From Shirer :
In the murders in this field the Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration camp inmates, women as well as men, and even Germans.
The ”experiments” were quite varied. Prisoners were placed in pressure chambers and subjected to high-altitude tests until they ceased breathing. They were injected with lethal doses of typhus and jaundice.
They were subjected to ”freezing” experiments in icy water or exposed naked in the snow outdoors until they froze to death. Poison bullets were tried out on them as was mustard gas. At the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women hundreds of Polish inmates – the ”rabbit girls” they were called – were given gas gangrene wounds while others were subjected to ”experiments” in bone grafting. At Dachau and Buchenwald gypsies were selected to see how long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water. Sterilization experiments were carried out on a large scale at several camps by a variety of means on both men and women; for, as an S.S. physician, Dr. Adolf Pokorny, wrote Himmler on one occasion, ”the enemy must be not only conquered but exterminated.” If he could not be slaughtered – and the need for slave labor toward the end of the war made that practice questionable, as we have seen – then he could be prevented from propagating. In fact Dr. Pokorny told Himmler he thought he had found just the right means, the plant Caladium seguinum, which, he said, induced lasting sterility.
"The thought alone [the good doctor wrote the S.S. Fuehrer] that the three million Bolsheviks now in German captivity could be sterilized, so that they would be available for work but precluded from propagation, opens up the most far-reaching perspectives."
Another German doctor who had ”far-reaching perspectives” was Professor August Hirt, head of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Strasbourg. His special field was somewhat different from those of the others and he ex- plained it in a letter at Christmas time of 1941 to S.S. Lieutenant General Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s adjutant.
"We have large collections of skulls of almost all races and peoples at our disposal. Of the Jewish race, however, only very few specimens of skulls are available . . . The war in the East now presents us with the opportunity to overcome this deficiency. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik commissars, who represent the prototype of the repulsive, but characteristic, subhuman, we have the chance now to obtain scientific material."
Professor Hirt did not want the skulls of ”Jewish-Bolshevik commissars” already dead. He proposed that the heads of these persons first be measured while they were alive. Then-
"Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head should not be damaged, the physician will sever the head from the body and will forward it . . . in a hermetically sealed tin can."
Whereupon Dr. Hirt would go to work, he promised, on further scientific measurements. Himmler was delighted. He directed that Professor Hirt ”be supplied with everything needed for his research work.”
He was well supplied. The actual supplier was an interesting Nazi individual by the name of Wolfram Sievers, who spent considerable time on the witness stand at the main Nuremberg trial and at the subsequent ”Doctors’ Trial,” in the latter of which he was a defendant.∗ Sievers, a former bookseller, had risen to be a colonel of the S.S. and executive secretary of the Ahnenerbe, the Insti- tute for Research into Heredity, one of the ridiculous ”cultural” organizations established by Himmler to pursue one of his many lunacies. It had, according to Sievers, fifty ”research branches,” of which one was called the ”Institute for Military Scientific Research,” which Sievers also headed. He was a shifty-eyed, Mephistophelean-looking fellow with a thick, ink-black beard and at Nuremberg he was dubbed the ”Nazi Bluebeard,” after the famous French killer. Like so many other characters in this history, he kept a meticulous diary, and this and his correspondence, both of which survived, contributed to his gallows end.
By June 1943 Sievers had collected at Auschwitz the men and women who were to furnish the skeletons for the ”scientific measurements” of Professor Dr. Hirt at the University of Strasbourg. ”A total of 115 persons, including 79 Jews, 30 Jewesses, 4 ’Asiatics’ and 2 Poles were processed,” Sievers reported, requesting the S.S. main office in Berlin for transportation for them from Auschwitz to the Natzweiler concentration camp near Strasbourg. The British cross-examiner at Nuremberg inquired as to the meaning of ”processing.”
”Anthropological measurements,” Sievers replied.
”Before they were murdered they were anthropologically measured? That was all there was to it, was it?”
”And casts were taken,” Sievers added.
What followed was narrated by S.S. Captain Josef Kramer, himself a veteran exterminator from Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau and other camps and who achieved fleeting fame as the ”Beast of Belsen” and was condemned to death by a British court at Lueneburg.
Professor Hirt of the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute told me of the prisoner convoy en route from Auschwitz. He said these persons were to be killed by poison gas in the gas chamber of the Natzweiler camp, their bodies then to be taken to the Anatomical Institute for his disposal. He gave me a bottle containing about half a pint of salts – I think they were cyanide salts – and told me the approximate dosage I would have to use to poison the arriving inmates from Auschwitz.
Early in August 1943, I received eighty inmates who were to be killed with the gas Hirt had given me. One night I went to the gas chamber in a small car with about fifteen women this first time. I told the women they had to go into the chamber to be disinfected. I did not tell them, however, that they were to be gassed."
By this time the Nazis had perfected the technique.
"With the help of a few S.S. men [Kramer continued] I stripped the women completely and shoved them into the gas chamber when they were stark naked.
When the door closed they began to scream. I introduced a certain amount of salt through a tube . . . and observed through a peephole what happened inside the room. The women breathed for about half a minute before they fell to the floor. After I had turned on the ventilation I opened the door. I found the women lying lifeless on the floor and they were covered with excrements."
Captain Kramer testified that he repeated the performance until all eighty inmates had been killed and turned the bodies over to Professor Hirt, ”as requested.” He was asked by his interrogator what his feelings were at the time, and he gave a memorable answer that gives insight into a phenomenon in the Third Reich that has seemed so elusive of human understanding.
"I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received an order to kill the eighty inmates in the way I already told you. That, by the way, was the way I was trained."
Another witness testified as to what happened next. He was Henry Herypierre, a Frenchman who worked in the Anatomical Institute at Strasbourg as Professor Hirt’s laboratory assistant until the Allies arrived.
"The first shipment we received was of the bodies of thirty women . . . These thirty female bodies arrived still warm. The eyes were wide open and shining. They were red and bloodshot and were popping from their sockets- There were also traces of blood about the nose and mouth. No rigor mortis was evident."
Herypierre suspected that they had been done to death and secretly copied down their prison numbers which were tattooed on their left arms. Two more shipments of fifty-six men arrived, he said, in exactly the same condition. They were pickled in alcohol under the expert direction of Dr. Hirt. But the professor was a little nervous about the whole thing. ”Peter,” he said to Herypierre, ”if you can’t keep your trap shut, you’ll be one of them.”
Professor Dr. Hirt went about his work nonetheless. According to the corre- spondence of Sievers, the professor severed the heads and, as he wrote, ”assem- bled the skeleton collection which was previously nonexistent.” But there were difficulties and after hearing them described by Dr. Hirt-Sievers himself had no expert medical or anatomical knowledge – the chief of the Ahnenerbe reported them to Himmler on September 5, 1944.
"In view of the vast amount of scientific research involved, the job of reducing the corpses has not yet been completed. This requires some time for 80 corpses.
And time was running out. Advancing American and French troops were nearing Strasbourg. Hirt requested ”directives as to what should be done with the collection.”
"The corpses can be stripped of the flesh and thereby rendered unidentifiable [Sievers reported to headquarters on behalf of Dr. Hirt]. This would mean, however, that at least part of the whole The skeleton collection as such is inconspicuous. The flesh parts could be declared as having been left by the French at the time we took over the Anatomical Institute ∗ and would be turned over for cremating. Please advise me which of the following three proposals is to be carried out:
1. The collection as a whole to be preserved;
2. The collection to be dissolved in part;
3. The collection to be completely dissolved."
”Why were you wanting to deflesh the bodies, witness?” the British pros- ecutor asked in the stillness of the Nuremberg courtroom. ”Why were you suggesting that the blame should be passed on to the French?”
”As a layman I could have no opinion in this matter,” the ”Nazi Bluebeard” replied. ”I merely transmitted an inquiry from Professor Hirt. I had nothing to do with the murdering of these people. I simply carried through the function of a mailman.”
”You were the post office,” the prosecutor rejoined, ”another of these distinguished Nazi post offices, were you?”
It was a leaky defense offered by many a Nazi at the trials and on this occasion, as on others, the prosecution nailed it.
The captured S.S. files reveal that on October 26, 1944, Sievers reported that ”the collection in Strasbourg has been completely dissolved in accordance with the directive. This arrangement is for the best in view of the whole situation.”
Herypierre later described the attempt – not altogether successful – to hide the traces.
In September, 1944, the Allies made an advance on Belfort, and Professor Hirt ordered Bong and Heir Maier to cut up these bodies and have them burned in the crematory ... I asked Herr Maier the next day whether he had cut up all the bodies, but Herr Bong replied; ”We couldn’t cut up all the bodies, it was too much work. We left a few bodies in the storeroom.”
They were discovered there by an Allied team when units of the U.S. Seventh Army, with the French 2nd Armored Division in the lead, entered Strasbourg a month later. †
∗ Germany had annexed Alsace after the fall of France in 1940 and the Germans had taken over the University of Strasbourg.
† Professor Dr. Hirt disappeared. As he left Strasbourg he was heard boasting that no one would ever take him alive. Apparently no one has – alive or dead.
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