Auschwitz
In the late 1930's the Nazis killed thousands of handicapped Germans by lethal injection and poisonous gas. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units following in the wake of the German Army began shooting massive numbers of Jews and Gypsies in open fields and ravines on the outskirts of conquered cities and towns.
Eventually the Nazis created a more secluded and organized method of killing. Extermination centers were established in occupied Poland with special apparatus especially designed for mass murder. Giant death machines.
Six such death camps existed: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Large-scale murder by gas and body disposal through cremation were conducted systematically by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler's SS men ..
Victims were deported to these centers from Western Europe and from the ghettos in Eastern Europe which the Nazis had established. In addition, millions died in the ghettos and concentration camps as a result of forced labor, starvation, exposure, brutality, disease, and execution.
Auschwitz-Birkenau became the killing centre where the largest numbers of European Jews were killed. By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with some estimates running as high as three million persons eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning. 9 out of 10 were Jews. In addition, Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and prisoners of all nationalities died in the gas chambers.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was located nearby the provincial Polish town of Oshwiecim in Galacia, and was established by order of Heinrich Himmler on 27 April 1940. Private diaries of Goebbels and Himmler unearthed from the secret Soviet archives show that Adolf Hitler personally ordered the mass extermination of the Jews - as Goebbels wrote "With regards to the Jewish question, the Fuhrer decided to make a clean sweep ..."
There are horrifying stories of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the fanatical, ruthless SS-men. And there are stories to bear witness to goodness - in Auschwitz the missionary Jane Haining refused to reject her children and showed herself to be a saint. And Oscar Schindler came to Auschwitz to save 300 Schindler-women from certain death. He managed to do it - the only shipment out of the Nazi death camp during WW2 ..
Carl Clauberg
Before WW2 Carl Clauberg was a well-respected Professor and gynaecological researcher with a successful medical career. But Clauberg, one of the most respected individuals in the German medical society, transformed at Auschwitz from a healer into a systematic killer.
Carl Clauberg was born in Wuppertal in 1898 into a craftsmen family. He participated in WWI as infantryman, later studied medicine and advanced to doctor-in-chief at the University gynaecological clinic in Kiel. He entered the NSDAP in 1933, and later he was appointed Professor for gynaecology at Koenigsberg University.
In December 1942, Carl Clauberg came to the death camp Auschwitz and received Block 10 for his medical experimental activities. At Auschwitz Professor Carl Clauberg injected chemical substances into wombs during his experiments. Thousands of Jewish and Gypsy women were subjected to this treatment. They were sterilized by the injections, producing horrible pain, inflamed ovaries, bursting spasms in the stomach, and bleeding. The injections seriously damaged the ovaries of the victims, which were then removed and sent to Berlin.
At Auschwitz victims were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, frozen to death, and exposed to various other traumas. Men and women were positioned repeatedly for several minutes between two x-ray machines aimed at their sexual organs.
Most subjects died or were gassed immediately because the radiation burns from which they suffered rendered them unfit for work. Men's testicles were removed and sent to Breslau for further examination.
Carl Clauberg was put to trial in the Soviet Union and sentenced to 25 years. 7 years later, he was pardoned under the "returnee" arrangement between Bonn and Moscow and went back to West Germany. Upon returning he held a press conference and boasted of his scientific work at Auschwitz.
After survivor groups protested, Clauberg was finally arrested in 1955 but died in August 1957, shortly before his trial should have started.
Eva Mozes Kor
The identical twins Eva Mozes Kor and Miriam Mozes survived the deadly genetic experiments conducted by The Angel of Death, Josef Mengele, in Auschwitz. Their parents, grandparents, two older sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins were killed ..
The sisters were put through many extremely brutal surgeries and experiments by Mengele, who experimented mainly on twins. Eva later recalled:
"I was given five injections. That evening I developed extremely high fever. I was trembling. My arms and my legs were swollen, huge size. Mengele and Dr. Konig and three other doctors came in the next morning. They looked at my fever chart, and Dr. Mengele said, laughingly, 'Too bad, she is so young. She has only two weeks to live .."
Eva later told how a set of Gypsy twins was brought back from Mengele's lab after they were sewn back to back. Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese twin by connecting blood vessels and organs. The twins screamed day and night until gangrene set in, and after three days, they died ...
The fact that Eva and Miriam survived Auschwitz was a miracle in itself, as only few individual twins were still alive at the time the camp was liberated.
As adults, Eva and Miriam suffered serious health problems. Eva suffered from miscarriages and tuberculosis. Her son had cancer. Miriam's kidneys never fully developed and she died in 1993 of a rare form of cancer, probably brought on by the unknown medical experiments and injections which she was subjected to at the hands of Josef Mengele.
Herta Oberheuse
Dr. Herta Oberheuser killed children with oil and evipan injections, then removed their limbs and vital organs. The time from the injection to death was between three and five minutes, with the person being fully conscious until the last moment.
She made some of the most gruesome and painful medical experiments, focused on deliberately inflicting wounds on the subjects. In order to simulate the combat wounds of German soldiers fighting in the war, Herta Oberheuser rubbed foreign objects, such as wood, rusty nails, slivers of glass, dirt or sawdust into the wounds.
After WW2, in October 1946, the Nuremberg Medical Trial began, lasting until August of 1947. Twenty-three German physicians and scientists were accused of performing vile and potentially lethal medical experiments on concentration camps inmates and other living human subjects between 1933 and 1945.
Fifteen defendants were found guilty, and eight were acquitted. Of the 15, seven were given the death penalty and eight imprisoned.
Herta Oberheuser was the only female defendant in the medical trial. She received a 20 year sentence but was released in April 1952 and became a family doctor at Stocksee in Germany. Her license to practice medicine was revoked in 1958.
Medical Experiments
High-Altitude Experiments
to investigate the limits of human endurance and existence at extremely high altitudes. The victims were placed in the low-pressure chamber and thereafter the simulated altitude therein was raised. Many victims died as a result of these experiments and others suffered grave injury, torture, and ill-treatment.
Incendiary Bomb Experiments
to test the effect of various pharmaceutical preparations on phosphorous burns. These burns were inflicted on the victims with phosphorous matter taken from incendiary bombs, and caused severe pain, suffering, and serious bodily injury.
Freezing Experiments
to investigate the most effective means of treating persons who had been severely chilled or frozen. The victims were forced to remain in a tank of ice water for up to 3 hours. Extreme rigor developed in a short time. Numerous victims died in the course of these experiments. After the survivors were severely chilled, rewarming was attempted by various means. In another series of experiments, the victims were kept naked outdoors for many hours at temperatures below freezing. The victims screamed with pain as their bodies froze.
Sea-water Experiments
to study various methods of making sea water drinkable. The victims were deprived of all food and given only chemically processed sea water. Such experiments caused great pain and suffering and resulted in serious bodily injury to the victims.
Malaria Experiments
to investigate immunization for and treatment of malaria. The victims were infected by mosquitoes or by injections of extracts of the mucous glands of mosquitoes. After having contracted malaria the victims were treated with various drugs to test their relative efficacy. Over 1,000 victims were used in these experiments. Many died and others suffered severe pain and permanent disability.
Mustard Gas Experiments
to investigate the most effective treatment of wounds caused by Mustard gas. Wounds deliberately inflicted on the victims were infected with Mustard gas. Some of the victims died as a result of these experiments and others suffered intense pain and injury.
Sulfanilamide Experiments
to investigate the effectiveness of sulfanilamide. Wounds deliberately inflicted on the victims were infected with bacteria such as streptococcus, gas gangrene, and tetanus. Circulation of blood was interrupted by tying off blood vessels at both ends of the wound to create a condition similar to that of a battlefield wound. Infection was aggravated by forcing wood shavings and ground glass into the wounds. The infection was treated with sulfanilamide and other drugs to determine their effectiveness. Many victims died as a result of these experiments and others suffered serious injury and intense agony.
Spotted Fever (Typhus) Experiments
to investigate the effectiveness of spotted fever and other vaccines. Numerous victims were deliberately infected with spotted fever virus in order to keep the virus alive - over 90 percent of the victims died as a result.
Experiments with Poison
to investigate the effect of various poisons upon human beings. The poisons were secretly administered to the victims in their food. The victims died as a result of the poison or were killed immediately in order to permit autopsies. In or about September 1944 the victims were shot with poison bullets and suffered torture and death.
Victims
The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews by the Nazi regime during World War 2. In 1933 approximately nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed.
The European Jews were the primary victims of the Holocaust. But Jews were not the only group singled out for persecution by Hitlerfs Nazi regime. As many as one-half million Gypsies, at least 250,000 mentally or physically disabled persons, and more than three million Soviet prisoners-of-war also fell victim to Nazi genocide. Jehovahfs Witnesses, homosexuals, Social Democrats, Communists, partisans, trade unionists, Polish intelligentsia and other undesirables were also victims of the hate and aggression carried out by the Nazis.
The number of children killed during the Holocaust is not fathomable and full statistics for the tragic fate of children who died will never be known. Some estimates range as high as 1.5 million murdered children. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of institutionalized handicapped children who were murdered under Nazi rule in Germany and occupied Europe.
Holocaust Deaths
Country/Region
Estimate
Germany (1938 Borders)
130,000
Austria
65,000
Belgium & Luxembourg
29,000
Bulgaria
7,000
Czechoslovakia
277,000
France
83,000
Greece
65,000
Hungary & Ukraine
402,000
Italy
8,000
Netherlands
106,000
Norway
760
Poland & USSR
4,565,000
Romania
220,000
Yugoslavia
60,000
TOTAL
6,017,760
Source: Nizkor Project statistics derived from Yad Vashem and Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution.
The world outside Nazi Europe received numerous press reports in the 1930s about the persecution of Jews. By 1942 the governments of the United States and Great Britain had confirmed reports about the Final Solution - Germany's intent to kill all the Jews of Europe. However, influenced by antisemitism and fear of a massive influx of refugees, neither country modified their refugee politics. No specific attempts to stop or slow the genocide were made until mounting pressure eventually forced the United States to undertake limited rescue efforts in 1944.
In Europe, rampant antisemitism incited citizens of many German-occupied countries to collaborate with the Nazis in their genocidal policies. There were, however, individuals and groups in every occupied nation who, at great personal risk, helped hide those targeted by the Nazis.
One nation, Denmark, saved most of its Jews in a nighttime rescue operation in 1943 in which Jews were ferried in fishing boats to safety in neutral Sweden.
Witnesses
Marc Berkowitz and his twin sister Francesca were two of Mengelefs victims. Arriving at Auschwitz from Czechoslovakia in March 1944 with their mother, 12-year-old Marc and his twin sister, Francesca, were singled out by Mengele for medical experimentation:
"Before the experiments began, Mengele came and tattooed my number personally. They put us in freezing baths, smeared chemicals on our skin, but it was the needles we were most afraid of. After the first 150 injections I stopped counting ... One morning in July 1944 I spotted my mother among a long line of women moving toward the gas chamber. Mengele called me in and gave me an errand to the crematorium. He knew I would see my mother go to her death. A couple of days later he asked me if I still believed in God."
Years later, Marc Berkowitz still suffered from pains due to the injections.
The Children
When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, Isabella Leitner and her family were herded in a ghetto and finally sent to Auschwitz where her mother and baby sister were gassed immediately. Isabella, the author of several books about the Holocaust, was exposed to horrors that words cannot describe, tortured, used. She later remembered the arrival at Auschwitz:
"I packed for my journey to Auschwitz on May 28, 1944 - my 20th birthday. As we alighted from the cattle car - my mother, my brother and my four sisters - there was Mengele, looking magnificent with his dog, his pistol, his riding crop. He sent my mother to the crematorium immediately. She was too old to live. And my youngest sister, Potyo, she was too young for him at 13 ... Mengele was as smooth, as civilized, as elegant as you can imagine, good-looking even. You would never suspect the evil. He was the genius of death. I have a sort of revenge. It would kill Mengele to see that I gave birth to two of the most magnificent, beautiful, intelligent children ... "
Isabella Leitner survived - not as a destroyed soul, not as a person utterly crushed by suffering, but as a wonderful, open woman with pure delight in life.
A surviving Mengele twin, Moshe Offer, later recalled the death of his brother:
"Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not sure why - perhaps because he was the older twin. Mengele made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore. I cannot tell you how I felt. It is impossible to put into words how I felt. They had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers - and now, my twin ..."
Irene Hizme and her twin brother, Rene Slotkin, were born in Czechoslovakia and were only four years old when they were taken with their mother to Theresienstadt. Shortly afterward, they were sent to Auschwitz, where they were separated. They never saw their mother again. They survived for almost three years in Auschwitz where they were experimented on by Josef Mengele as part of his twins research. Irene later recalled:
"I remember the first time I saw Mengele he was wearing green, dark green. And I remember his boots. That was probably the level my eyes were. Black, shiny boots. He was asking for twins, twins ..."
"The first time we went to the infirmary, he took blood. It was very painful ... They gave me injections in the arm and the back, and X-rays. I'd be extremely sick for a while."
After the war, Irene was adopted by a family on Long Island and spent several years tracking down Rene, who was still in Europe. In 1950, the family was finally able to bring him to the United States and reunite the twins. And both got married with children.
Frank Klein was interned at Auschwitz-Birkenau for seven months. He later recalled how he and his family arrived at the Auschwitz railhead:
"The first time I saw Mengele was the day I arrived at the camp with my twin brother, Otto, my mother, my aunt and my sister. One of the men on the train platform asked my mother if Otto and I were twins. When my mother said, "Yes," he said, "I'll be right back." A few minutes later, he took us to Mengele. For the next hour we watched the selection process. My mother was sent to the gas chamber, and so was my aunt."
My brother and I survived and I've had a nightmare ever since the camp. I dream that Mengele is taking my brother away to kill him ..."
At 19, in March 1943, Ernest Michel arrived in Auschwitz after five days and four nights in cattle cars. He was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1923 to a Jewish family which had been living in Germany for over 300 years. He was arrested on September 3, 1939, three days after the outbreak of World War II, and spent the next five-and-one-half years in slave labor and concentration camps.
Ernest Michel, Auschwitz number 104995, worked as an orderly in the Auschwitz infirmary and later recalled Mengele:
"One day in the summer of 1944 we took eight women, mostly young and all healthy, into the room where the experiments would take place. I saw Mengele standing there in his uniform, surrounded by three or four others. As we brought in each girl, an officer would strap her down. After a while the screaming inside stopped. When we took them out two of the eight were dead, five were in a coma, one was still strapped to the cot. Mengele was standing there, discussing it very casually. The only word I could hear was 'experiment'."
Ernest Michel's parents, grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins were all murdered by the Nazis, gassed in Auschwitz. He survived and arrived in the United States in 1946. He was active in the survivor community for many years and served as Chairman of the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Israel in 1981.
As surviving Mengele victim Alex Dekel later stated:
"Mengele ran a butcher shop - major surgeries were performed without anesthesia. Once, I witnessed a stomach operation - Mengele was removing pieces from the stomach, but without any anesthetic. Another time, it was a heart that was removed, again, without anesthesia. It was horrifying. Mengele was a doctor who became mad because of the power he was given. Nobody ever questioned him - why did this one die? Why did that one perish? The patients did not count. He professed to do what he did in the name of science, but it was a madness on his part ..."
The Angel Of Death
Dr. Josef Mengele, nicknamed The Angel Of Death, and the other Nazi doctors at the death camps tortured men, women and children and did medical experiments of unspeakable horror during the Holocaust. Victims were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death. Children were exposed to experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusions of blood from one to another, isolation endurance, reaction to various stimuli. The doctors made injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, removal of organs and limbs.
At Auschwitz Josef Mengele did a number of medical experiments, using twins. These twins as young as five years of age were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected.
Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of the children in an attempt to change their eye color. He carried out twin-to-twin transfusions, stitched twins together, castrated or sterilized twins. Many twins had limbs and organs removed in macabre surgical procedures, performed without using an anesthetic.
Only a few of the children survived Auschwitz. They later recalled how they were visited by a smiling Uncle Mengele who brought them candy and clothes. Then he had them delivered to his medical laboratory either in trucks painted with the Red Cross emblem or in his own personal car.
Josef Mengele was the chief provider for the gas chambers at Auschwitz - and did well! When it was reported that one block was infected with lice, Mengele solved the problem by gassing all the 750 women assigned to it.
The memory of this slightly built man, scarcely a hair out of place, his dark green tunic neatly pressed, his face well scrubbed, his Death's Head SS cap tilted rakishly to one side, remains vivid for those who survived his scrutiny when they arrived at the Auschwitz railhead. Polished boots slightly apart, his thumb resting on his pistol belt, he surveyed his prey with those dead gimlet eyes. Death to the left, life to the right.
Josef Mengele and the other camp doctors - masterminds of the horrors of Nazi genocide - were found to be psychologically normal. They were men of fine standing, cultured, husbands who morning and night kissed their wives, fathers who tucked their children into bed ...
A Jew and a medical doctor, the Auschwitz prisoner Miklos Nyiszli - No. A8450 - was spared death for a grimmer fate: to perform autopsies and 'scientific research' on his fellow inmates at Auschwitz under the supervision of Dr. Josef Mengele, the chief provider for the gas chambers.
Miraculously, Nyiszli survived to give an horrifying and sobering account, one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the public - Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. You find this account pp. 114-120:
Miklos Nyiszly
"In number one's crematorium's gas chamber 3,000 dead bodies were piled up. The Sonderkommando had already begun to untangle the lattice of flesh. The noise of the elevators and the sound of their clanging doors reached my room. The work moved ahead double-time. The gas chambers had to be cleared, for the arrival of a new convoy had been announced.
The chief of the gas chamber kommando almost tore the hinges off the door to my room as he arrived out of breath, his eyes wide with fear or surprise. "Doctor," he said, "come quickly. We just found a girl alive at the bottom of a pile of corpses."
I grabbed my instrument case, which was always ready, and dashed to the gas chamber. Against the wall, near the entrance to the immense room, half covered with other bodies, I saw a girl in the throes of a death rattle, her body seized with convulsions. The gas kommando men around me were in a state of panic. Nothing like this had ever happened in the course of their horrible career.
We moved the still-living body from the corpses pressing against it. I gathered the tiny adolescent body into my arms and carried it back to the room adjoining the gas chamber, where normally the gas kommando men change clothes for work. I laid the body on a bench. A frail young girl, almost a child, she could have been no more than fifteen. I took out my syringe and, taking her arm - she had not yet recovered consciousness and was breathing with difficulty - I administered three intravenous injections.
My companions covered her body which was as cold as ice with a heavy overcoat. One ran to the kitchen to fetch some tea and warm broth. Everybody wanted to help as if she were his own child. The reaction was swift. The child was seized by a fit of coughing which brought up a thick globule of phlegm from her lungs. She opened her eyes and looked fixedly at the ceiling. I kept a close watch for every sign of life. Her breathing became deeper and more and more regular. Her lungs, tortured by the gas, inhaled the fresh air avidly. Her pulse became perceptible, the result of the injections.
I waited impatiently. I saw that within a few minutes she was going to regain consciousness: her circulation began to bring color back into her cheeks, and her delicate face became human again .. I made a sign for my companions to withdraw. I was going to attempt something I knew without saying was doomed to failure.
From our numerous contacts, I had been able to ascertain that Mussfeld had a high esteem for the medical expert's professional qualities. He knew that my superior was Dr. Mengele, the KZ's most dreaded figure, who, goaded by racial pride, took himself to be one of the most important representatives of German medical science. He considered the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers as a patriotic duty. The work carried out in the dissecting room was for the furtherance of German medical science ...
And this was the man I had to deal with, the man I had to talk into allowing a single life to be spared. I calmly related the terrible case we found ourselves confronted with. I described for his benefit what pains the child must have suffered in the undressing room, and the horrible scenes that preceded death in the gas chamber. When the room had been plunged into darkness, she had breathed in a few lungfuls of cyclon gas. Only a few, though, for her fragile body had given way under the pushing and shoving of the mass as they fought against death. By chance she had fallen with her face against the wet concrete floor. That bit of humidity had kept her from being asphyxiated, for cyclon gas does not react under humid conditions.
These were my arguments, and I asked him to do something for the child. He listened to me attentively then asked me exactly what I proposed doing. I saw by his expression that I had put him face to face with a practically impossible problem.
It was obvious that the child could not remain in the crematorium. One solution would have been to put her in front of the crematorium gate. A kommando of women always worked there. She could have slipped back to the camp barracks after they had finished work. She would never relate what had happened to her. The presence of one new face among so many thousands would never be detected, for no one in the camp knew all the other inmates. If she had been three or four years older that might have worked. A girl of twenty would have been able to understand clearly the miraculous circumstances of her survival, and have enough foresight not to tell anyone about them. She would wait for better times, like so many other thousands were waiting, to recount what she had lived through.
But Mussfeld thought that a young girl of sixteen would in all nai 'vete' tell the first person she had met where she had just come from, what she had seen and what she had lived through. The news would spread like wildfire, and we would all be forced to pay for it with our lives. "There's no way of getting round it," he said, "the child will have to die." Half an hour later the young girl was led, or rather carried, into the furnace room hallway, and there Mussfeld sent another in his place to do the job. A bullet in the back of the neck."