Heinrich Rindfleisch MD – a Doctor at Majdanek Concentration Camp
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Heinrich Rindfleisch MD – a doctor at Majdanek concentration camp Background and higher academic education Heinrich Friedrich Rindfleisch was born on 3 March 1916 in Strasbourg as the only child of the Reichsbank inspector, August Heinrich Rindfleisch and his wife Lucie, née Müller. As Alsace and Lorraine, in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, were returned to France, and the local branch of the Reichsbank was closed down, the Rindfleisch family moved to Berlin shortly after the end of the First World War. The bank clerk, August Rindfleisch, had the characteristics typical of a bureaucrat from the times of Emperor Wilhelm II (the period before the First World War) – conservatism and a nationalist world view. It is confirmed by the opinion from October 1934, in which Rindfleisch describes his family home as nationalist. Rindfleisch attended primary school in the Berlin district of Lichtenberg, and then a Reform Real gymnasium, from which he graduated in 1935 with a good final examination result. In the summer of 1935, he began to study medicine at the University of Berlin. With 9,000 students, the University of Berlin was then the biggest academic institution in Germany. He dropped his studies after a year in order to perform a duty of a six-month state labour service in the National Labour Service (RAD). At that time, he was also awarded the Bronze Sturmabteilung (SA) Sports Badge and he took part in the military parade at the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) congress in 1936 in Nuremberg. After resuming his studies he passed a physics examination as well as a state examination in medicine with the grade ‘good’. On 8 May 1942 he received a licence to practice medicine, and in the same year, under the supervision of Prof. Dr Werner Haase from the university surgery clinic in Berlin, he wrote a doctoral thesis ‘The Treatment of Joint Pain with Strontium’. He received the grade ‘very good’ for his thesis and was given a degree of Doctor of Medicine. From July 1940 until the end of 1941 he worked as a trainee doctor, and then as an assistant doctor in the university surgery clinic in Berlin. Since May 1942, directly after a longer leave, he underwent an almost eight-week basic training in the Reserve Sanitary Battalion of the Waffen-SS in Oranienburg. From July to August 1942 he took part in the training for candidates for the position of commander of the SS Reserve Sanitary Battalion in Oranienburg, which was organised for the tenth time, as he was supposed to become a commander of the SS Corps after the next promotion to the rank of second lieutenant. By the end of the war, Rindfleisch had reached the rank of SS reserve lieutenant. In 1934, as an 18-year-old student, he applied for admission to the local SS unit No. 10/42 in Berlin. In fact, his path to the SS, as well as his activity in its ranks until he was 1 promoted to SS commander in 1943, is impossible to reconstruct. The SS identity card confirms his membership since 1939. Due to a vision defect he was not fully able to perform military service and was therefore not sent to the front, but he was recommended to work as a camp doctor in an increasingly developing system of concentration camps. Doctor in a concentration camp His first job as a camp doctor was in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. However, on the basis of the available records, it is impossible to determine an exact period of his activity in the camp. Therefore, he belongs to the group of the camp doctors, who, in the years 1941 to 1942, when there was a large personnel fluctuation, were in Sachsenhausen for a short period of time. During the one of police interrogations on 20 February 1968, Rindfleisch said that in 1942 he was conscripted into the Waffen-SS formation in Oranienburg, and then was a garrison doctor at the Reserve Sanitary Battalion, which was stationed there. Although he denies any connection with the camp, it is very likely that before his work in Ravensbrück, perhaps even within the time of the training for reserve commanders in the summer of 1942, he worked as a doctor in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for a short period of time. Information about him working there is provided only by an account of a former prisoner, Witold Zegarski, who mentions Rindfleisch in connection with operations performed in the camp hospital. Rindfleisch took part in operations that seriously affected the health of the victims. Rindfleisch himself treated this as an additional training in the field of surgery. In August 1942, directly after the training for candidates for a position of commander of the reserve, Rindfleisch was promoted to the rank of master sergeant, and he was transferred to the men’s camp in KL Ravensbrück as a camp doctor. Since August 1941 the camp had its own camp hospital. During his service as a camp doctor, Ravensbrück was ‘purged’ of the Jews. Numerous transports of Jewish prisoners left Ravensbrück heading towards Auschwitz. In addition, prisoners, who were considered ‘permanently incapable of work’, were subjected to selections carried out by camp doctors. These prisoners were deported to other camps or, as part of the ‘14f13’ action (a code name for murdering mentally ill and incapable of work concentration camp prisoners), a special medical commission sent them to Hartheim death camp near Linz, where they were being murdered with gas. In the preparatory proceedings conducted by the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg against the former commander of a prisoner division in the men’s camp KL Ravensbrück, witnesses accused Rindfleisch of active participation in the killing of prisoners. In contrast, the former prisoner, Karl Gerber, who worked as an assistant in the camp hospital, expressed in his unpublished diary a positive opinion about Rindfleisch. Also another prisoner, Helmut 2 Simolka, testified: ‘Dr Rindfleisch helped us as much as he could. He and the dentist, Dr Berger, illegally delivered medicines to the camp, he tried to make the prisoners receive better, more varied meals. He decided to use Block 5 as a hospital for patients during the period of convalescence.’ Another person who had a positive opinion about Rindfleisch was his boss, a garrison doctor, who, on 20 November 1942, proposed to promote Rindfleisch to the position of a second lieutenant of SS. What drew attention of Rindfleisch’s boss was his ‘particularly good behaviour and upbringing’. It is not known whether Rindfleisch took credit for successes of two Czech doctors, who, since the autumn of 1942, as prisoners have worked in the camp hospital and contributed to better care for ill prisoners. Until March 1, 1943 Rindfleisch was transferred to the KL Lublin concentration camp, where he worked as an assistant camp doctor. However, it is not clear how long he stayed there. On the one hand, the Central Office in Ludwigsburg stated that he stayed there until July 1944, when the camp was finally closed down on July 22, 1944. On the other hand, the former prisoner, Roman Olszyna, testified during the hearing that on April 8, 1944 Rindfleisch and ten other doctors- prisoners were transferred from Majdanek concentration camp to Gross-Rosen concentration camp located in Lower Silesia. According to the information provided by Wehrmacht, he was assigned to the headquarters of Gross-Rosen concentration camp on May 4, 1944. However, it is certain that during the time of the largest number of transports and the extermination conducted in the years 1943-1944, Rindfleisch worked as a doctor at Majdanek and took part in crimes committed there. During the preliminary hearings conducted by the Central Office in Ludwigsburg, as well as during the Majdanek trials in Düsseldorf (1975- 1981) many witnesses testified that Rindfleisch was killing prisoners himself. Some of the testimonies concerned the so-called Spritzen, i.e. killing prisoners by injecting them with evipan, phenol, air or petrol, which was practised in many camps. The victims of this method were mainly ill prisoners as well as other prisoners sentenced to death by the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). Already during the first trial against members of SS crew from Majdanek, which took place in November 1944 in Lublin, one of the witnesses said ‘at 7 a.m. Dr Rindfleisch took evipan ampoules with himself, went to the camp hospital and there he chose a victim at his discretion and killed them.’ The witness testified that during 7 months when he had to work in a pharmacy, about 7,000 evipan ampoules were used. A Polish witness, Maria Kaufmann-Grasowska, accused Rindfleisch of the fact that in the summer of 1943, after he was asked to take care of a 10 or 11-year-old boy suffering from diphtheria, he slit his throat. Directly after this murder, Rindfleisch, leaving the camp hospital, said ‘he is cured now’. It should be added that during the interrogation of the camp’s hospital medical assistant, Willi Reinartz, he said that he could only imagine what the witness, Maria 3 Kaufmann-Grasowska, meant was ‘a procedure of an incision in the trachea’, which is commonly used in patients suffering from diphtheria. What is more, the witness claims that she knows from the camp nurses that Dr Rindfleisch was stabbing pregnant women in the stomach with a scalpel, which led to death of both mother and the unborn child. Officially, no medical experiments were conducted at Majdanek. However, a few doctors performed experiments on prisoners on their own.