Tag Archives: Experiments
The Remarkable Story of the Ovitz Family—The Dwarfs of Auschwitz
I did post about the Ovitz family before but because it is such a remarkable story, I thought it a good idea to do another one. Before I get into the main story, I have to explain that I mean no disrespect with the title— it was how the family gained recognition.
The Ovitz family was a Jewish Romanian family. The seven dwarf siblings had formed the Lilliput Troupe, known for singing and playing music using small instruments throughout Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in the 1930s and 1940s. The taller family members had backstage roles. The performers consisted of Rozika, Franziska, Avram, Freida, Micki, Elizabeth, and Perla. The Ovitzs lived a communal life in one big house in the village.
When any one of them got married, the spouse moved in and joined the enterprise.
At the start of World War II, there were twelve family members—seven of them were born with Pseudoachondroplasia, a form of dwarfism. Hungary seized Northern Transylvania in September 1940, and the new racial laws banned Jewish artists from entertaining non-Jews. Even though the Ovitz family were observant Jews, they obtained papers that omitted the fact that they were Jewish and continued going on their tours until 1944. On May 12, 1944, all twelve family members were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. One average-sized brother, Arie, escaped the roundup. Arie was married to Magda, and they had a little girl. He never met her because he was arrested and executed in 1944. Magda and her family were deported to Auschwitz and perished in the gas chambers.
Once the Ovitz family arrived in Auschwitz, they attracted the attention of Dr. Mengele. He housed them in better conditions within the camp, only to keep them healthier for his unethical research and experiments. Mengele wanted to decipher the secrets of human growth, especially as the family included two normal-sized sisters. Although Mengele was actually kind in his words when it came to the dwarfs—his actions in the name of science were horrific.
Throughout their time at Auschwitz, all of the members of the family (short and tall, blood-related, related by marriage, and fake-related) were subjected to almost daily blood tests, bone marrow sampling, blinding chemical tests, constant teeth and hair pulling, ear drip torture, and repeated showcases where they were told to strip in front of audiences and researchers during lectures and analysis.
“The most frightful experiments of all were the gynecological experiments.” Elizabeth Ovitz would later write, “They injected things into our uterus, extracted blood, dug into us, pierced us and removed samples… It is impossible to put into words the intolerable pain that we suffered, which continued for many days after the experiments ceased.”
Eighteen-month-old Shimshon Ovitz was put through the worst ordeals because he had taller parents and was prematurely born; Mengele drew blood from the veins behind his ears and his fingers daily often, causing weakness. The Ovitzes also witnessed two newcomer dwarfs killed and boiled so their bones could placed on exhibit in a museum. Mengele filmed them but after the war, the film was never found. It is possible that he kept it when he fled. Amid the other invasive procedures, Mengele poured boiling water into their ears, followed by ice water. He put chemicals in their eyes that blinded them. There were no moral boundaries restricting Mengele’s irrelevant experimentation. They thought the pain would drive them mad.
Despite all the torture and abuse, the family survived and was liberated from Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
In March 2013, the Actor Warwick Davis presented an episode of the ITV series Perspectives, Warwick Davis—The Seven Dwarfs of Auschwitz.
In the documentary, reference was made to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was Adolf Hitler’s favorite movie. Though Snow White may have been a fairy tale written by the Brothers Grimm—the story of the Ovitz Seven Dwarfs was far from a fairy tale. It was more of a grim tale of horror.
Later, Perla Ovitz, the last surviving member of the family (she died in 2001), acknowledged the horrifying details of their imprisonment—but still maintained a tiny shred of gratitude toward their captor.
“If the judges had asked me if he should be hanged, I’d have told them to let him go,” she recalled. “I was saved by the grace of the devil; God will give Mengele his due.”
The Ovitz family traveled on foot for seven months to their home village. Upon arrival, they found their home had been looted. They moved, first to the town of Sighet and later to Belgium. In May 1949, they immigrated to Israel, settled in Haifa, and began their tours again, being quite successful and packing large concert halls. In 1955, they retired and bought a cinema hall.
Descendants of the men of the family were born taller; the women did not become pregnant due to their small pelvises. The firstborn, Rozika Ovitz, died in 1984 at the age of 98.
I am surprised that no one has turned their story into a movie.
Sources
https://allthatsinteresting.com/ovitz-dwarfs-auschwitz
https://historyofyesterday.com/the-7-dwarfs-from-auschwitz/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/23/the-dwarves-of-auschwitz
https://www.kpbs.org/news/arts-culture/2021/08/27/warwick-davis-and-seven-dwarfs-auschwitz
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/16872009/arie-ovitz#source
Donation
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
$2.00
Agents of Evil
The photograph above is a collage of the faces of the female SS guards in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Like their male counterparts, they were also agents of evil. They had subscribed to the Nazi ideology.
Ravensbrück was a purpose-built concentration camp to imprison predominantly women. It housed around 120,000 women and children, 20,000 men, and 1,200 adolescent girls and young women (imprisoned in the Uckermark Juvenile Protective Custody Camp) registered as Ravensbrück prisoners between 1939 and 1945. These prisoners came from over 30 nations and included Jewish, Sinti, and Roma people. It was also a camp where they conducted many experiments. In 1942 and 1943, selected inmates were infected with gas gangrene or other bacteria and given a series of cures—that more often than not—resulted in death or severe disabilities. In 1944, they subjected prisoners to experimental bone transplants and amputations.
The female SS guards were pivotal to the running of the camp. Many of them were mothers and had children.
A job advertisement from a 1944 German newspaper stated the following, “Healthy, female workers between the ages of 20 and 40 wanted for a military site. Good wages and freeboard, accommodation, and clothing are promised.”
An estimated 3,500 women worked as Nazi concentration camp guards, and all of them started at Ravensbrück. Many would later work in extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau or in Bergen-Belsen.
Guards, like Anna Enserer, were employed in Ravensbrück from 1940 to the spring of 1942. In the spring of 1942, Anna Enserer was assigned to Auschwitz, where she was on duty until November 1942. After falling pregnant and giving birth, she left the baby with her mother returned to Auschwitz, and was employed as a block leader.
As part of the research into the SS guards of the Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp, memorial staff interviewed the former SS guard Anna Enserer (1919-2007). The conversation took place in her apartment. During a break in the interview, Ms. Enserer opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out this small place card. Her name, “Overseer Enserer (II), Anna,” was written in the middle of the broken letters, surrounded by green fir branches with burning candles. On the right is a child-like angel figure with blonde hair holding a violin in his hand. Most likely, the prisoners made this name card for a Ravensbrück SS Christmas party.
From autumn 1941 onwards at the latest, arts, crafts, and drawings were made by prisoners in several workshops and work detachments for the SS: not only toys, badges, or dolls, but also congratulations and Christmas cards or, as in this case, place cards for the official one Christmas party.
The murder of prisoners in Ravensbrück evolved. Initially, prisoners were shot in the back. Later, women were transported to a T4 Program killing center or Auschwitz to the gas chambers. Prisoners at Ravensbrück were also murdered by lethal injection and cremated in the nearby resort town of Fürstenberg. In late January or early February 1945, approximately 2,200 women were murdered by gas chambers constructed next to Fürstenberg’s crematorium.
From July 1942 to about September 1943, experiments were conducted to investigate the effectiveness of sulfanilamide at the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for the benefit of the German Armed Forces. Wounds deliberately inflicted on the experimental subjects were infected with bacteria such as streptococcus, gas gangrene, and tetanus.
At Ravensbrück, SS female guards, armed with attack dogs, forced malnourished women inmates to march to slave labor sites each day, guarded them as they performed manual labor, and then force-marched them back to the concentration camp. The prisoners, under notoriously inhumane conditions, were held as German shepherds used as guard dogs.
Anna W. was a prisoner at Ravensbrück. The following is an excerpt of her testimony.
The camp was liberated on April 30, 1945, by Soviet troops. Very few of the female guards were ever convicted.
-Anna: “I was sterilized myself, but in Ravensbrück.
Q: In Ravensbrück. How old were you back then?
Anna: Sixteen.
Q: And did you know what…
Anna: Not quite sixteen.
Q: Did you know what kind of…
Anna: No, I did not know that. They said they were just examining, but the pain afterwards, so then you realized.
Q: That was of course, very, very…
Anna: There were several young girls, of, how old were they, twelve years, twelve, fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds.
Q: And Friedel [her husband], too?
Anna: No.
Q: No, not him. Because I know that they also did this to the boys…
Anna: Yes, I even know some where they did it.
Q: Yes, I think Ranko B., no?
Anna: Yes.
Q: He spoke about it. This is something very terrible, for a woman, no?
Anna: Very much, yes. For now I have to suffer from it. Since I could have had a family, could have, I could have had grandchildren who would be twenty years by now, my grandchildren, right…”
Sources
https://www.dw.com/en/ravensbr%C3%BCck-female-concentration-camp-guards/a-54517319
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55661782
Siegfried Handloser—An Evil Man Who Was Given Compassion
On December 9, 1946, an American military tribunal opened criminal proceedings against 23 leading German physicians and administrators for their willing participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was Telford Taylor, and the chief prosecutor was James M. McHaney. In his opening statement, Taylor summarized the crimes of the defendants.
“The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures, and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science. The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful only are still alive; a few of the survivors will appear in this courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected. For the most part they are nameless dead. To their murderers, these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals.”
Siegfried Handloser was one of the men on trial. He was born in Konstanz. Since World War I, he has been in the German Army Medical Service. He entered the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy in Berlin in 1903. After passing the state examination in 1910, he was employed in various positions in the medical service from 1928-32. Eventually, he became a consultant in the Reichswehr Ministry.
Handloser was a Lieutenant General in the medical service and medical inspector in the Wehrmacht. He also served as chief of medical services of the armed forces. He was found guilty of participation in high altitude, freezing, malaria, mustard gas, sulfanilamide, seawater, epidemic jaundice, and spotted fever experiments on humans. He also conducted bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration and bone-transplantation experiments. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Handloser joined the committee of the German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM-Deutsche Gesellschaft für Innere Medizin) in 1937. The German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM) was founded in Wiesbaden in 1882 and, with over 30,000 members, still is one of the largest medical-scientific professional societies in Europe.
Handloser effectively became the Nazi delegate In 1938. He only got here because of his political role, not through scientific achievement. He had not previously been a member of the DGIM.
Handloser was promoted to the position of Army Group physician of the Nazi Army Group Command 3. In October 1939, and was named honorary professor.
Handloser’s career took him to Army Group Command 3 in Vienna in 1938. He was an Army Medical Inspector and Army Surgeon in the General Quartermaster’s Office of the Army High Command from February 1941. He was appointed the first Chief of Wehrmacht Medical Services (“Chief W San”) at the High Command of the Wehrmacht in June/July 1942.
Handloser cooperated with Ernst Robert Grawitz, “Reichsarzt-SS und Polizei,” but was not his superior. He was in charge of all the Wehrmacht medical personnel—including the medical units of the Waffen-SS.
Handloser became responsible for all medical crimes in the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. He experienced increasing criticism during the war, as there were deficiencies in medical supplies, which eventually came to a complete collapse.
Handloser attended a meeting on December 29, 1941, at which it was decided to conduct human experiments to test typhus vaccines at Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
The tests resulted in the deaths of about 100 people. Handloser actively operated the organization of forced prostitution in the territories occupied by the Nazis, using his position as chief of the Wehrmacht Medical Service. Handloser strove to minimize the danger of venereal disease and to prevent “sexual intercourse with Jewish women.”
Orderly prostitution was also intended to avoid undesirable contact with women in the occupied territories, which could have been used for espionage purposes. After Hitler refused parole for soldiers convicted of homosexual acts in 1942, Handloser turned his attention to this issue as well. In this context, the establishment of more Wehrmacht brothels to “remedy the sexual emergency” was discussed.
Handloser was convicted by the American Military Tribunal No. 1 (the Doctors’ Trial) in August 1947 and sentenced to life imprisonment. This was later reduced to 20 years, but in 1954, he was released shortly before dying of cancer in Munich at the age of 69. He was shown compassion where he had none himself.
Sources
https://www.dgim-history.de/en/biography/Handloser;Siegfried;1126
https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz25809.html
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/defendants-in-the-doctors-trial
Donation
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
$2.00
Karin Magnussen—Mengele’s Willing Assistant
Somebody once told me, “Evil acts can only be committed by men.” I disputed that notion. History has many examples of women who are just as evil—if not even more evil than men.
Anyone who knows me knows how important eye health is to me. In 2011, I lost my right eye, and in 2015, I nearly lost the left one.. For the best part of a year, I was basically blind. When I see something about eye health or care—it immediately catches my attention.
Karin Magnussen was a German biologist, teacher and researcher at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics department during the Third Reich. She is known for her 1936 publication, Race and Population Policy Tools, and her studies of heterochromia iridium (different-coloured eyes) using iris specimens supplied by Josef Mengele from Auschwitz Concentration Camp victims.
Mengele sent blood samples from about 200 patients of various races to the Berlin Institute. Karin Magnussen received human parts (such as eyes taken from a deceased Sinti family) from the notorious concentration camp—Auschwitz.
This is from a colleague—she received the information that more twins and family members with Heterochromic irises would be found in the Sinti family in Mechau from northern Germany. Karin Magnussen had adrenaline eye drops administered to inmates from Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The Sinti family had a high prevalence of heterochromia iridium and was forced to participate in this study. Members of this family, as well as other victims, were later killed, had their eyes enucleated and sent to Magnussen for examination. Magnussen articulated the findings of these events in a manuscript that has never been published.
No fewer than 40 pairs of eyes were received by Magnussen from Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Hungarian prisoner pathologist Miklós Nyiszli noted after the autopsy of the Sinti twins that they had been killed, not due to illness but because of a chloroform injection to the heart. Nyiszli had to prepare their eyes and send them to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
Mengele was not an ophthalmologist, but he did work in close collaboration and complicity with Karin Magnussen and Otmar Von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. The eye colour protocol objective was to demonstrate hereditary differences in iris structure determined by race and ostensibly to cure heterochromia. Mengele sent heterochromous Gypsy eyes to Magnussen, extracted from the bodies of inmates who died (or he killed). Mengele injected adrenaline into the children’s eyes, in an attempt to change eye colour and to study environmental influences. Magnussen was fully aware of Mengele’s methods.
At least until spring 1945, Magnussen was working in Berlin. After the end of World War II, she moved to Bremen and continued to complete her research. She was published in 1949. She was later de-nazified in Bremen.
In 1950, Magnussen taught at a girls high school in Bremen. She worked as a study counsellor and official, including teaching biology. She was considered a popular teacher who prepared interesting biology lessons. Her pupils could examine, for example, living and dead rabbits from their breeding. Until 1964, essays in scientific journals were published by her. She retired in August 1970. Even in old age, she justified the Nazi racial ideology. She noted in 1980, in a conversation with the geneticist Benno Müller-Hill, that the Nuremberg Laws were not fair enough. She also denied until the last minute that Mengele would have killed children for their scientific studies. She was entangled by her cooperation with Mengele, the supply of human materials, and mired deep in concentration camp crimes that she claimed to know nothing about.
In 1990, Magnussen moved into a nursing home and died in February 1997 in Bremen
Sources
https://www.dw.com/en/skeletons-in-the-closet-of-german-science/a-1587766
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32387532/
http://www.estherlederberg.com/Eugenics%20(Anecdotes)/Karin%20Magnussen.html
Women’s Health During the Holocaust
I am certain this piece will stir some emotions and will probably cause controversy. There will be some who will question it and “Why would you pick this subject?” However, for future generations (and us) to understand the Holocaust (or at least as much as possible), it is necessary to address all aspects.
Recently I realized how important it was for some survivors to have children after the war. Many of them had lost most or all of their families. They, therefore, started new families, not to substitute them for lost families but to ensure the continuation of the bloodline. It was also a way to show the Nazis that they lost.
Such was the horror of the holocaust though, that this option was denied to several women. I was watching the documentary “The US and the Holocaust” a few days ago. One of the survivors mentioned in the documentary, when she was in Auschwitz, didn’t have any periods—her menstrual cycle had stopped or had been disrupted. This intrigued me and I looked into it.
Evidence at the Nuremberg trial showed that Nazis sought methods of mass sterilization of Jewish women.
Immediately upon arrival at the concentration camps, over 98% of women stopped menstruating.
Anna Hájková has written about the Jewish Theresienstadt prisoner and physician František Bass’ research on amenorrhoea, the loss of menstruation, which focused on how it was caused by the shock of incarceration. Interestingly, however, almost all this research discussed ovulation (and its lack) rather than menstruation, even though both are part of the same biological function.
Periods impacted the lives of female Holocaust victims in a variety of ways. For many, menstruation was linked to the shame of bleeding in public and the discomfort of dealing with it. Periods also saved some women from being sexually assaulted. Equally, amenorrhoea could be a source of anxiety: about fertility, the implications for their lives after the camps and about having children in the future. There has been minimal investigation as to the cause(s) of amenorrhea, beyond malnutrition and trauma.
The only women who did not stop menstruating attributed it to detecting something added to the soup on some occasions and refused to eat on those occasions. Two other women reported detecting a white powder in the “disgusting” and “foul-smelling” brown liquid that participants referred to as either “soup” or “coffee” at Auschwitz but were too hungry to discard the soup.
A few women (15/93) identified precisely what led to their amenorrhea in Auschwitz and for most (as described below), subsequent difficulties with fertility. Most women were haunted by never knowing what caused them to suddenly stop menstruating and later, the long-term effects on their fertility/infertility.
One survivor reported having been sterilized in Auschwitz by radiation. Two were singled out and sterilized in Auschwitz by surgery on their reproductive organs in Nazi experiments. Peggy J Kleinplatz and Paul Weindling conducted interviews focused on reproductive histories, including amenorrhea beginning in 1942-45, subsequent attempts to conceive, numbers of pregnancies, miscarriages and stillbirths. Ninety-eight per cent of women interviewed were unable to conceive or carry to term their desired number of children. Of 197 confirmed pregnancies, at least 48 (24.4%) ended in miscarriages, 13 (6.6%) in stillbirths and 136 (69.0%) in live births. The true number of pregnancy losses is likely much higher. Only 15/93 (16.1%) of women were able to carry more than two babies to term, despite most wanting more children desperately. Amenorrhea among Jewish women arriving at concentration camps was too uniform and sudden to be affected only by trauma and/or malnutrition. Survivors’ narratives and historical evidence suggest the role of exogenous hormones, administered without women’s knowledge to induce amenorrhea as well as subsequent primary and secondary infertility.
Upon entry into the camp, prisoners were given shapeless clothing and had their heads shaved. They lost weight, including from their hips and breasts, two areas commonly associated with femininity. Oral testimonies and memoirs show that all of these changes compelled them to question their identities. When reflecting on her time in Auschwitz, Erna Rubinstein, a Polish Jew who was 17 when in the camps, asked in her memoir, The Survivor in Us All: Four Young Sisters in the Holocaust (1986): ‘What is a woman without her glory on her head, without hair? A woman who doesn’t menstruate?’
Some teenagers experienced their first period in the camps alone, separated from their families or orphaned. In such cases, older prisoners provided help and advice. Tania Kauppila, a Ukrainian ina Mühldorf Concentration Camp, was 13 when she started her periods. She did not know what was happening and shed many tears. She was scared that she was going to die and did not know what to do. Older women in the camp taught her and others in the same position about periods. The girls were taught how to handle it and what they needed to do in order to cope with the blood flow. It was a different learning process than they would have had at home: ‘You tried to steal a piece of brown paper, you know, from the bags and do the best you can’, recalled Kauppila. This story reoccurs across numerous oral testimonies. Many orphaned survivors who had just started mentioned the help of older women, who took on both a sisterly and motherly role in helping these young girls, before they experienced potential amenorrhoea; older women usually lost their period within the first two or three months of imprisonment.
For each testimony, participants were asked about the number of live births and pregnancy losses. It is notable that of the four women who had given birth in the years 1935–1940 and whose children were killed in the camps, three had difficulty conceiving after the war, even though they were still in their 20s and 30s. The total number of live births for 93 women since 1945 was 136. Twenty women were unable to carry any children to term. The majority of women had 1-2 children.
I know this is a controversial subject, and I don’t claim to be an expert in the matter, therefore I have used text from scientific papers, However, it is an important aspect to address.
sources
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953622005561?via%3Dihub
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36007428/
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/menstruation-and-holocaust
Experiments on Women in Auschwitz
On 7 July 1942, Heinrich Himmler, in cooperation with three others, including a physician, inaugurated experimenting on women in Auschwitz and investigated extending this experimentation on men.
Himmler convened a conference in Berlin to discuss the prospects for using concentration camp prisoners as objects of medical experiments. The other attendees were the head of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, SS General Richard Glueks (hospital chief), SS Major-General Gebhardt and Professor Karl Clauberg (one of Germany’s leading gynaecologists). The conference outcome showed the major program of medical experimentation on Jewish women at Auschwitz was allowed. The experiments performed secretively ensured prisoners would not be aware of what was happening.
The aim was to obtain a fast, cheap method of sterilization “not only to defeat the Jewish enemy,” the SS Reich Leader wrote, “but also to exterminate him.” The sterilization campaign used experimental drugs and X-ray radiation to sterilize several thousand women and several hundred men.
The experimentation would take the form of sterilization via massive doses of radiation or uterine injections. Also decided was a consult with an X-ray specialist about the prospects of using X-rays to castrate men and demonstrating this on male Jewish prisoners. Adolf Hitler endorsed this plan on the condition that it remained top secret.
Below are testimonies by two women. They are only known as Ms A and Ms B to protect their identity and more importantly, dignity.
Ms A
“The experiment was done to me in Auschwitz, Block 10. The experiment was done on my uterus. I was given shots in my uterus and as a result of that, I was fainting from severe pain for a year and a half. [Years later,] Professor Hirsh from the hospital in Tzrifin examined me and said that my uterus became as a uterus of a 4-year-old child and that my ovaries shrank.”
Ms B
“I was put into Barrack No. 10 in Auschwitz in April of 1944. After a month or so of being placed in Barrack No. 10, I as well as the other female prisoners no longer produced monthly menses and experiences terrible effects of a rash. First, pus-filled blisters appeared then turned into sores. In some cases, this rash occurred on both my arms and my chest. In the morning and the night, we were lined up approximately for two hours for a ‘roll call.’ During this time Dr Mengele came once or twice a week and he pulled out the weak and the sick from the line and they never have been seen again. It was necessary to make sure that the entire body was covered so Dr Mengele would not see even one sore, or our life would be over. Dr Gisella Perl assisted Dr Mengele during the day. However, at night Dr Perl came into the barrack and administered an ointment with glue-like consistency to every sore, in order to heal this horrific rash. Dr Perl came periodically to Barrack No. 10 and also went to other barracks to administer this ointment. The rash needed several weeks to clear up; however, it would often return a few days later. In Auschwitz, there was a belief among the female prisoners that the soup we were given to eat was drugged and the drug was the reason why we suffered from this horrific rash. Without Dr Perl’s medical knowledge and willingness to risk her life by helping us, it would be impossible to know what would have happened to me and many other female prisoners. I lived in Sighet, the same town as Dr Gisella Perl until I was 16 when I was sent away to the ghetto. I remember what a wonderful reputation she had, and how well-known she was in our area. My mother was her patient, and my grandmother went to her husband, Dr Krauss, who was an internist. When we were both in Auschwitz, I remember she was the doctor of the Jews there.”
Sources
https://jewishcurrents.org/july-7-nazi-medical-experimentation-begins
The Evil of Dr Hans Eisele
I am always amazed why so many evil men got away with murder. Especially the physicians who were supposed to, “first do no harm.”
Hans Eisele was an SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer and Nazi physician in various camps, including Mauthausen and Buchenwald. There he mistreated and murdered prisoners, for example, by operating on them without anaesthesia and by giving lethal injections to people with tuberculosis. In 1945, he was convicted of the crimes he had committed. He was released again in 1952 after a reduced sentence.
Nazi party member 3125695, former SS Hauptsturmführer, began fighting on the Western Front and then worked in Nazi concentration camps at Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, Dachau and Buchenwald. According to the American who prosecuted Eisele, Colonel William Denson, Eisele started as the good doctor, called, The Angel by prisoners, but steadily became cruel and sadistic, until at Buchenwald when given the moniker, The Butcher, because he carried out medical experiments on prisoners, allowing them to die slowly after injections of cyanide.
On 13 December 1945, Eisele and 39 others were tried at the main court trial for atrocities at Dachau.
Eisele was found guilty of complicity in three executions which he had issued death certificates for afterwards. His sentence was death. However, after a mandatory review of his case and those of his codefendants, the death sentence was one of eight out of 36 reduced to prison terms on appeal. The reasoning for sparing Eisele was that the military could not find evidence of him individually mistreating prisoners. In addition, medical care in the camp under his purview had improved somewhat, and he had barely spent any time in Dachau whatsoever.
On 11 April 1947, Eisele was tried at the Buchenwald main trial. He was found guilty and received another death sentence for complicity in murder and alleged human experimentation. However, the basic conviction against Eisele proved dubious and uncertain (much of what is now known about Eisele was then unavailable), so four of the eight military judges submitted an application that the judgment be converted by the reviewing body to a ten-year sentence, which was granted.
During his detention in a prison for war criminals, Landsberg wrote an extensive defence titled, Audiatur et altera pars, in which he denied the allegations and represented himself as a convinced Christian who had always been a physician only for the sake of others. In contrast, numerous witnesses of his crimes were former concentration camp prisoners and some former SS members. After his sentence was reduced [to ten years], Eisele was released from prison on 26 February 1952.
After his release, he opened a medical practice in Munich. In 1958, during the trial of Martin Sommer, a guard at Buchenwald, new allegations were made against Eisele. That he had murdered at least 200 Jews and performed gruesome medical experiments came to light. Eisele fled to Egypt with the help of an SS underground group, where he settled under the pseudonym Carl Debouche in the upmarket Cairo suburb Maadi. Eisele was arrested in July 1958 by police in Cairo.
However, before being extradited, he disappeared from custody the following month.
Eisele moved in the circles of former Nazi scientists in Egypt after a German extradition request had been rejected. The Mossad tried to assassinate Eisele via a mail bomb on 25 September 1963. However, the bomb detonated early, instead killing a postal worker. Eisele died on 3 May 1967 and was buried in the small German cemetery in grave No. 99
Sources
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1040518
https://data.niod.nl/WO2_biografieen/Hans-Eisele.html
https://dbpedia.org/page/Hans_Eisele_(physician)
Nazi Science
The above photograph is of Eugen Fischer, a German professor of medicine, anthropology, and eugenics and a member of the Nazi Party. He authored a 1913 study of the Mischlinge (racially mixed) children of Dutch men and Hottentot women in German Southwest Africa. Fischer opposed racial mixing, arguing that Negro blood was of lesser value and that mixing it with white blood would bring about the demise of European culture. After 1933, Fischer adapted the activities of his institute to serve Nazi antisemitic policies. He taught courses for SS-Doctors, served as a judge on the Hereditary Health Court of Berlin and provided hundreds of opinions on the paternity and racial purity of individuals, including the Mischlinge offspring of Jewish and non-Jewish German couples.
Eugenics was not a German concept. Types of eugenic practices have existed for millennia. Some indigenous peoples of Brazil are known to have practised infanticide against children born with physical abnormalities since pre-colonial times. In ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato suggested selective mating to produce a guardian class. In Sparta, to determine whether or not a Spartan child was fit to live, the children were inspected by the council of elders, the Gerousia.
The Nazis modelled their Eugenics program on the American eugenics movement. It was rooted in the biological determinist ideas of Sir Francis Galton, which originated in the 1880s. In 1883, Sir Francis Galton first used the term eugenics to scientifically describe an improvement biologically of genes in human races and the concept of being well-born.
The Nazis also admired the Jim Crow-era laws that discriminated against African Americans and segregated them from European Americans, and they debated whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany. Yet they ultimately decided that it would not go far enough.
The views of Eugen Fischer helped create the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, serving as justification for the Nazi belief that Aryans were racially superior to other races—especially the Jews. Adolf Hitler read the works of Fischer while imprisoned in 1923 and used his eugenic notions to support a pure Aryan society in his manifesto, Mein Kampf.
Fischer retired in 1942 as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. After the war, he worked to secure university teaching positions for many of his former students (including Otmar von Verschuer). As professor emeritus at the University of Freiburg, Fischer continued to lecture and publish articles in anthropological journals. He died in 1967.
Paul Nitsche, a founding member of the German Racial Hygiene Society and prominent psychiatrist, long-combined the advocacy of treatment, including occupational and electroshock therapy, for fitter patients with support for mercy death for incurables. A member of the Nazi Party since May 1933, he served as deputy, then head, of the T-4 Medical Office, a division charged with selecting patients for transfer to T-4 facilities.
Nitsche received his medical license in 1901 and a professorship in 1925. Nitsche did not join the Nazi Party until May 1933. He was a strong supporter of eugenics and euthanasia and was present at the gassing demonstration at what would become the Brandenburg euthanasia centre in either December 1939 or January 1940. He was driven not so much by Nazi racial ideology as by his support of racial science and his vision of progressive medicine. Being well established, Nitsche was no longer motivated by the prospect of career advancement but ideologically committed when he later joined Action T4.
In 1948, Nitsche was placed on trial in Dresden by East German authorities for his crimes in the T-4 Euthanasia program. In 1948, the psychiatrist received the death penalty and was executed.
Otmar von Verschuer (rear, in the photo above) supervises the measurement of the heads of two men as part of an anthropometric study of heredity.
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, as the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute—Department for Human Heredity, Verschuer, a physician and geneticist, examined hundreds of pairs of twins to study whether criminality, feeble-mindedness, tuberculosis, and cancer were inheritable. In 1927, he recommended the forced sterilization of the mentally and morally subnormal. Once a member of an ultra-nationalist paramilitary Freikorps unit of World War I veterans, Verschuer typified those academics whose interest in German national regeneration motivated their research.
In the late stages of the Second World War, Verschuer directly or indirectly started to use research material obtained in the Auschwitz concentration camp, mainly through his former student Josef Mengele, who served there as a camp physician.
Verschuer was never on trial for war crimes despite many indications that not only was he fully cognisant of Mengele’s work at Auschwitz, encouraging collaboration with Mengele. In a report to the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; DFG) from 1944, Verschuer talked about Mengele’s assistance in supplying the KWI-A with some scientific materials from Auschwitz:
“My assistant, Dr Mengele (MD, PhD), has joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer and camp physician in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Anthropological investigations on the most diverse racial groups of this concentration camp are being carried out with the permission of the SS Reichsführer [Himmler]; the blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for analysis.”
A prominent figure in German psychiatry, genetics, and eugenics in the first half of the 20th century was Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin began his career in psychiatry in Munich. He amassed a vast collection of patient genealogies and concluded that mental disorders were genetic and could be predicted and averted through sterilization. In 1931, he became the director of the government-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. Believing one of the critical dangers facing Germany was the growing number of the mentally unfit. Rüdin helped draft the Nazi sterilization law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring and wrote its official commentary.
The American Rockefeller Foundation funded numerous international researchers to visit and work at Rüdin’s psychiatric genetics department, even as late as 1939. These included Eliot Slater and Erik Stromgren, considered respectively the Founding Fathers of psychiatric genetics in Britain and Scandinavia, and Franz Josef Kallmann, who became a leading figure in twins research in the US after emigrating in 1936.[6] Kallmann had claimed in 1935 that minor anomalies in otherwise unaffected relatives of schizophrenic people should be grounds for compulsory sterilization.
Claiming that he was a scientist and not a politician, Rüdin was de-Nazified and classified as a nominal party member. The psychiatrist who helped develop the Nazi mass sterilization law died in retirement in 1952.
These were just the Nazi scientists. There were many more—and they often obtained well-paid jobs after the war.
https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/deadly-medicine/profiles/#01-fischer
The Horrors of the Holocaust
***********************WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT***********************
This will be the most horrific post I have done on the Holocaust. Generally, I try to avoid graphic images because they make me feel uncomfortable.
However, there is nothing comfortable about the Holocaust, and it should make us feel uneasy. There were millions murdered in the most gruesome way possible. I can’t even say imaginable, because I still can’t imagine it. Even those who survived suffered for years to come, sometimes until they died, at times decades later.
The photograph above is of the bodies of women and children found during the liberation of Auschwitz.
“My memories from there have stayed with me all my life,” said Aleksander Vorontsov, who was part of a film crew that captured some of the horror the troops found at Auschwitz, remembered. “All of that was the most moving and horrific thing that I filmed during the war.”
A young man sits on an overturned stool next to a burnt body inside the Thekla concentration sub-camp outside Leipzig, Germany, shortly after its liberation by U.S. Forces in April 1945.
Many of those who had managed to survive Auschwitz were gravely ill. The Nazis left Them behind to die.
German doctor Fritz Klein stands amid the corpses of prisoners in one of the mass graves at the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp soon after its liberation by British troops in April 1945.
After the liberation of Auschwitz, Ivan Dudnik, a 15-year-old Russian boy, was rescued. He was captured and sent to the camp by the Nazis, and he went insane from the horrors he witnessed there.
A pile of human bones and skulls lies on the grounds of the Majdanek concentration camp soon after its liberation by Soviet troops in 1944.
A female survivor after the liberation of Auschwitz
A starving child lying on the street of the Warsaw ghetto, as photographed by a sergeant in the Wehrmacht, circa 1941.
A Polish supervisor logs in the Polish dead as a pile of bodies lies atop a wheelbarrow. 1942. Warsaw ghetto.
12 April 1945—Bodies of prisoners of Ohrdruf stacked like cord-wood
Bogumila Jasuik, one of the “Ravensbruck Rabbits” chosen for medical experimentation. “German doctors experimented on her twice in November and December 1942, making four cuts on the muscles of her thigh.” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).
What amazes me more than anything else is that there is so much evidence, yet there are so many who still deny the Holocaust ever happened.
Sources
https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/photographs/world-war-ii-holocaust-images
https://allthatsinteresting.com/warsaw-ghetto#22
https://allthatsinteresting.com/liberation-of-auschwitz#34
History of Sorts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.