Read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Online
Authors: William L. Shirer
Walter Neff, a camp inmate who served as Dr. Rascher’s medical orderly, furnished the “Doctors’ Trial” with a layman’s description of one water-freezing test.
It was the worst experiment ever made. Two Russian officers were brought from the prison barracks. Rascher had them stripped and they had to go into the vat naked. Hour after hour went by, and whereas usually unconsciousness from the cold set in after sixty minutes at the latest, the two men in this case still responded fully after two and a half hours. All appeals to Rascher to put them to sleep by injection were fruitless. About the third hour one of the Russians said to the other, ‘Comrade, please tell the officer to shoot us.’ The other replied that he expected no mercy from this Fascist dog. The two shook hands with a ‘Farewell, Comrade’ … These words were translated to Rascher by a young Pole, though in a somewhat different form. Rascher went to his office. The young Pole at once tried to chloroform the two victims, but Rascher came back at once, threatening us with his gun … The test lasted at least five hours before death supervened.
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The nominal “chief” of the initial cold-water experiments was a certain Dr.
Holzloehner
, Professor of Medicine at the
University of Kiel
, assisted by a Dr. Finke, and after working with Rascher for a couple of months they believed that they had exhausted the experimental possibilities. The three physicians thereupon drew up a thirty-two-page top-secret report to the Air Force entitled “Freezing Experiments with Human Beings” and called a meeting of German scientists at
Nuremberg
for October 26–27, 1942, to hear and discuss their findings. The subject of the meeting was “Medical Questions in Marine and Winter Emergencies.” According to the testimony at the “Doctors’ Trial,” ninety-five German scientists, including some of the most eminent men in the field, participated, and though the three doctors left no doubt that a good many human beings had been done to death in the experiments there were no questions put as to this and no protests therefore made.
Professor Holzloehner
*
and Dr. Finke bowed out of the experiments at this time but the persevering Dr. Rascher carried on alone from October 1942 until May of the following year. He wanted, among other things, to
pursue experiments in what he called “dry freezing.”
Auschwitz
, he wrote to Himmler,
is much better suited for such tests than Dachau because it is colder there and because the size of the grounds causes less of a stir in the camp. (The test persons yell when they freeze.)
For some reason the change of locality could not be arranged, so Dr. Rascher went ahead with his studies at Dachau, praying for some real winter weather.
Thank God, we have had another intense cold snap at Dachau [he wrote Himmler in the early spring of 1943]. Some people remained out in the open for 14 hours at 21 degrees, attaining an interior temperature of 77 degrees, with peripheral frostbite …
86
At the “Doctors’ Trial” the witness Neff again provided a layman’s description of the “dry-freezing” experiments of his chief.
A prisoner was placed naked on a stretcher outside the barracks in the evening. He was covered with a sheet, and every hour a bucket of cold water was poured over him. The test person lay out in the open like this into the morning. Their temperatures were taken.
Later Dr. Rascher said it was a mistake to cover the subject with a sheet and to drench him with water … In the future the test persons must not be covered. The next experiment was a test on ten prisoners who were exposed in turn, likewise naked.
As the prisoners slowly froze, Dr. Rascher or his assistant would record temperatures, heart action, respiration and so on. The cries of the suffering often rent the night.
Initially [Neff explained to the court] Rascher forbade these tests to be made in a state of anesthesia. But the test persons made such a racket that it was impossible for Rascher to continue these tests without anesthetic.
87
The TPs (test persons) were left to die, as Himmler said they deserved to, in the ice-water tanks or lying naked on the ground outside the barracks at Dachau on a winter evening. If they survived they were shortly exterminated. But the brave German flyers and sailors, for whose benefit the experiments were ostensibly carried out, and who might find themselves ditched in the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean or marooned in some frozen waste above the Arctic Circle in Norway, Finland or northern Russia, had to be saved if possible. The inimitable Dr. Rascher therefore took to performing on his human guinea pigs at Dachau what he termed “warming
experiments.” What was the best method, he wanted to know, for warming a frozen man and thus possibly saving his life?
Heinrich Himmler, never backward in offering “practical” solutions to his corps of busy scientists, suggested to Rascher that warming by “animal heat” be tried, but at first the doctor did not think much of the idea. “Warming by animal heat—the bodies of animals or women—is much too slow,” he wrote the S.S. chief. But Himmler kept after him.
I am very curious [he wrote Rascher] about the experiments with animal heat. Personally I believe these experiments may bring the best and the most sustained results.
Though skeptical, Dr. Rascher was not the man to ignore a suggestion from the leader of the S.S. He promptly embarked on a series of the most grotesque “experiments” of all, recording them for posterity in every morbid detail. Four inmates from the women’s concentration camps at
Ravensbrueck
were sent to him at Dachau. However there was something about one of them—they were classified as prostitutes—that disturbed the doctor and he so reported to his superiors.
One of the women assigned showed impeccably Nordic racial characteristics … I asked the girl why she had volunteered for brothel service and she replied, “To get out of the concentration camp.” When I objected that it was shameful to volunteer as a brothel girl, I was advised, “Better half a year in a brothel than half a year in the concentration camp …”
My racial conscience is outraged by the prospect of exposing to racially inferior concentration camp elements a girl who is outwardly pure Nordic … For this reason I decline to use this girl for my experimental purposes.
88
But he used others, whose hair was less fair and the eyes less blue. His findings were duly reported to Himmler in a report marked “Secret” on February 12, 1942.
89
The test persons were chilled in the familiar way—dressed or undressed—in cold water at various temperatures … Removal from the water took place at a rectal temperature of 86 degrees.
In eight cases the test persons were placed between two naked women on a wide bed. The women were instructed to snuggle up to the chilled person as closely as possible. The three persons were then covered with blankets …
Once the test persons regained consciousness, they never lost it again, quickly grasping their situation and nestling close to the naked bodies of the women. The rise of body temperature then proceeded at approximately the same speed as with test persons warmed by being swathed in blankets … An exception was formed by four test persons who practiced sexual intercourse between 86 and 89.5 degrees. In these persons, after coitus, a very swift temperature rise ensued, comparable to that achieved by means of a hot-water bath.
Dr. Rascher found, somewhat to his surprise, that one woman warmed a frozen man faster than two women.
I attribute this to the fact that in warming by means of one woman personal inhibitions are avoided and the woman clings more closely to the chilled person. Here too, return of full consciousness was notably rapid. In the case of only one person did consciousness fail to return and only a slight degree of warming was recorded. This test person died with symptoms of a brain hemorrhage, later confirmed by autopsy.
Summing up, this murderous hack concluded that warming up a “chilled” man with women “proceeds very slowly” and that hot baths were more efficacious.
Only test persons [he concluded] whose physical state permitted sexual intercourse warmed up surprisingly fast and also showed a surprisingly rapid return of full bodily well-being.
According to the testimony at the “Doctors’ Trial” some four hundred “freezing” experiments were performed on three hundred persons of whom between eighty and ninety died directly as a result thereof, and the rest, except for a few, were bumped off subsequently, some of them having been driven insane. Dr. Rascher himself, incidentally, was not around to testify at this trial. He continued his bloody labors on various new projects, too numerous to mention, until May 1944, when he and his wife were arrested by the S.S.—not for his murderous “experiments,” it seems, but on the charge that he and his wife had practiced deceit about how their children came into the world. Such treachery Himmler, with his worship of German mothers, could not brook—he had sincerely believed that Frau Rascher had begun to bear her three children at the age of forty-eight and he was outraged when he learned that she had kidnaped them. So Dr. Rascher was incarcerated in the political bunker at his familiar Dachau camp and his wife was carted off to
Ravensbrueck
, from which the doctor had procured his prostitutes for the “warming” tests. Neither survived, and it is believed that Himmler himself, in one of the last acts of his life, ordered their execution. They might have made awkward witnesses.
A number of such awkward witnesses did survive to stand trial. Seven of them were condemned to death and hanged, defending their lethal experiments to the last as patriotic acts which served the Fatherland. Dr. Herta Oberheuser, the only woman defendant at the “Doctors’ Trial,” was given twenty years. She had admitted giving lethal injections to “five or six” Polish women among the hundreds who suffered the tortures of the damned in a variety of “experiments” at Ravensbrueck. A number of doctors, such as the notorious Pokorny, who had wanted to sterilize millions of the enemy, were acquitted. A few were contrite. At a second
trial of medical underlings Dr. Edwin Katzenellenbogen, a former member of the faculty of the Harvard Medical School, asked the court for the death sentence. “You have placed the mark of Cain on my forehead,” he exclaimed. “Any physician who committed the crimes I am charged with deserves to be killed.” He was given life imprisonment.
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Midway through the war there was one act of retribution against the gangster masters of the New Order for their slaughtering of the conquered people. Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police and the S.D., deputy chief of the Gestapo, this long-nosed, icy-eyed thirty-eight-year-old policeman of diabolical cast, the genius of the “final solution,” Hangman Heydrich, as he became known in the occupied lands, met a violent end.
Restless for further power and secretly intriguing to oust his chief,
Himmler
, he had got himself appointed, in addition to his other offices, Acting Protector of
Bohemia
and
Moravia
. Poor old Neurath, the Protector, was packed off on indefinite sick leave by Hitler in September 1941, and Heydrich replaced him in the ancient seat of the Bohemian kings at Hradschin Castle in
Prague
. But not for long.
On the morning of May 29, 1942, as he was driving in his open Mercedes sports car from his country villa to the Castle in Prague a bomb of British make was tossed at him, blowing the car to pieces and shattering his spine. It had been hurled by two Czechs,
Jan Kubis
and Josef Gabeik, of the free Czechoslovak army in England, who had been parachuted from an R.A.F. plane. Well equipped for their assignment, they got away under a smoke screen and were given refuge by the priests of the Karl Borromaeus Church in Prague.
Heydrich expired of his wounds on June 4 and a veritable hecatomb followed as the Germans took savage revenge, after the manner of the old Teutonic rites, for the death of their hero. According to one Gestapo report, 1,331 Czechs, including 201 women, were immediately executed.
91
The actual assassins, along with 120 members of the Czech resistance who were hiding in the Karl Borromaeus Church, were besieged there by the S.S. and killed to the last man.
*
It was the Jews, however, who suffered the most for this act of defiance against the master race. Three thousand of them were removed from the “privileged” ghetto of
Theresienstadt
and shipped to the East for extermination. On the day of the bombing Goebbels had 500 of the few remaining Jews at large in Berlin arrested and on the day of Heydrich’s death 152 of them were executed as a “reprisal.”
But of all the consequences of Heydrich’s death the fate of the little village of Lidice near the mining town of Kladno not far from Prague will
perhaps be longest remembered by the civilized world. For no other reason except to serve as an example to a conquered people who dared to take the life of one of their inquisitors a terrible savagery was carried out in this peaceful little rural place.
On the morning of June 9, 1942, ten truckloads of German Security Police under the command of Captain Max Rostock
*
arrived at Lidice and surrounded the village. No one was allowed to leave though anyone who lived there and happened to be away could return. A boy of twelve, panicking, tried to steal away. He was shot down and killed. A peasant woman ran toward the outlying fields. She was shot in the back and killed. The entire male population of the village was locked up in the barns, stables and cellar of a farmer named
Horak
, who was also the mayor.
The next day, from dawn until 4
P.M.
, they were taken into the garden behind the barn, in batches of ten, and shot by firing squads of the Security Police. A total of 172 men and boys, over sixteen, were executed there. An additional nineteen male residents, who were working in the Kladno mines during the massacre, were later picked up and dispatched in
Prague
.