KARL GEBHARDT AND HERTA OBERHEUSER: THE ROAD TO MEDICAL MURDER

CHRISTINE ELEANOR CLARKE

Master of Arts in History Nipissing University

2013

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Nazi doctors violated the inherent trust and intimacy of the medical profession by conducting experiments on non-consenting concentration camp prisoners. Focusing on Dr. and Dr. Herta Oberheuser, it became clear that perpetrators of medical crimes shared sociological and biographical factors that affected their decision to join and participate in the violence of in spite of the demands placed upon them by their profession to heal and not harm. Furthermore, their work relationship, shaped by Nazi and gender ideology, had a significant impact on how they operated within the concentration camp system, and later, how they were perceived in an American military trial. By examining a male superior and a female subordinate, the influence of gender was revealed not only in the primary court documentation, but also in the current historiography. Connecting sociology with biography enables a more complete understanding of the historic individual that proves invaluable given that many more recent interpretations of Gebhardt and especially Oberheuser have been coloured by sentiment and moral judgment.

Clarke 1

The relationship between doctors and patients is special in that it requires trust and intimacy uncommon to many professional relationships. Through this connection, doctors are able to identify, explain, and remove pain. 1 Among the many questions regarding the medical experiments to be undertaken at the behest of the Nazi regime, is the question of how doctors could cause pain and deliberately think up ways to cause pain, when it is their professional calling to diagnose and get rid of it. Though factors vary by individual perpetrators, in the cases of Karl Gebhardt and Herta Oberheuser, generational cohorts, gender, and biography provide significant indicators as to what would motivate successful, intelligent medical professionals to make of a healing art, a killing method.

While the majority of doctors under the Nazi regime (1933-1945) led benign wartime existences, Dr. Karl Gebhardt (1897-1948) and Dr. Herta Oberheuser (1911-1978) participated in medical experiments sanctioned by the Nazi regime for the purposes of improving battle conditions for German soldiers. They used the inmates of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, located north of , as test subjects in a number of these experiments between 1942-1943.

For instance, to test the effectiveness of sulfanilamide, a drug used to combat infections sustained on the front lines; Gebhardt and Oberheuser would inflict a wound on the patient’s leg and inject the healthy tissue with bacteria such as streptococcus, gas gangrene, and tetanus. Such wounds were deemed inaccurate to battle conditions. To better simulate wounds attained on the battlefield, blood flow was restricted to the area of operation and pieces of wood or glass were introduced to aggravate the infection. Some patients received sulfanilamide. Others received different drugs.2 Some received no medication. Patients did die as a result of this experiment.

1 Oliver Garceau, “The Morals of .” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 363 (1966), 60-69, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1036469 (accessed July 28, 2013) 60. 2 Indictment, Count Two–War Crimes. October 25, 1946, Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10, vol.1, 12, http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/NT_war-

Others experienced severe pain and, in many cases, remained ill for extended periods of time afterward. In certain cases, additional reparative surgeries were required.3

In the case of Nazi , doctors were among the earliest, most eager and in some instances, most zealous perpetrators of war crimes. Statistically, joined the ranks of the Third Reich in large numbers very early on in the regime. Nearly 73 percent of male physicians between 1933-1945 were affiliated with the Nazis.4 Of that 73 percent, 35 percent were involved in the National Socialist German Doctors Association (Nationalsozialistischer

Deutscher Ärztebund or NSDÄB). For women, 52 percent of physicians were affiliated with

Nazism, while 10 percent were involved in the NSDÄB, impressive given that many women were removed from or left practicing medicine and returned to their homes to practice domesticity.5

Where gender, generational cohorts and biography are key, is in methodology. Nazism, marked by fascist ultra-nationalism, anti-semitism, biological/racial tenets, and the desire to create a Utopian society made up of a racially superior citizenry, is also a very gendered political ideology.6 When applied to a society, Nazism creates very gendered roles for individual citizens.

Herta Oberheuser and Karl Gebhardt were both working within this social system, not only as individuals, but in relation to each other. Using both Gebhardt and Oberheuser provides an opportunity to compare and contrast the differences experienced and exhibited by female and male perpetrators, as analyzing them separately, in accordance with Joan Scott’s notion that gender is relational, would provide an incomplete picture of the one, while sacrificing the other

criminals_Vol-I.pdf (accessed August 6, 2012). 3 Selection from the Argumentation of the Prosecution, Extract from the Closing Brief Against Defendant Gebhardt. Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10, vol.1, 358- 360, http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/NT_war-criminals_Vol-I.pdf (accessed August 6, 2012),. 4 Michael H. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 252. 5 Ibid. 6 Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2002), 10.

entirely.7 Gender then, is the relationship between the roles of men and women, in addition to how these roles developed within a Nazi cultural context. In the cases studied by Wendy Lower and Irmtraud Heike, the expectations of female perpetrators differed greatly from those of men.

Women were treated more harshly than men in post-war and legal contexts. At the same time, present day historians have also been guilty of gendering subjects and creating character assumptions based on gendered material. Michael Kater is a principal offender when concerning

Oberheuser’s portrayal as an evil, single-mindedly driven, cold woman. Meanwhile, when considering Gebhardt as a subject, his masculinity is often explained through his military experiences, or through his work relationship with Herta Oberheuser. In many ways, using a gendered approach inextricably links these subjects together. Gebhardt’s masculinity is in part tied to Herta Oberheuser as he was the one to seek her out and take her on as his assistant. Herta

Oberheuser’s portrayal during and after the war has a great deal to do with her medical past, a past she could not have lived were it not for the experiences made possible by Gebhardt. A gendered approach is also important in order to establish a clearer understanding of gender identity, particularly concerning Oberheuser. Bonnie Smith has argued that the gender characteristics of female professional historians, though the same is applicable to medical sciences at a university and professional level, were more blurred and has suggested that the identities of these past women academics could not be as neatly defined by the feminine and masculine dichotomy.8 As Oberheuser steps outside of typical feminine norms of behaviour, it is necessary to analyze how, why and to what degree she deviated from gendered norms.

7 Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review, vol. 91. 5 (1986), 1053-1075, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1864376 (Accessed January 28, 2013) 1054. 8 Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2000), 186.

In terms of generational cohorts, it would be negligent to deny or ignore the impact of

Gebhardt and Oberheuser’s upbringing on their medical crimes. Michael Wildt, Michael Mann and Hilary Earl have all clearly demonstrated that perpetrators, outside of their Nazi related killings, had ordinary lives with a few common, extraordinary factors that made entering the murderous ranks of the Nazi party less morally or ethically questionable. The frameworks expounded upon by Wildt, Mann, and Earl can be applied to the early lives of Oberheuser and

Gebhardt. While Gebhardt can be considered an old fighter, a survivor of World War I, a student radical who attended the Nazi Putsch in 1923, and thus can easily be slotted into the existing framework, so too can Oberheuser, in spite of her gender and in spite of her lack of martial experience. Obviously too young to participate in the war, had her gender permitted, Oberheuser was old enough to witness her father leave for the front, she was old enough to recall the effects of the depression, and was just as vulnerable, via her relationship with her father and the result of the war, to fall victim to early Nazi propaganda.

For the few reasons briefly listed above, biography is absolutely necessary to even begin understanding the motivations of perpetrators. Without biography, the actions carried out by

Gebhardt and Oberheuser lack context. Regardless of deed, they are individuals who made decisions, were swayed, acted, reacted, and ultimately did so toward some end. For Gehhardt, the slide from healer to murderer was ideological. He bought into the ideology and as a result, he was able to carry out orders that moved him higher and higher in the Nazi hierarchy. For Herta

Oberheuser, it is clear that she was motivated by her career desires. Her initial entry into the party may well have been out of obligation, but she certainly benefitted from her Nazi affiliation between 1941-1945. She managed to achieve career goals and advance in her career, when the careers of many women were stagnating or returning to a more domestic center. Historians such

as Michelle Mouton, Robert Lifton, and Paul Weindling, in addition to Lower, Heike, Earl, and

Kater have all made use of biographical elements in order to expand on the area of perpetrator motivations.

For the sake of career and ideological aspirations, Oberheuser and Gebhardt committed medical crimes. Their work, dictated by the higher echelons of the Nazi party, makes them agents of a violent regime. Their motivations and ultimately, their decision to enter into and undertake medical work that would surely result in mass deaths, is a product of the historical time and place they inhabited. By understanding the politicization of the medical profession, the fulfillment and acting out of complex gender roles, and the impact of generational socialization, underlying motivational factors for murder become increasingly clear.

During the Nazi era, medical sciences and political ideology became dependent on one another. The state appropriated medical language to outline racist and discriminatory policies that aided in the corruption of medical ideals. For many Nazi doctors, Gebhardt and Oberheuser included, the medicalized language of Nazi ideology and policy opened the door to dangerous experimental medicine, to higher social status, to a greater social role, and to careers with increased prestige.

When the Nazis ascended to power in 1933, they drafted a number of laws limiting the rights of various ‘other’ social groups. The most important laws to the medical context are the

Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny (1933), the Law for the Protection of

Blood and Honour (1935) and the backdated legislation that would legalize the use of euthanasia on hereditarily ill patients, otherwise known as the T4 Program (1939).9 The law for the

Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny states that anyone suffering from any of nine

9Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945, (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1993), 48-49.

vaguely described hereditary conditions (including blindness, deafness, epilepsy, severe alcoholism, and schizophrenia) could “be sterilized by a surgical operation if, according to the experience of medical science there [was] a high probability that his offspring [would] suffer from serious physical or mental defects of a hereditary nature”.10 The Law for the Protection of the Blood indicated that Jews and Germans or those of kindred blood were not to intermarry and were not to have sexual relations outside marriage.11 The backdated T4 legislation granted doctors Bouhler and Brandt the authority direct from Hitler’s desk, to expand the program of

‘mercy deaths’ to patients who were deemed incurable by select physicians.12 These policies were necessary because hereditarily healthy families were having one and two children while

“countless numbers of inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions [were] reproducing unrestrainedly while their sick and asocial offspring burden the community”.13

Worth in was determined not solely by race, but by notions of healthy and unhealthy, categories under which race (as a genetic and hereditary concept) were classified. As such, the previously mentioned laws relied on the medical knowledge and abilities of physicians in order to be fully enacted.

In 1895, Alfred Ploetz, a leader in the field of eugenics, “warned against the various kinds of social ‘counterselection’ (such as bloody war, revolution, welfare for the sick or inferior) that led to racial degeneration”.14 In a post 1919 world, Germany had lost the extremely bloody First World War, was thrust into a severe economic depression, and was politically polarized. According to this school of thought, Germany was already racially degenerating. It

10 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, July 14, 1933, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi- dc.org/pdf/eng/English30.pdf. 11Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, September 15, 1935, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/nurmlaw2.html. 12 Signed Letter by Hitler Authorizing Euthanasia Killings, backdated September 1, 1939, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English37Intro.pdf. 13 Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945, 138. 14 Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 15.

had lost millions of valuable young soldiers, its people were struggling to find work, to feed themselves and survive, in addition to which, the possibility that the Weimar government was to blame for their hardships was actively circling. For these reasons, it is not difficult to see why

German social Darwinists “rejected the optimistic laissez-faire free-market liberalism” that was popular in victorious Britain and America, and “stressed instead the need for state intervention to stop what they saw as the beginnings of a supposed ‘degeneration of the human species’.”15

By 1933, Hereditary Health Courts were established to act as an authority on who should be sterilized. The health courts were comprised of two doctors, one who was an administrative health officer, the other had to be knowledgeable in the field of hereditary health.16 The third member of the judge’s panel was a district judge. All three had close ties to the regime.17

Medical sciences were used by the regime because they lent it authority, scientific objectivity, and the appearance of neutrality. In a way, the appearance of neutrality and “legal reassurance for the masses” provided by the Hereditary Health courts, gave the medical community the safety and legitimacy needed to carry out “the successful implementation of the policy of exclusion”.18

Doctors were absolutely indispensable to the Nazi Reich. The training they received “set a premium on ‘objectivity,’[was] unencumbered by moral ‘value judgments’ [and] in itself encouraged the idea that human beings were merely aggregates of functioning parts, or of more or less imperfect genetic ‘material’”.19 The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased

Progeny was a first step in government intervention in fertility, demographic control, and social

15 Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, 14. 16 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, (USA: Basic Books, 2000), 25. 17 Ibid. 18 Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to The , 20. 19 Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945, 56.

valuation, all of which were directly linked to ideas of social Darwinism, Mendelian genetics, and Lombroso’s ideas regarding biology’s link to criminality.20 Darwin, Mendel, and Lombroso all stressed the importance of environment and nature on the development of living beings, therefore providing the framework for a school of thought dedicated to proving that the inferiority of certain human groups was innate rather than acquired.21 There was a health court, a legal/medical body designed to select individuals worthy of reproduction and life, based on the expert, medically objective opinion of politicized physicians. From the very beginning of the

Reich, doctors conducted selections and in doing so regulated life and death. The hereditary health courts and the decisions made by the doctors sitting as judges, created the precedent for selections in concentration and death camps. The same is true for the laws protecting German blood and the laws legalizing euthanasia. By medicalizing social ills and race, murder could be standardized and ignored while serving the eugenic aims of Nazism. In the case of mentally ill children, doctors would commonly provide an overdose of a sedative in order to induce pneumonia, which was “virtually incurable”.22 Families of the murdered individual would receive letters claiming that their loved one had been transferred to a new asylum, had taken ill, and died in spite of medical intervention. The letter then explained that the corpses had to be cremated in order to prevent the spread of infectious diseases prevalent during times of war.23 In

20 Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to The Final Solution, 2-3. Gregor Mendel, known for his genetic experiments on pea plants, posited a theory of heredity that was unaffected by physical environment. This theory was built upon by later German scientists and eventually became the basis of the “germ plasm” that rendered select groups (the mentally ill, Jews, Gypsies) irreparably inferior. Lombroso, the father of criminal anthropology, through measuring the human body sought to determine physical markers of criminality and prove that criminals were born and not made. His scientific approach toward the identification and prosecution of supposed criminals effectively marginalized groups such as the mentally ill and Gypsies. Lombroso and later Medelians used science as a means of unequivocally p