within the concentration camp hierarchy. First, the SS physicians wanted healthy subjects with sufficient nutrition and overall fitness so that their test results would not be influenced by sickness and weakness. Moreover, the subject group needed to be comparable in terms of gender and age. For infection tests, prisoners without respective prior diseases were sought, if possible, so as to rule out immunities against the relevant pathogen.79 New arrivals were also favored because they would not yet have experienced the detriments of living within a concentration camp. On the other hand, the commanders of the camps needed as many prisoners as possible for work and labor details.80 The vast network of concentration camps meant that the prisoners became the labor

74 Ibid.,210. Translated by Paul Weindling 75 Ibid., 209. 76 Levi, Primo. Moments of Reprieve (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 10-11 77 The Medical Case, Part II. 78 Ley, Children as Victims, 209-14. 79 Ibid., 211 80 Ibid., 211 29

force for the war effort. The grueling nature of the forced labor details required that workers be healthy and strong. Up until 1942, it was relatively easy to accommodate the doctors’ requests. However, after the war began to turn in favor of the Allies, the Nazi’s demand for slave laborers increased sharply. The need for war production, such as munitions and other materials, superseded the wishes of the scientists, who were intentionally debilitating their victims. Therefore, the healthy and strong potential test subjects, desired by the doctors for their experiments, were pressed into hard labor to be worked to death. In order to resolve this setback to their research, the doctors considered additional groups of prisoners. In addition to women, children also came into the fold. This new potential source came in abundance as hundreds of thousands of people were being “delivered” to the camps following the mass deportations during the course of the “Final Solution.”81 Although the children that were deported with their families to Auschwitz were of little use as laborers, they largely met the doctors’ requirements. Based on their young age and the lower probability of prior illnesses, children were an ideal choice as test subjects for inoculation experiments.82 In fact, Nazi physicians at other concentration camps such as Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, and Sachsenhausen were also engaged in pseudoscientific research that subjected children to various experiments. They ran the gamut from sterilization to inoculation with infectious diseases.83 The fear of infectious diseases weighed heavily upon the minds of the Nazi elites. In fact, the spread of epidemic spread of jaundice (hepatitis) among the ranks of the police and the army left some units listing up to 60% casualties lasting up to six weeks.84 As the war situation in the East was worsening, it was therefore of the upmost importance to find a cure as quickly as possible. It was recommended to Himmler that experiments begin in earnest.85 Dr. Arnold Dohmen, an immunologist and SA elite, had been conducting extensive experiments into finding a treatment for hepatitis. He eventually discovered that it was not passed along by bacteria, but by virus, and had been successful with cultivating pathogen cultures in animals. Himmler agreed with the recommendation and, on 16 June 1943, granted permission to Dohmen to conduct experiments at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Himmler personally selected from Auschwitz eight Jews associated with the Polish resistance movement who had been condemned to death for use by Dr. Dohmen in his experiments.86 At first, exclusively adult

81 Ley, Children as Victims, 211. 82 Ibid., 211. 83 Lukas, Richard C. Did the Children Cry?: Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939-1945. (Hippocrene Books, 1994), 88. 84 The Medical Case, 39. 85 Ibid, 39 86 Ibid., 39. 30

men were used a test subjects for such experiments. These were primarily Polish, Jewish, Soviet, and German concentration camp inmates.87 However, many of these men, despite being fed full sustenance rations, were not ideal for inoculation experiments because they had developed immunities from prior exposure to various contagions. What Dr. Dohmen required were test subjects whose immune systems were still pristine. Therefore, two weeks later, Dr. Dohmen visited and selected twelve boys from Auschwitz for his experiments, of which, eleven were later transferred to Sachsenhausen.88 As Saul Oren- Hornfeld, one of Dr. Dohmen’s test victims, later recounted, the immunologist selected his young subjects in Auschwitz himself from an arriving transport. On the ramp, he asked them: “Children, were you sick? Did you have jaundice?” When the children failed to understand, he pointed to the yellow star on their clothes. “That,” Oren said, “We understood”.89 The experience of these boys will be discussed in the next chapter. Another SS physician, lung specialist Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer, who apparently believed there was no difference between animals and Jews, wanted to develop a serum to combat tuberculosis. Fortunately for him, he had connections in high places, including an uncle who knew Himmler personally, who helped him get the approval to begin his own experiments.90 His initial experiments on adult males did not produce any desired results; all of the test subjects died. At his post-war interrogation, Heissmeyer said, “After determining in the fall of 1944 that my plan to heal TBC [tuberculosis] patients with the aforementioned serum had failed, and that the condition of most of the inmates had worsened and not improved (I no longer know how many inmates were involved), I discontinued the experiments. I then ordered twenty children to be brought in, on whom I used the same serum to see if they were inherently immune to TBC well as to see if I could immunize them against the disease.”91 Thus, in November 1944, twenty-five children from Auschwitz arrived at Neuengamme. Dr. Heissmeyer had personally selected them for experimentation for the benefit and progress of medicine.92 The

87 Ley, Children as Victims, 209. 88 Ley, Astrid, and Günter Morsch. Medical care and crime: the infirmary at Sachsenhausen concentration camp 1936-1945. Metropol, 2007. 89 Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen Archive: Viedo interview of Saul Oren-Hornfeld, in ‘Jedesmal musste es ein Wunder sein’, Filmochschule Potsdam, 1996. As translated and presented By Dr. Astrid Ley. "Children as victims of medical experiments in concentration camps." From Clinic to Concentration Camp: Reassessing Nazi Medical and Racial Research, 1933-1945 (2017): 211 90 Lukas, Did the Children Cry?, 89. 91 Pasternak, Inhuman Research, 217. As quoted from The murders at Bullenhuserdamm, 37-49 92 Ibid., 37-49. 31

youngest was five and the oldest was twelve years old.93 Heissmeyer inoculated them with tuberculosis bacilli. Their story will also be told in the next chapter. Dr. Mengele, the infamous geneticist and member of the SS elite, who would become the chief doctor of Auschwitz, had a ‘theory’ that human beings had pedigrees, like dogs. He was convinced that he had a personal duty to create a super-race of blue-eyed, blond ‘Nordic’ people through selective breeding, and further of his obligation to eliminate the biologically inferior specimens. At Auschwitz, his surgical ward was immaculately clean and his syringes always sterilized. He often used the latter for injecting his patients with phenolic acid, benzine, or air, which killed them within a few seconds.94 He believed that the key to unlocking the potential procreative power of twins lies within the blood of the twins themselves. Harnessing this power over the creation of life would dramatically increase Germany’s population. This would solve the pressing issue of the inferior races out-reproducing the superior Volk. In Mengele’s twin experiment, pairs of twins deported to Auschwitz were examined and autopsied in comparative terms. In contrast to child twins, adult twins rarely arrived at the camp together.95 Twins were the primary concern, regardless of age. However, adult twins were scarce and when they did arrive together there was a possibility of them already being too sick and frail for medical tests. Therefore, young twins were the best, and only, option for Mengele.

Ruminations Human experimentation began in the major concentration camps following the start of World War II. Ostensibly, for the purposes of the advancement of the German people and the Nazi war execution, the experiments had a variety of aims and goals. Much of the research was in pursuit of applicable military medicine aimed at testing new therapies and vaccines for treating battlefield injuries, illnesses, and epidemics.96 Others, like experiments performed by Mengele, were endeavored to affect population growth, and planned settlement policies for Eastern Europe. Further, Himmler and the SS, encouraged scientists and physicians to engage in virtually uninhibited research in order to provide scientific legitimization to the racist Nazi ideology.

93 Lukas Did the Children Cry?, 89. 94 Wiesenthal, Simon, and Joseph Wechsberg. The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs. (Bantam Books, 1967), 148. 95 Ley, Children as Victims, 211. 96 Ibid., 217. 32

While the groups of human test subjects were originally only adult men condemned to death, the range of potential guinea pigs enlarged to encompass all concentration camp prisoner inmates, which up until 1942, were primarily adult males. After the summer of 1942, the tide of the war was beginning to move against the Germans. Simultaneously, women and children were being delivered in droves by the SS to the concentration camps. Not useful for hard labor details, this new influx of prisoners satisfied the needs of the doctors for medical experimentation subjects. As a consequence, only inmates who could not be used as forced laborers were provided for medical experiments by the camp commanders.

The desperate need for slave laborers siphoned the doctors’ test subject pool. The Nazi physicians searched elsewhere and found prime subjects in healthy states without prior illnesses in young children. And as discussed above, the advent of these children as new subjects was advantageous to the Nazi physicians in regard to the prevailing medical practices at the time, and in accordance with their racial logic. Thus, in the opinion of the medical perpetrators, children were the best suited subjects for test purposes, or, in the case of Mengele’s research on twins, the only possible subjects.97

97 Ley, Children as VictimsI, 217. 33

Immolation

Chapter Four

--I suffered immense pain and cruelty from the experiments. They were inhuman, but because of them I survived. As bad as the experiments were without them I would not be here today to write this … Now that I am emotionally a lot stronger I would like to describe a little more details about my horrible experiments which no matter how hard I am trying I never get over it as long as I live. I was born November 23, 1930. I was about five weeks in Auschwitz alone, separated from my family, my parents, two sisters and two brothers when Dr. Mengele pulled me out of a queue as we were on the way from the c-lager [camp] to the gas chamber. I was the only one picked that day personally by Mengele and his assistant. They took me to his [laboratory], where I met other children. They were screaming from pain. Black and blue bodies covered with blood. I collapsed from horror and terror and fainted. A bucket of cold water was thrown on me to revive me. As soon as I stood up I was whipped with a leather whip which broke my flesh, then I was told the whipping was a sample of what I would receive if I did not follow instructions and orders. I was used as a guinea pig for medical experiments. I was never ever given painkillers or anesthetics. Every day I suffered excruciating pain. I was injected with drugs and chemicals. My body most of the time was connected to tubes which inserted some drugs in to my body. Many days I was tied up for hours. Some days they made cuts in to my body and left the wounds open for them to study. Most of the time there nothing to eat. Every day my body was numb with pain. There was no more skin left on my body for them to put injections or tubes … One day we woke up and the place was empty. We were left with open infected wounds and no food. We all were half dead with no energy or life left in us. [One] day … Russian soldiers tried to shake me to see if I was alive or dead. They felt a tiny beat in my heart and quickly picked me up and took me to a hospital.98

98 “Mrs. M”. Testimony for The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. She requested that her real name not be used. http://www.claimscon.org/about/history/closed-programs/medical- experiments/personal-statements-from-victims/ last accessed: 6/22/17 34

The “Lucky Ones” Arriving at Auschwitz was a terrifying experience for all deportees. After the exhaustingly long journey by cattle-car, the bewildered Jews faced the terrifying chaos of selection upon arrival. In her interview, survivor Ibi Schewatz, sobbingly describes the fate of most children under the age of fourteen as they were sent immediately to the gas chambers. The young children and the babies that were “lucky” enough to be selected would then be experimented on by the SS camp doctors.99 Most children were not old and strong enough to be useful as slave labor, and were already “useless eaters.” They served no purpose being alive and were chiefly sent straight to their deaths. The majority of these “lucky ones,” those of useable stock for medical experiments selected by the SS doctors, such as twins for Dr. Mengele, would not survive. Their ordeal would last much longer and be more far more excruciating than those immediately gassed upon arrival. The sardonic use of the word “lucky” by Ibi Schewatz begs the question of whether or not the other camp inmates knew what fate awaited those chosen children.

In fact, the plight of the children was known amongst the inmate population. Shirley Fine, as a camp prisoner at Auschwitz, saw many twins, young and old, all over the medical blocks.100 Although Auschwitz camp survivor, Judith Guttman, did not personally bear witness to the medical experiments, it was an open secret throughout the camp. Rumors and gossip naturally ran rampant as to what the Nazi doctors were doing. In this case, however, the rumors could not fully articulate what was happening. All she knew for certain was that Mengele was experimenting with diseases and immunizations. The twins would receive injections of the same severe and lethal pathogens. He wanted to observe the differences of what happened to each twin. Judith further tells of the other known, “crazy” experiment that Mengele carried out on the many twins was to force transfusions between people with different blood types to ascertain how the body accepts, or rejects, new blood.101 If only the medical testing ended where the rumors left off. However, the children would soon be plunged into a nightmarish experience of increasingly painful and invasive experimentation.

The fate which awaited the nubile human guinea pigs was quickly realized as they were led to their new homes in the children’s section of the camp. Eva Kor Moses, a famous young survivor of

99 Schewatz, Ibi. Interview by Bernice Brandmark. Video recording. Sunrise, Florida, USA. 17 May 1995. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. American University of Paris. Interview code: 1632 100 Fine, Shirley. Interview by Josh Freed. Video recording. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. 4 November 1981. USC Shoah Foundation, Visual History Archive, American University of Paris. Interview code: 53576 101 Guttman, Judith. Interview by Carol Stulber. Video recording. Los Angeles, California, USA. 17 April 1998. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, American University of Paris. Interview code: 40762 35

Mengele’s Twin study, recounts the first moment when she and her twin sister, Miriam, entered the children’s barrack after their selection. While a grim fate awaited their families, amongst the many others in the arrival line, an even darker future awaited the twins at Mengele’s hands. Eva recalled her own quick introduction to life at Auschwitz: "The first time I went to use the latrine located at the end of the children's barrack, I was greeted by the scattered corpses of several children lying on the ground. I think that image will stay with me forever. It was there that I made a silent pledge - a vow to make sure that Miriam and I didn't end up on that filthy floor."102 Indeed, it was through their determined will, along with sheer luck, that these twins survived.

Selections for the gas chamber did not end after arrival; in fact, even amongst those selected as potential test subjects, only a few would be elected as “suitable” enough for actual testing. Further, those who became ill, or otherwise incapacitated from the injections and experiments, would also be sent away for gassing. Simon Wiesenthal recounts in his memoirs that one day Mengele came into the children’s block in Auschwitz to measure the boys. He became very angry when he found many of them too small for their age. He made the boys stand against the doorpost that was designated with nails corresponding to expected height for each age group. If a boy’s head did not reach the proper nail, Mengele gave a sign with his riding crop and the child was taken away to the gas chambers. Over a thousand children were murdered at that time.103 Undoubtedly, as a result of living in the ghettos and subsequent years of war, the boys’ nominal growth was greatly affected. The “lucky ones” left would now have to face life in the camp as human test subjects.

Daily survival was a monumental task for the children. Life would be grim and bleak, at best. One child survivor, Leo Lowy, describes a usual day for the children in the medical care of the SS doctors. For the typical day, they would get up and count the corpses in the barracks. Then those still alive would have to stand for roll call. And if it so happened that one child of a pair of twins had died, then the remaining one would be sent to the gas chamber. Generally, when the children were taken for experimentation they were taken in sets of five to eight twins to a waiting room. This waiting room was windowless, dull, white, and empty. When they were taken into the examination room they were treated with cold, impersonal detachment. The room was grey with little to none medical equipment. There would be two or three doctors that often were not German, but nonetheless had to speak in German. They would compare their

102 Kor, Eva. Interview by Doris Lazarus. Video Recording. Chicago, Illinois, USA. Interviewed 2 April, 1995. USC Shoah Foundation, Visual History Archive, American University of Paris. Interview code: 1917 103 Wiesenthal, Murderers Among Us, 147. 36

charts and measurements.104 The children would be subject to endless measuring, poking, prodding, and other various testing for reactions. The children were never told what was being done to them nor why they were there. Many children were from different ethnicities and did not speak the same language. These continuous visits to the experimenting room were a terrifying and lonely experience. It was indeed scary, for as the young Leo Lowy recounts that the worst part was the psychologically draining nature of daily trips to the medical ward. He recalls having to bear witness to a man being castrated and feared that he would soon suffer a similar fate.105 And many did, which will be the focus of the next chapter.

There were, however, some moments when the “lucky ones” were indeed very lucky. In his testimony interview, Leo Lowy recalls one time when he, his brother, and two other boys were returning to their barracks and encountered two drunken SS soldiers. The soldiers began questioning why they were not in their barracks and that they must be punished. Then SS men began beating them mercilessly. As the boys were being ruthlessly struck, Leo Lowy remembered the only words he knew in German and shouted: “Mengele twin!” Immediately, the two SS men seemingly froze in mid-strike upon hearing Dr. Mengele’s name. The two SS men cursed and yelled at the boys to run immediately back to their barracks. Leo Lowy felt that he was under the protection of Mengele because of the preferential treatment received by twins.106 While being one of Mengele’s twins was a dreadful ordeal, there was still a silver lining of having some privilege being under his auspices; however, that “privilege” of Mengele’s protection existed only in Auschwitz.

Further away in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Evelin Rider recalls life in the children’s medical barracks when she was just eight years old. One day, she was taken to courtyard where an SS doctor was whipping children. Already there were three dead bodies of young children bruised black and blue and covered in bloody lacerations. The man would whip the child, and if the child screamed or talked back, then he would whip them again. The children naturally would cry and the doctor would continue whipping them until their screams fell silent. Then, the SS officer would take his pistol and execute the child. This is one of the memories that Evelin has had the most difficult time attempting to understand. She believes that these experiments were designed to test to what extent her humanity could be broken.107 This whipping can surely be described as sadistic mistreatment. Obviously, no medical or

104 Lowy, Leo. Interview by Josh Freed. Video recording. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. 15 January 1982. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archives, American University of Paris. Interview code: 53609 105 Interview of Leo Lowy 106 Ibid., 107 Rider, Evelin. Interview by Annette Israel. Video recording. Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. 5 January 1997. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, American University of Paris. Interview code: 24415 37

scientific inquiry was at work. Publicly whipping the children served only to terrify, thereby instilling obedience through fear. As the opening quote of this chapter from ‘Mrs. M’ further testifies to the flagellation present at Auschwitz, lashings were doled out for disobedience, for crying during experiments, or even arbitrarily by the SS doctors and guards. While punishments were draconian and unnecessary, flogging a young child until it collapses unconsciously from the pain only to then execute the limp body illustrates the sadism that developed from such a disconnect between the doctors and their human test subjects. In another episode recalled by Evelin in her interview involves going outside for a walk with the other children and some of the nurses. She recalls a “fine dust falling like snow” and covering their skin. When Evelin went to wipe the dust off from herself, she was rebuked by one of the nurses being told, “No! Don’t rub it off! It has to burn into your skin so that you never forget it!” It was not until she saw Steven Spielberg’s movie, Schindler’s List, that she realized what the “snowy fine dust” really was for the first time.108 That the doctors held any sympathy for the children is questionable. Evelin tells about her sleeping bed in the medical building. She recounts that there was another little girl in the room next to her behind the wall. The girl cried and wailed continuously, like “a whining dog,” and scratched on the walls. When the doctor came and spoke to the nurse he said, “You weren’t supposed to kill her.” To which the nurse replied, “What does it matter if it is sooner or later?” This was the level of concern towards the children from the Nazi medical staff. And even in the present day, Evelin hears the little girls screams every time she hears a dog wail.109 The constant fear of being selected for immediate death, the incessant cries and screams from children in pain, and the perpetual knowledge of further experiments caused deep and lasting scars to the psyche of the survivors. Evelin recalls another day when she was brought by a nurse to a children’s room wherein there were many more children. But then the other children were sent away and a doctor came in and wanted to play a game using a ball with her. The next thing she remembers was waking up on the floor with her hair disheveled. She does not remember because she believes that she most likely blocked it out. This happened at least another two times. The nurse that brought her requested that she not be present for the next time. The doctor told Evelin when she came around again that “maybe they will play with the ball next time.” We can rather certainly take this to mean she was raped several

108 Ibid., 109 Ibid., 38

times as an eight-year-old girl.110 As cruel as life was for the “lucky ones,” medicalized tortures and sadism not yet imagined awaited them in the guise of scientific progress.

The Experience of the Experiments “I was subjected to medical experiments from the beginning of August 1943 until the end of October 1943 under the Nazi regime. In the camp[Mogilev] where I was kept as a child, we did not receive any food for days. We cried out for food. Then the boss of the [camp] came up to us children. He distributed various desserts to us children. After a couple of hours, we realized that something was not in order with the food. I got really sick and suffered from cramps, I threw up, had diarrhea, the chills and fever. Many died as a consequence of this poisoned food. Due to this [heavily poisoned] food my legs felt as they would be paralyzed. I could not walk for several weeks and could only be carried. As soon as I recovered, I received numerous injections from a doctor … into the right side of my mouth, close to my lower jaw. Why I was injected, for what and what substance I was injected I don’t know, since I was only eight years old at that time. I still have a hole on my right cheek. The man who ordered all of [this], his name was Knoblauch. After the war he was hunted as a criminal of war.”111

Notes and Measurements Every test subject chosen was subjected to extensive measuring. The SS doctors and nurses would take note of every physical detail and compare them to the others. Characteristics such as eye color, hair color, body proportions, facial features, and general posture were used to find some causal link within their genes. Most of this measuring was noninvasive and superficial. Like many other twins, Leo Lowy and his sister received preferential treatment because of Dr. Mengele’s need for twins to carry out his experiments. He remembers being measured in every way, from the hands to the feet, and even eye color. He also knew that eventually the external measurements would be complete, and then he would be

110 Ibid., 111 ‘Mrs.E.’ Testimony for The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. She requested that her real name not be used. http://www.claimscon.org/about/history/closed-programs/medical-experiments/personal- statements-from-victims/ last accessed: 6/22/17 39

dissected to measured internally. He recalls always being in front of a person in a white lab coat that spoke German. His treatment was better than most, as he says that nothing evil or sadistic was done to him, just extensive measuring.112 While measurements alone are not terrifying, the whole experience was nonetheless debasing. One twin who survived, commented: “We were always naked during the experiments. We were marked, painted, measured, observed. Boys and girls were together. It was all so demeaning. There was no place to hide, no place to go. They compared every part of our body with that of our twin. The tests would last for hours. And Mengele was always there, supervising.”113 Not all twins however were fortunate enough to only be measured. For others, humiliation and discomfort would become painful torture as the experiments became increasingly lethal.

The experiences of the twins Irene and Rene Slotkin in Auschwitz differed greatly. They were kept separate and subjected to Mengele’s medical experiments independently. Rene’s experiences of undergoing medical tests were not as invasive as those done to his sister Irene. The two of them believe this was because they are fraternal twins, and thus were separated into the corresponding male and female barracks. Rene’s experience was rather minimal compared his sister Irene.114 On the other hand, Irene recalls spending a great deal of time in the camp hospital. She had much blood taken from the left side of her neck, and sometimes from the finger. She recounts having to sit for long periods of time to be measured and extensively x-rayed. She was sick for most of the time because of the various injections she was given.115

Eva Kor describes two kinds of experiments that she experienced. One was the experiments involving being measured and compared. The other was the “blood lab,” where she received injections with various germs and pathogens. When she inquired, she was told that she was being tested for syphilis, despite being only nine years old. She tells us that during these experiments five sets of twins would be kept naked for six to eight hours at a time. The only way that Eva was capable of coping was to block it out.116 It was believed that the key to unlocking the power of human gene lay within the blood.

112 Interview of Leo Lowy 113 Lukas, Did the Children Cry?, 87. 114 Hizme, Irene; Slotkin, Rene. Interview by Joan Ringelheim. Video Recording. 19 April 1995. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Interview code: RG-50.030*0320 115 Ibid., 116 Interview of Eva Kor 40

The Blood Lab Eva Kor narrates her experience in one of the labs to which she was taken, infamously known as the “blood lab.” Here, the SS doctors would tie both of her hands with a rubber hose. In her left arm, the doctors would drain her blood to determine just how much blood a person could lose and yet remain alive. Eva recalls sometimes they would take up to five or six large vials in a single instance. And in the other arm, the doctors would give shots and inject the children with various chemicals and compounds. Eva speaks of how she managed to maintain her composure by turning away and suppressing the pain. The injections, of course, quickly made her sick. However, it was well known that anyone who went to hospital never came back.117 It was only natural that many would become sick as a result of being exposed to foreign agents in such a physically weakened state. The young survivor, Eva Slonim, recalls a blood- letting experiment conducted on her by Dr. Mengele. She says that after all which she had seen, she was certain that she was going to be fully drained. The doctor took three or four bottles of blood from her arm and then simply left. After this she became very ill and developed dysentery and typhoid.118 After the children had been drained of their blood, and made sick from the testing compounds, they were led back to their barracks to rest and recuperate. Should they survive the night, they would be measured and tested again the following day. Mengele and his medical staff conducted ceaseless experimentations on the children. Naked sometimes for two to five hours, the children were cold and scared. Historian Richard Lukas relates the experience of one nurse at Auschwitz: “I cried with the children,” said one nurse-prisoner who knew of fifty children who had died during the summer of 1944. “They drew blood from the children every day.”119 Others, however, would be completely drained of their blood which would then be infused into non-twin youngsters.120 Stephanie Heller and her sister were taken to Mengele’s lab where he took measurements and performed blood transfusions, x-rays, and gave them injections. The purpose was to see how identical the twins truly were. The blood transfusion was very painful because of the large needles used and the quantity of blood taken. She and another twin boy were given a transfusion which made them both very sick; her sister’s blood was likewise transfused with the other corresponding twin boy.121 Often, the

117 Ibid., 118 Slonim, Eva. Interview by Sharona Blum. Video recording. Caulfield, VIC, Australia. 24 July, 1997. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, American University of Paris. Interview code: 33024 119 Lukas, Did the Children Cry?, 87. 120 Interview with Eva Slonim 121 Heller, Stephanie. Interview by Pauline Wrobel. Video recording. Melbourne, VIC, Australia. 31 October 1996. USC Shoah Foundation, Visual History Archives, American University of Paris. Interview code: 21978 41

differing blood types would be incompatible between the two subjects, and their bodies would reject the new blood and shutdown. The useful knowledge gained from these blood experiments would be benefit for wounded soldiers in the front. Another example of blood transfusions between twins comes from Annetta Able, who was selected by Mengele for part of his twin’s study. The doctor was conducting research into whether twins who copulated with other twins would conceive yet more twins. This was done in pursuit of growing the German Volk. She and her sister were selected and taken to a “hospital-like” medical building. There, they were lain down next to two other young Polish twin boys from whom they received crude and primitive blood transfusions. The reaction to the transfusions caused severe sickness. The twins were then left to be observed and their blood samples sent to Berlin for eugenic analysis.122

“Dirty Blood” Apparently, not all the blood was for blood tests; some of it was ostensibly sent to the German soldiers at the front.123 In fact, so great was the need for blood transfusions on the battlefront that a blind eye was often turned towards the origins of the blood. The questionable nature of using Jewish blood for transfusions with pure German soldiers is certainly of intrigue. As the war was turning for the worse for the Germans, practicality must have taken precedence over hardline racial ideology. It can be reasonably concluded that a dying Wehrmacht soldier cared little about whose blood it was that was going to save his life. As Leo Lowy relates his experience with blood transfusions, he recounts a moment when he had the misfortune of having the same blood type as that of another German soldier. He was taken one day and lain down on a table where the doctors introduced a large needle and tube into him, and did the same with the soldier. Leo was drained almost entirely of blood and had to be dragged back to the barracks.124 However, that German soldier survived thanks to the life-saving transfusion of “inferior” blood. It would be curious to know what that individual soldier thought of the fact that Jewish blood was coursing through his veins, that is, if he was even made aware. And yet, despite being considered “dirty Jews,” the doctors inevitably had to use their blood for the wounded soldiers.125

122 Able, Annetta. Interview by Fay Goodchild. Video recording. Melbourne, Australia. 1 August 1996. USC Shoah Foundation, Visual History Archive, American University of Paris. Interview code: 17484 123 Lukas, Did the Children Cry?, 87. 124 Interview of Leo Lowy 125 Lenga, Ann. Interview by Marci Rosenberg. Video recording. St. Louis, Missouri, USA. 17 June 1997. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archives. Interview code: 29854 42

Extended Isolations Experiments into the effects of long-term isolation wherein subjects were deprived of all human contact and interaction were conducted in the Majdanek concentration camp. Camp survivor, Abraham Wrobel, recounts an experiment he witnessed being conducted on a small boy. He speaks of a cage made of wood within lay a young boy in straw. The camp nurses gave him food but never touched him. They were experimenting to see what would become of the boy as he witnessed all of horrors of the camp. Although they camp doctors did not physically harm the boy, the boy’s eyes were hollow and expressionless.126 It could be that the doctors were experimenting with post-traumatic stress and how such findings might be applied to the young German children suffering Allied bombing raids. However, the purpose of such an experiment is open to speculation. Further experiments with privation and starvation will be examined in the next chapter. The children who became infirm, or too weak to continue, would often be sent to “the barrack of the living dead.” In this barrack, no food was provided. The three-story bunk beds were full of emaciated children who were too weak to even speak; all they could do was wail and scream. Twice a week, the camp guards would come to count the living and throw out the dead like “sacks of potatoes” into the back of a truck, which was headed directly to the crematoria. Often, the children were not yet dead when they were thrown away.127

Reactions to Stimuli Evelin Rider further recounts more of her experiences in Sachsenhausen. On her first day, she recalls being taken to a room with eight other young girls, and then, she says, “the bad things started to happen.” She was taken to an operating room and lain down on a table. The doctors began to take their measurements, poke her body, and test for reactions. The doctors were testing to determine whether different races were more resilient to pain. Thus, many painful tests were conducted all over the left side of her body. Evelin recalls hearing the doctor later say that it was time to give her some gas. One particularly kind-natured nurse told her to be strong, and not to show any pain; this would be the only way for her to survive the camp.128 If the children were able to resist the pain from the

126 Wrobel, Abraham. Interview by Dawn Horwitz. Video recording. New York, NY, USA. 28 March 1997. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, American University of Paris. Interview code: 28153 127 Interview of Eva Kor 128 Interview with Evelin Rider 43

experiments, then it would indicate that they were “fit,” and therefore, worthy of further testing and observation. While painful, it would save them from certain death. Continuing in her interview, Evelin recalls one of the following days when she returned to the same room. This time, there was another very young girl about the same age in the room. The young girl was crying and wailing from all that the doctors had done to her, so much so that the they were unable to continue with their experiments. The little girl would not stop crying, which was of course against the rules laid down by the doctors. Evelin and the girl comforted each other by sharing some simple prayers. (The little girl was named Rachal, aged 8 ½.) After a while, some twenty children were then lined up against the wall. Many of the camp SS doctors observed them, and made another deadly selection by calling out the numbers of the kids. Rachal was selected in Evelin’s place. They exchanged a quick, emotional goodbye knowing that Rachal was going straight to the gas chamber. And after a few others had been called, they were taken away and never came back. When Evelin and the remaining children returned to the basement where they were kept, they were alone in total silence. After this experience, she remembers, the children did not speak to each other anymore.129 It was indeed very difficult to form and maintain any semblance of a normal relationship.

Injections Children were subjected to injections of a staggering array of solutions, chemicals, compounds, and other unknown substances. Historian Richard Lukas mentions in his book, Did The Children Cry?, that there were also institutions in Upper Silesia, notably the Medizinishce Kinderheilandstalt, formerly an insane asylum. Here, Nazi doctors experimented on Polish children by giving them heavy doses of luminal, a phenobarbital used as a hypnotic aid and sedative, from which most of them died. At another institution, one child victim later recalled, “Most of the children at Loben were Polish and they were given spinal injections after which they had to lie in bed for a week and could not keep food down.”130 These kinds of stories are very common. The Nazis were obsessed with finding cures and treatments for the range of diseases ailing the German Volk. The child test subjects were injected with all kinds of unknown substances to test their effectiveness, whether it be therapeutic or lethal in design.

129 Interview with Evelin Rider 130 Lukas, Did the Children Cry?, 89. 44

Eva Slonim recounts that often only one of the twins would be taken and giving an injection and the other would be used as a control.131 Medical experiment survivor Ann Lenga’s brother ended up losing his hair and fingernails from the injections. Quickly his hair thinned and fell out along with his cuticles. He was given so many injections that both of his arms were deep blue and black.132 It would be difficult to precisely determine what effect which drug was having when so many were administered at once. The doctors would not be able to take count of all the variables. Thus, this represents a medically unnecessary and fruitless experiment. Once more, this overuse of experiments borders on the cruel. Nonetheless, some measure of control was accounted for in the experiments, if only perfunctorily.

Naturally, these injections of unknown substances caused the children to fall ill. As their young bodies fought to survive the poisons infused into them, the SS doctors would be ever-present to measure, record, and report their observations. Eva Slonim retells a memory of one injection given to her by Dr. Mengele in her vein that caused her to have severe stomach cramps. Other children were given lethal injections of various chemicals testing the lethality of the compounds.133 Often, the purpose of these experiments with injections was to determine at what dosage the effects became noticeable, and then at what concentrations was it lethal. Further, child survivor Erna Motonaga, recounts the story of her cousin who was injected with various chemicals to test which substances, and in what quantity, would cause a person to go insane. Once the patient had indeed gone insane, they would be dissected to investigate the brain.134 Virtually all the subjects who died as a result of injections were autopsied to glean information as to the side effects of the various toxins. It is understandable, then, that young Leo Lowy was always fearful that someday one of the doctors would have a knife ready to operate on him, but luckily this never happened. He feels immensely grateful that his fears were never realized beyond numerous injections all over his body, including the ribs, the spine, fingers, arms, legs, and neck.135

Eva Kor Moses and her sister Miriam were subjected to many extremely brutal surgeries and experiments by Mengele. Eva later told: "I was given five injections. That evening, I developed an extremely high fever. I was trembling. My arms and my legs were swollen, huge size. Mengele and [four other] doctors came in the next morning. They looked at my fever chart, and Dr. Mengele said, laughingly,

131 Interview with Eva Slonim 132 Interview of Ann Lenga 133 Interview of Eva Slonim 134 Motonaga, Erna Bragman. Interview by Nancy Carpenter. Westminster, California, USA. 19 October 1995. USC Shoah Foundation, Visual History Archive, American University of Paris. Interview code: 4876 135 Interview of Loe Lowy 45

'Too bad, she is so young. She has only two weeks to live."136 Eva Kor fortunately recovered well enough to escape being sent to the gas chambers, and indeed to survive the camp itself.

Eye Color Experiments The ideal Aryan was imagined as having blonde hair and blue eyes. Dr. Mengele desired to find a method to change the color of the iris. Countless measurements and careful recording of various eye colors and shapes had revealed some patterns amongst ethnicities. By creating a solution that would alter one’s eye color, it was believed that this change would be permanent, and thereby, might be passed along to new offspring. In this endeavor, Mengele experimented on several children using an array of solutions for the eyes. Young Irene Zisblatt speaks of one such experiment which she survived. She was selected among fifteen other children because of their “smooth skin.” They were made to undress outside, and were then examined by the doctors who were looking for unblemished bodies. The fifteen children were given eye drops of an unknown solution and placed in a pitch-black dungeon under one of the barracks in Auschwitz. Irene cannot recall exactly how long they were in the total blackness, which is understandable due to the total sensory deprivation. Furthermore, they were not provided any food or water. The only water they had to drink was the water in which they were standing, and in which they had to relieve their bodily functions. After much time had passed, the children were brought back outside into the light and asked what they could see.137 Many of the children had completely lost their ability to see, while others’ sight was forever impaired. Irene was lucky enough that her sight returned to normal after a few days had passed. The doctors were quite unsuccessful in their experiments on eye colors in the hope of creating more blue-eyed Aryans; most of the results ended only in blindness.

Pathogens and Inoculations The next experiment which Irene Zisblatt recounts involved only five of the original fifteen children she was selected with. The five remaining were given injections of a “syrup-like” solution under the fingernails. The doctors were testing the effects of various viruses and how they affected the blood.138 Indeed, the Nazis were obsessed with curing diseases and finding immunities. Two particularly notable

136 Interview with Eva Kor 137 Zisblatt, Irene. Interview by Jennifer Resnick. Video Recording. Pembroke Pines, Florida, USA. 21 October, 1995. USC Shoah Foundation, Visual History Archives, American University of Paris. Interview code: 7832 138 Ibid., 46

cases stand out involving the intentional infection of children with deadly pathogens: Dr. Dohmen’s hepatitis experiments at Sachsenhausen, and Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer’s tuberculosis experiments at Neuengamme.

Dr. Arnold Dohmen was an immunologist who was conducting research into jaundice, which was running rampant through the rank and file of the army on the Eastern front. He was working to identify the pathogen causing hepatitis, which was unknown at that time. He succeeded in culturing a germ that produced the symptoms of jaundice in animal experiments and then wanted to clarify his findings by applying those results on human test subjects. Dr. Dohmen, with the help and advocacy of Dr. Karl Brandt, applied to Himmler for human test subjects. Himmler approved the idea and selected eight prisoners sentenced to death from Auschwitz.139 However, Dohmen ended up selecting twelve boys from Auschwitz, of which eleven were then transferred to Sachsenhausen. Despite Himmler having wanted them to be Polish partisan fighters, Dohmen was able to choose otherwise, showing a degree of ‘leeway’ on the doctors’ part in choosing their test subjects.140

What Dr. Dohmen was seeking in his test subjects was no prior exposure to diseases. That way, the body would not yet have had time to develop immunities. These new human guinea pigs’ immune systems would be as unsullied as possible. As Saul Oren-Hornfeld (born 1929), one of Dr. Dohmen’s test victims, later recounted, the immunologist selected his young subjects in Auschwitz himself from an arriving transport. On the ramp, he asked them: “Children, were you sick? Did you have jaundice?” When the children failed to understand, he pointed to the yellow star on their clothes. “That,” Oren said, “We understood”.141 Once he had his chosen his victims, he could begin experimenting.

Beginning in August 1943, Dr. Dohmen injected into the boys the bacilli culture which he had produced in animals from his earlier experiments. Then, at various times, he performed very painful liver biopsies on the boys. Medical orderly, Bruno Meyer, recalls the experiments. He tells how Dr. Dohmen, while performing a biopsy on one boy, took the long syringe needle out of the child’s body and collected the thick, dark blood into a test tube. Because of the lack of concern about the comfort or safety of the child, the procedure was agonizing. In fact, some pieces of organ tissue which had been ripped completely

139 The Medical Case, 39. 140 Ley, Children as Victims, 212-4. 141 Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen Archive: Viedo interview of Saul Oren-Hornfeld, in ‘Jedesmal musste es ein Wunder sein’, Filmochschule Potsdam, 1996. As translated and presented By Dr. Astrid Ley 47

out of the liver by the needle, floated in the glass.142 Dr. Dohmen’s experiments were cut short, however, as the Allies were closing in around Germany. Despite being sentenced to be executed during the camp’s evacuation, these lucky eleven boys would survive with the help of Norwegian inmates until the Allies liberated the concentration camp.143 Elsewhere, other test victims were not so fortunate.

Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer was a lung specialist conducting research into finding a cure for tuberculosis. For some time, he had been experimenting on adult male prisoners. However, these test subjects had prior exposure, and therefore their immune systems were not pristine for experimentation.144 Beginning in January 1945, twenty children, ten boys and ten girls, were selected for human testing at the Neuengamme concentration camp. Instead of injecting the pathogen directly, Dr. Heissmeyer cut open the fleshy part of their arms and rubbed the incisions with cultures of tubercle bacilli.145 Within a few days, various symptoms had manifested on the children’s bodies. The doctor removed the lymph nodes from the children from which new vaccinations were cultured. The resulting symptoms of the new inoculations which the children received were lesions and cavity formations in their lungs. In addition to consistently running a high fever and suffering severe fatigue, the children were literally holding onto their last breath.

On 18 April 1945, as the Allies were soon to arrive at the gates of Neuengamme, orders were received from on high that the children were to be murdered so that all traces of the experiment might be covered up. To facilitate this, in the middle of the night, the children were awakened and dressed, and told to carry their toys with them, and they were transferred to the sub-camp, Bullenhuserdamm.146 There, the children were taken to a basement, undressed, given morphine injections, and hanged. In the words of Johann Frahm, who put the rope around each victims’ neck, “they looked like pictures hung upon a wall on hooks.”147 The bodies were taken back to Neuengamme where they were cremated on the night of 21 April 1945. So much about these unfortunate children’s death was unnecessary: the transfer to another sub-camp while morbidly ill, being hung instead of receiving a lethal morphine dose, being returned to be cremated, and most poignantly, only nine days before the war’s end.

142 As translated and presented by Dr. Astrid Ley in From Clinic to Concentration Camp: Reassessing Nazi Medical and Racial Research – original source: Eyewitness report of the former medical orderly Bruno Meyer, Bericht uber die Hepatitits Versuche im KZ Sachsenhausen, unpublished typescript, 1960, in Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen Archive: P3 Bruno Meyer, Vol. I, p.1 143 Ley, Children as Victims, 214. 144 Ibid, 214 145 Pasternak, Inhuman Research, 217-9. 146 Lukas, Did the Children Cry?, 89. 147 Pasternak, Inhuman Research, 217-9. 48

Psychological Experiments Not all the experiments performed by the Nazi doctors were physiological in nature; they also conducted cruel psychological experiments on children. These tests can be aptly described as “sadistic games.” Survivor Eva Slonim speaks of an exceptionally horrifying game which the children were forced to play in Auschwitz. They would be made to form a circle and sing a song while one person danced in the middle. The child dancing would then have to ask one of the other children from the circle to dance with them in the center. However, whomever was chosen was taken away to the laboratory. Dr. Mengele was often present to observe how the children reacted psychologically. Some of the children would return after receiving simple injections, while others would be dissected and their organs removed to be sent to Berlin for further analysis. Eva is still able to whistle the tune of that song.148 Similarly, at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Evelin Rider recounts that one day a nurse took her out of the medical building and they walked to another building which was “like an office.” There, instead of operations and surgeries, the kids were called upon to dance to some music.149 In her interview, Evelin is able to hum part of the melody. It is not difficult to imagine that the songs which the children had to sing, with all their consequences, would be forever etched into their memories. Although the tune of the songs which the two survivors remember are different, their dances were the same.

Another cruel example of psychological stress testing comes again from Evelin Rider. She retells a time when she was taken into a room where some doctors in white coats were waiting. One of them was holding what “looked like a baby.” In the room, there was a small pool of murky water into which the doctors threw the “baby.” Quickly, and instinctively, she dashed over and plunged her hands into the dark water to rescue the infant. However, despite her frantic searching, she was unable to retrieve the baby. Evelin believes that this experiment was designed to test the pathology of camp inmates under extreme duress. She remembers others having been subjected to similar experiences.150 The fact that such experiments were even conceived of, and then conducted, on such young and fragile minds highlights the depraved and inhumane imaginations of the Nazi doctors. What they were hoping to ascertain is open to conjecture; or it could simply have been for the entertainment of the children’s tormentors.

The experiments so far described have been callous and cruel. However, they did still follow some semblance of Nazi logic: children were chosen because of their healthy overall stature and because they

148 Interview with Eva Slonim 149 Interview with Evelin Rider 150 Ibid., 49

had not yet suffered from the damaging effects of camp life. Further, for experiments into pathogens and viruses, children were best suited because of their lack of exposure to diseases, thereby, ensuring that most of them would have unspoiled immune systems. This would be much like a blank-slate for the Nazi researchers to glean valuable results from, ostensibly for the betterment of medicine. For the study conducted on discovering the secrets behind twins, children were ideal because they most often arrived together, compared to the rarer instance adult twins arriving simultaneously.

These experiments that the SS physicians administered were painful, intrusive, and unnecessary for the children. Experiencing demeaning and humiliating mistreatment, and combined with an utter lack of compassion from the doctors, the children underwent nerve-racking medical procedures. However, these experiments can still be considered “humane,” in the sense that the experiments were not designed, or intentioned, to be deadly. Here, the doctors still needed living test subjects.

50

Lamentations

Chapter Six

…the Broken Dolls…

She looked inside and saw piles of dead bodies, mostly of children, in this “dead chamber.” One boy was sitting with his ear removed and his severed arm lying next to him. There were also many ears and lungs strewn about. There were other little children that looked like broken dolls, with organs missing and their arms lying around.151

The Fate of Newborns Newborn babies were not only useless to the camp directors as labor, and to the SS doctors as test subjects, they also represented the anathema of Nazi ideology: propagation of inferior sub-humans, their mortal enemies. However, there was still some use for the fetus of a pregnant woman. A young female survivor from Auschwitz, Stephanie Heller, was given a forced abortion while she was six months pregnant. The doctors were experimenting to determine the latest possible time in which an abortion could be performed, ideally having the would-be-mother remain alive. Oftentimes, however, performed with crude instruments and no anesthesia, the fetus would be taken out and disposed of, while the mother, should she survive the operation, would to be sent to the gas chamber.152

Dr. Mengele, driven by his aspiration of unlocking the procreative key for conceiving twins, devised an experiment, wherein, twins would be made to copulate with other twins in hopes of producing yet further twins. Another memory of Eva Slonim narrates a tragic story of a young woman who was expected to give birth to twins; however, only one baby was born. When Dr. Mengele saw this, he became outraged and with a large syringe gave a lethal injection into the newborns neck. Then holding the baby like “a lame rabbit,” he threw it to the other side of the barracks.153 If the woman had, indeed, given birth to twins as Mengele anticipated, then those twin babies, as well as the life of the mother, would likely

151 Interview of Eva Slonim 152 Interview of Stephanie Heller 153 Interview of Eva Slonim 51

have been spared, albeit only for further measuring, blood testing, and experimentation. However, since only one infant was born, then the entire clinical trial was thrown out as a failed experiment, along with the lives of the test victims.

The SS guards and doctors would often take delight in disposing of the infants in the most sadistic of ways. A Jewish nurse who survived Auschwitz said, “Someone would grab a child’s arm, another his legs, and thus little babies were hurled through the air like a length of wood, to land in the blazing pit, while the murderers watched the results of their bravery with great pleasure. Another survivor claimed he saw Höss himself grab a child by the leg and throw him into the fire…”154 Mengele’s experiments into attempting to increase fertility resulted in many unwanted births. However, instead of gassing or using lethal injections, the deaths of the babies born through forced pregnancy were especially brutal and appalling. When, in late 1942, the mass deportations associated with the full implementation of the “Final Solution” began to overburden the extermination camps, the babies were simply thrown into burning pits on top of already smoldering children’s bodies. This was something that SS men routinely did when the five crematoria and fifty-two ovens of Auschwitz became overtaxed. Further, killing infants by bashing their heads against the wall, or a pole, apparently was a regular occurrence at places like Treblinka, Sobibor, and Majdanek.”155

Shirley Fine recounts a soul-wrenching instance during her interview regarding pregnant women in the camp. Numerous women came to Auschwitz already pregnant and gave birth. This was extremely dangerous for the lives of the mother and the newborn, because, if a guard overheard the cries of the baby, then they would both would be immediately killed. When a woman was going into labor, the other women would help the new mother bear her child, and then immediately kill the newborn. Shirley explains that this was, in fact, the most humane option for the women in the camp. Otherwise, the SS guards would take the baby and the mother straight to the gas chambers. Moreover, the women also killed the newborns to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Nazi doctors. Ironically, the women considered it to be a merciful and gentle death, at their “motherly” hands, rather than at the hands of the cruel and heartless SS men.156

154 Lukas, Did the Children Cry?, 75. 155 Ibid., 75. 156 Interview with Shirley Fine 52

The Grievous Experiments

Starvation and Child Cannibalism The Nazis employed starvation as a highly effective weapon in their arsenal of mass murder. From Hermann Pfannmüller‘s “most simple method” of depriving newborns of food instead of “wasting” medical supplies, to the purposeful starving of millions of Soviet POW’s, the Nazis learned a great deal about privation and deprivation.157 During the late-war years, SS doctors began to experiment on the effects of starvation on the bodies and minds of children.

Evelin Rider recounts another experiment conducted in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. A particularly gruesome experiment on starvation, and its effects on children, was to assess at what point one child would eat another. This child cannibalism test was staged with a baby on a table, set with a knife and a fork. Evelin recalls that the body of the baby was mostly black and covered in a dark red-brown color, which she believes was most likely blood and extreme bruising. A nurse brought in a young boy, around the age of eight, who had been purposefully starved for several days. The young boy, being crazed from hunger, took the knife and fork, and cut the baby open and began eating. She feels that she was brought into that room for the purpose of testing what feelings and emotions might be differentiated between the Jews and the Germans.158 The results of this test were obvious before they had begun: that is, starvation drives the mind insane, and hunger will cause a person to become desperate. Far away, another experiment was also confirming these “results” in a similar trial.

In Auschwitz, Ora Markstein, explains how the SS doctors wanted to test how long children would survive with reduced rations, with no food provided whatsoever, and what were the effects of starvation on young minds and bodies. A group of several children had been isolated and deprived for many days. She recalls seeing some SS men throw pieces of bread amongst the group of hungry children, which they fell upon like “wolves.” Afterward, the SS shot the “wolves.”159 The results gathered from such an experiment does not reveal anything new about the ravages of hunger. Perhaps, the Nazi doctors were seeking new insights regarding how to better mitigate the effects of starvation in the cities amongst German children. Nonetheless, these are certainly examples of calculated medical torture masquerading under the guise of legitimate scientific experimentation.

157 Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 119-20 158 Interview with Evelin Rider 159 Markstein, Ora. Interview by Leah Myers. Video recording. Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 22 March 1988. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, American University of Paris. Interview code: 54226 53

Forced Sex Changes Dr. Mengele had an unlimited supply of human beings which could be used as guinea pigs at his disposal, and commanded absolute power over their lives. One of the experiments he pursued was transsexual operations. He hypothesized that, by surgically transplanting the reproductive organs of people, he could force a sex changes between the subjects. Simon Wiesenthal recounts in his memoirs a story about a boy who underwent such a surgery: “I met another man whom the scientists of Auschwitz, after several operations, had successfully turned into a woman. He was then thirteen years old. After the war, a complicated operation was performed on him in a West German clinic. The doctors restored the man’s physical masculinity, but they couldn’t give him back his emotional equilibrium.” 160 Most of the victims of these sex change experiments died from the grisly operations performed without anesthesia.

Creating Conjoined Twins Another unnerving surgical experiment conceived in the mind of Dr. Mengele was the creation of conjoined twins. Numerous sets of twins were selected for this frightening experiment. Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese Twin by connecting blood vessels and organs. The twins would be cut nearly in half along their sides and laid open. The ribs, spine, and other bones would be grafted together, and then the bodies would be sewn back up. Eva Kor Moses recounts a time in the children’s barrack after one of these procedures. She recalled how a pair of Gypsy twins were brought back from Mengele's lab after they had been sewn back to back. The twins screamed day and night until gangrene set in, and, finally, after three days, they died.161 Eva remembers the incessantly wailing of both children throughout those days and nights even after so many years. None of the test subjects of these Siamese twins experiments survived.

Lethal Injections Under the euthanasia program tens of thousands of children had been given “mercy deaths” using lethal dosages of luminal, morphine, or other sedatives.162 This research was continued in Auschwitz where SS doctors sought to develop new lethal serums, as well as effortless methods to murder children

160 Wiesenthal, Murderers Among Us, 146. 161 Interview of Eva Kor 162 Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 54

for examination. A Jewish inmate-doctor at Auschwitz under the supervision of Dr. Mengele, Miklos Nyiszli, recounts the moment he discovered “the most monstrous secret,”

“…still more corpses of twins were sent to me. They [SS] delivered me four pairs from the Gypsy Camp; all four were under ten years old. I began the dissection of one set of twins and recorded each phase of my work.

I removed the brain pan. Together with the cerebellum I extracted the brain and examined them. Then followed the opening of the thorax and the removal of the sternum. Next, I separated the tongue by means of an incision made beneath the chin. With the tongue came the esophagus, with the respiratory tracts came both lungs. I washed the organs in order to examine them more thoroughly. The tiniest spot or the slightest difference in color could furnish valuable information. I made a transverse incision across the pericardium and removed the fluid.

Next, I took out the heart and washed it. I turned it over and over in my hand to examine it. In the exterior coat of the left ventricle was a small pale red spot caused by a hypodermic injection, which scarcely differed from the color of the tissue around it. There could be no mistake. The injection had been given with a very small needle. Without a doubt a hypodermic needle. For what purpose had he received the injection? Injections into the heart can be administered in extremely serious cases, when the heart begins to fail. I would soon know. I opened the heart, starting with the ventricle. Normally the blood contained in the left ventricle is taken out and weighed. This method could not be employed in the present case, because the blood was coagulated in a compact mass. I extracted the coagulum with the forceps and brought it to my nose. I was struck by the characteristic odor of chloroform! The victim had received an injection of chloroform in the heart, so that the blood of the ventricle, in coagulating, would deposit on the valves and cause instantaneous death by heart failure. 55

My discovery of the most monstrous secret of the Third Reich’s medical science made my knees tremble. Not only did they kill with gas, but also with injections of chloroform into the heart….163

Annetta Able, one of the surviving twins, tells about the lethal injections given to other children in the barracks. The doctors gave injections into the hearts of children, especially twins, to see if one, or both, would die. If the injections resulted in the death of one twin, then both hearts would be removed and sent to laboratories in Berlin. If both twins survived the injections and the observation period, then they would be subjected to further experiments until their bodies gave out. When one of the twins died, their bodies were dissected and eventually the remnant pieces were thrown into the crematoria ovens.164 While Mengele was the man in charge, he could not personally attend to every experimental procedure. Annetta Able remembers that Mengele was the superior of several other Jewish-inmate doctors. Everything was under his supervision. While he may not have personally conducted many of the experiments, he would give his orders to the other doctors.165 And so it was that many of the children’s bodies were dissected and separated apart for further study. Miklos recalls that he had to keep any organs of possible scientific interest, so that Dr. Mengele could examine them.166 However, not all the body parts were considered useful for examination purposes; the excess body parts would be tossed into the ovens.

Surgeries Without Anesthesia The Nazi doctors conducted their experiments and performed their surgeries without any concern about the excruciating pain suffered by the test victims. Using unclean, and often crude instruments, the doctors and medical staff hacked, sawed, and dissected children during unnecessary and tortuous operations. The distressing case of Valentina Zachini, which involved the medical torture of this girl by physiologists, was recorded on film, and has been documented by author Ernst Klee.167 Valentina was diagnosed with microcephalia and experimented on by Nazi doctors in 1942 to test pain sensitivity, amongst other reflex reactions. The doctors filmed Valentina’s movements and reflexes as they poked,

163 Nyiszli, Miklos. Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. Penguin UK, 2012. Pg. 55-58 164 Interview of Annetta Able 165 Interview of Annetta Able 166 Nyiszli, Miklos. Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. Penguin UK, 2012. Pg. 58 167 “Jeder Mensch hat einen Name”: Legal and Ethical Dimensions of Human Experiments under National Socialism. Psychiatrie (Stuttgart, Germany). 2010;7(4):255-260. 56

prodded, cut, and operated, causing her extreme pain.168 Later, when she was on the dissection slab, she was cut open by the same doctor who would later, in 1945, excise the lymph glands of the twenty children killed at the Bullenhusen Damm school.169

Irene Zisblatt recounts a fourth experiment performed upon her in Auschwitz which involved removing the inmates’ tattooed numbers. Now, just two girls remained from her original group of fifteen. They were lain down on rusty tables, and the doctors gave them more painful injections. The doctors began cutting and pulling out the fleshy parts of their arms. Later, she learned that SS men have “SS” tattooed under their arms. This experiment was for the purpose of learning how to remove tattoos. She recalls being there for many hours over many days. The doctors used knives and blades without anesthesia, allowing the children to openly bleed. She recalls fading in and out of consciousness due to the loss of blood and the excruciating pain. Eventually, the doctors finished their work and removed the skin and flesh where the tattoo had been.170 As the Allies were steadily encircling Germany, the Nazi authorities feared retributive vengeance. The SS was panicked to cover up their crimes and distance themselves from Hitler’s regime. Being able to properly remove a tattoo would mean a much greater chance of survival for an SS doctor or soldier after the war was over and their crimes discovered.

One interesting and notorious figure was that of the Nazi doctor Herta Oberheuser of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, the one woman amongst the twenty-three accused at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial.171 Evidence that Oberheuser was involved in the forced sterilizations of healthy prisoners, and on children as young as eight years old, was overlooked at the Medical Trial, as were her euthanasia killings with phenol injections.172 However, one of the survivors of Oberheuser’s macabre surgical experiments was Hedy Epstein, who describes in detail one of the experiments conducted on her. The Nazi doctor would use rusty knives to open up sections of her legs, and then insert foreign objects such as dirt or rusty nails, and then sew the openings up again. Most people who underwent these kinds of experiments did not survive the blood poisoning or the subsequent infections.173 These experiments were clearly unnecessary as the results were already known: dirty foreign objects within the blood became

168 Ernst Klee, Deutsche Medizin im Dritten Reich. Karrieren vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2001), 116-19 169 Weindling, Victims and Survivors, 41. 170 Interview of Irene Zisblatt 171 Weindling, Paul. Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: from Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent. Springer, 2004. Pg. 174 172 Weindling, Nazi Medicine, 241-2. As referenced from BStU ZM 1639 Akte 2 173 Epstein, Hedy. Interview by Julie Heifetz. Video recording. St. Louis, Missouri, USA. 7 December 1995. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archives, American University of Paris. 57

infected resulting in the death of the host body. That so many children underwent such experiments is far beyond the rational scope of medical research. Another experience of Mengele’s torturous experiments is related by the child survivor, Ann Lenga. She recalls one experiment that she saw in the children’s barracks. Dr. Mengele, using a blade, would cut open the children’s bodies and then leave them to observe how long the young body can survive with various degrees of dissections, lacerations, blood-letting, and organ removal. Ann recounts that her brother was taken one day and drained of blood. The next day the doctors came back for him but he hid in the snow outside of the barracks. When the doctors were unable to find him, they took another young boy whom never returned. Out of the original one hundred children that she was in the barracks, with only five survived.174 Eva Slonim recalls one young boy who was in the twin barracks with her who was operated on and poorly sewn back together. Eva tells that boy was crying and howling in tremendous pain. When she went to look what was wrong with the boy, she saw the entire side of his body open up and his organs spilled out. He then, of course, died.175 Many of the children, after surviving the operations, finally succumbed after returning to the children’s barracks. In fact, the bodies of all the children whom had died during the night from the previous day’s experiments were taken away in a cart every morning to the crematoria.

Mutilation Often the experiments and operations were not within a realm of comprehension for the many young children. Some of the procedures were simply sadistic and torturous. Stephanie Heller recounts a time when there was a couple of young girls from the Netherlands that were sent to the medical center. They were separated and one of them was operated on. Stephanie had to take the body out. It was dreadful, she recalls, that this young girl’s body was so mutilated.176 Annetta Able further comments that oftentimes Mengele, and his colleagues, also removed and sent body parts such as limbs and skin tissue, which had been removed without anesthesia or clean tools.177

Sometimes only one part of the body was desired, therefore, that limb or organ would be severed and the rest of the body thrown away. Dora Freilich recalls experiments on girls of various ages ranging from small children to teenagers. The girls not yet of mature age were given many different medicines

174 Interview of Ann Lenga 175 Interview with Eva Slonim 176 Interview of Stephanie Heller 177 Interview of Annetta Able 58

and then cut open to see how their young bodies reacted. Often the young ones were cut up and the remnants of their bodies would be thrown into the fires.178

However, before the pieces and parts were thrown away, they would accumulate in bloody piles in a separate room from the operation table. Eva Slonim narrates discovering one of these ghastly heaps. Her job in the twin barracks was to collect the excrement every day from the night before and empty it into a latrine. One day as she was doing this, she passed one of the medical buildings. As she did so, she walked by a door that was slightly ajar. This door was always locked, but on that particular day, it was not. Curious, she looked inside and saw piles of dead bodies, mostly of children, in this “dead chamber.” One boy was sitting with his ear removed and his severed arm lying next to him. There were also many ears and lungs strewn about. There was one pile of small legs, and another pile of small arms. There were other little children that looked like broken dolls, with organs missing and their arms lying around.179

Body Harvesting Many amongst the secret segments of the Nazi elite had a penchant for goods and materials made from the bodies of Jews. Erna Motonaga tells that in Vienna there was a very big “sort of” hospital, or conservatorium, with lots of Jewish children. The children were force fed continuously, even after the kids cried from being stuffed full. Once the children had grown fat, the SS doctors would kill the children and harvest their body fat, which was used in creating specialized soap for high-end customers in Austria.180

Irene Zisblatt explains of another experiment when her and four other “smoothed skin” children were taken to Majdanek concentration camp. She soon found out why they had been chosen for their fair skin. They were going to be skinned and turned into lampshades, or gloves, or other various items. She was lucky that the SS woman, Elsa Koch, who had a special interest in human skin, was not at the camp that day for whatever reason. Irene and the other four girls were then sent back to Auschwitz.181 These “lucky ones” turned out to be very lucky indeed.

178 Freilich, Dora. Interview by Sally Alsher. Video recording. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. 6 November 1996. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archives, American University of Paris. Interview code: 22522 179 Interview with Eva Slonim 180 Interview of Erna Bragman Motonaga 181 Interview of Irene Zisblatt 59

Conclusion

“The tests were not only criminal but also, from a scientific point of view, incompetent!”182 --Telford Taylor

Reflections The stories of the children who survived medical experimentation within the concentration camps are heart-wrenching. However, their stories of pain and suffering by the hands of the SS physicians offers valuable insights into the experiences of survival within the camps, especially that of children. Because much of Holocaust academia is concerned with documenting the lives of the victims, it was necessary to illuminate some of the darker avenues of research. Numerous outstanding books, and articles, have been published discussing the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, the Nazi doctors, and their experiments on human beings. Surprisingly, little research has focused on the child victims of Nazi medical experimentation, and what they experienced.

How, and why, were children eventually selected to be used as guinea pigs was not a linear progression. First, the lives of children had been thoroughly degraded through the bureaucratic institutions on the Nazi state, namely the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Diseases, and the T4-euthanasia program. Experimentation on human beings became acceptable through the activates and directions of the Ahnenerbe and the Institute for Scientific Research for War Purposes. Under the direct involvement of Himmler, the SS would become the sole provider of human test subjects. After the conflagration of Nazification had removed the ethical, and moral, barriers inhibiting human experimentation, numerous physicians and doctors embraced the opportunity.

Medical experiments were designed and implemented by the Nazi doctors themselves. To receive human test subjects, they filed applications via the institutions of the Ahnenerbe and WwZF and waited for ultimate approval from Himmler himself. Initially, the experiments conducted were related directly towards war purposes; however, soon they would take different directions into disease inoculations,

182 Pasternak, Alfred. Inhuman Research: Medical Experiments in German Concentration Camps. (2006). 60

genetic research, experimental surgical operations, and extensive measurements “documenting” the differences in races.

Of notable notoriety were three doctors mentioned in this thesis: Dr. Arnold Dohmen, the immunologist, and his hepatitis research involving eleven boys at Sachsenhausen; Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer, the lung specialist, and his tuberculosis experiments on twenty ill-fated young children at Neuengamme; and Dr. Mengele, the geneticist, with his torturous experiments on twins, especially children. While human beings were used for research testing in almost all the major concentration camps from the onset of the war, children were used at only a few camps, and relatively late on the timeline of the Nazi era. That children were eventually used it is not surprising considering the new, radicalized vision of medicine.

It is a curious that the Nazis would use “dirty Jew” blood for the analysis and testing of various medical hypotheses. Further, that German soldiers received life-saving blood transfusions drained from Jewish children is intriguing, especially when considering the heavy indoctrination espoused by Nazi ideology. However, it is currently unknown how many were even made aware of this taboo and “defiling” practice. The controversy of using “dirty blood” was never really discussed. Some doctors, such as Dr. Ernst Grawitz, did voice their objections to using “sub-humans” to derive results applicable to the “superior” races. The infallibility of the racial logic of Nazi doctrine as posited as an argument in opposition to using “primitives” to learn about the “civilized.” This inconvenient controversy was apparently pushed to the wayside as it was rationalized that the victims, although “sub-human,” were still human at a biological level. The Nazis violated their own stringent rules regarding “pure” and “dirty” blood as necessity and practicality came to supersede the Nazi arrogance of wasting potential test subjects and workers.

Children were first used as test subjects in mid-1943. Until this time, adult males, and later females, were the groups to be used for testing. However, with the tide of the war turning against Germany, all those healthy adults were needed for war production, thus leaving the doctors searching for new sources to fill their quotas of human guinea pigs. As the mass deportations of the Holocaust began to bring in droves of potential subjects, they would have all the bodies they needed. They would find the solution, indeed the ideal solution, to their stringent requirements for healthy, and pristine, human clinical trials. Children were chosen because of their young age and the consequent likelihood of not yet being exposed to diseases and malnutrition, thus being suitable for testing vaccinations. Child twins were specifically sought after by Mengele for his research. Young twins usually arrived at Auschwitz together thus making them prime candidates. 61

What the children actually experienced while enduring these immoral experiments is devastating. However, as difficult as it is to hear, it is important to listen to their stories, and to understand how they were able to survive the horrors. The stories and experiences of these children are still a rather “dark” area in Holocaust research, that is, not much in-depth research has been carried out. While many children survived the camps to tell their story of suffering, the agonizing experiences lived by the children as victims of Nazi medical experimentation is a challenging topic to research. However, this approach has illuminated some of those darker depths of human tragedy during the Holocaust.

62

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