DEFENCE COUNSEL: Did Himmler add anything more at these discussions?
DEFENDANT: He said it certainly would not be asking too much to require concentration camp prisoners, who could not be sent on active service on account of the crimes they had committed, to take part in such experiments;… in that way they could rehabilitate themselves…
DEFENCE COUNSEL: What impression did you receive from these remarks?
DEFENDANT: They were of a kind you could not be wholly out of sympathy with in the grave emergency of those days.
Rascher’s reports began to come in by October 1942, and a conference on the subject attended by nearly a hundred medical officers of the Luftwaffe followed in this same month. After this, one supervising specialist declined to take any further part in the experiments in which around 15 men out of the 50 or so used had already died. Rascher then continued the experiments on his own, and the deaths increased to between 80 and 90. The men, either dressed in flying uniform or stripped, were immersed for periods of up to one and a half hours in water kept a few degrees above freezing. Himmler, again taking a personal interest in the experiments, wrote to Rascher on 24 October: ‘I am very anxious as to the experiments with body warmth’ — though Rascher in a report from Dachau dated 15 August had suggested dispensing with these because the reaction of the frozen men was too slow. Himmler also showed his indignation with those who were criticizing Rascher’s use of human beings. ‘I regard as guilty of treason’, he wrote, ‘… people who, even today, reject these experiments on humans and would instead let sturdy German soldiers die… I shall not hesitate to report these men.’
Four prostitutes were sent from the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück to supply the animal warmth in which Himmler believed, but one of these girls unfortunately turned out to be German. Rascher remonstrated with her, but she said she had volunteered for six months’ brothel duty in order to secure her future release from the camp. ‘It hurts my racial feelings’, wrote Rascher to Himmler on 5 November, ‘to expose as a prostitute to racially inferior concentration camp elements a girl who has the appearance of a pure Nordic.’ So the experiment went on without her, and Himmler came to see the results personally at Dachau on 13 November. In the same month, he wrote to a senior officer in the Luftwaffe, asking for Rascher’s release from the Luftwaffe so that his work could be continued solely under the S.S. ‘These researches’, he wrote, ‘… can be performed by us with particular efficiency because I personally assumed the responsibility for supplying from concentration camps for these experiments anti-social elements and criminals who only deserve to die.’ Now, he went on to complain, Christian medical circles were beginning to protest, and the experiments would best be conducted by the S.S. alone, with a ‘non-Christian physician’ acting as liaison officer between the Luftwaffe and the S.S. He singled out a Dr Holzlöhner as the principal troublemaker.
Rascher was eventually released from the Luftwaffe so that he could maintain his practices in secrecy. His experiments at Dachau continued, and he sent a detailed report dated 12 February 1943, pointing out how the prospects and fulfilment of sexual intercourse between the frozen men and the prostitutes substantially quickened the return of warmth. He then went on to ask Himmler for yet another favour: could he be removed to Auschwitz — ‘the camp itself is so extensive that less attention will be attracted to the work. For the subjects howl so when they freeze!’ Himmler was conducting other experiments at Auschwitz, and Rascher stayed at Dachau until he was arrested with his wife in 1944 for child abduction: the three children whose birth had so impressed their godfather Himmler had all been misappropriated. According to evidence given at Nuremberg, Himmler prevented any investigation of Rascher’s case; he remained under arrest and was shot at Dachau before the arrival of the Americans. According to Gebhardt, his wife was hanged at the same time ‘at Himmler’s suggestion’.
Although Rascher in the end proved to be a criminal sadist who took particular delight in causing intense suffering under the mask of science, he was only one of many who worked to satisfy Himmler’s obsession with medical experiment. During 1942—4 the work went on in a number of camps. In addition to the experiments with mustard gas and phosgene, which as we have seen began as early as 1939, Professor Gebhardt, Himmler’s personal physician and consultant surgeon of the Waffen S.S., took charge of the sulphonamide tests on women at Ravensbrück, which was only eight miles from his orthopaedic clinic at Hohenlychen. These tests were initiated by Himmler as a response to the Allied use of sulphonamides and penicillin, knowledge of which was reaching the German soldiers and affecting morale. In May 1942 Himmler held a conference at which Gebhardt and the Chief of the S.S. Medical Service were present, and undoubtedly Heydrich’s death in Prague from gangrene influenced the decision taken by Hitler and Himmler to order the experimental infection of Polish women under sentence of death at Ravensbrück with gas-gangrenous wounds. This work was supervised by the chief of the S.S. Medical Service and Gebhardt, and various sulphonamide preparations were tested on these ‘rabbit girls’, as they were called. Dr Fritz Fischer, one of Gebhardt’s assistants at Hohenlychen and a senior medical man working on these experiments, which inflicted the most fearful pain on the victims, said at the Doctors’ Triaclass="underline"
‘Loyalty to the State appeared to me at that period, when some 1,500 soldiers were falling daily on active service and several hundred people were dying daily behind the lines as a result of war conditions, to be the supreme moral duty. I believed we were offering reasonable chances of survival to the subjects of our experiments, who were living under German law and could not otherwise escape the death penalty… I was not then a doctor in civil life, free to take his own decisions. I was… a medical expert bound to act in exactly the same way as a soldier under discipline.’
From Himmler’s point of view as expressed at his conference in May, the women were being granted ‘an excellent chance of reprieve’.
Among the worst experiments in the camps were those that developed from the cruel, clumsy attempts to achieve methods of mass sterilization. These began as early as the autumn of 1941, when it became clear that the extermination of the races in the East could be effected most easily by such means. A scheme for sterilization by drugs was presented to Himmler in October 1941 by a specialist in venereal disease. ‘The thought alone that the three million Bolsheviks at present German prisoners could be sterilized so that they could be used as labourers but be prevented from reproduction, open the most far-reaching perspectives’, he wrote. Himmler was interested and authorized that ‘sterilization experiments should in any case be carried out in the concentration camps’. All experiments in sterilization drugs proved abortive, but Viktor Brack had already, in March 1941, sent Himmler a report on ‘experiments with Röntgen castration’, recommending the use of ‘high X-ray dosages’ which ‘destroy the internal secretion of the ovary, or of the testicles, respectively’. Exposure to the rays, Brack pointed out, would take only two minutes for men and three for women, and could be administered without their knowledge while, for example, they filled in forms at a counter. Severe burns would result, however, within a few days or weeks and ‘other tissues of the body will be injured’. Brack presented his scheme again a year later, in June 1942, stating that ‘castration by X-ray… is not only relatively cheap but can also be performed on many thousands in the shortest time’.
The following year the experiments began in Auschwitz and its subsidiary camp at Birkenau, where young Polish Jews were operated upon by X-ray, which caused them great pain in spite of which they were forced to continue at work. Subsequently many of them were castrated by normal means so that their testicles could be examined. These experiments continued until the end of April 1944, when Brack’s successor reported to Himmler that mass sterilization by X-ray could no longer be considered practicable.