Glossary

Move the mouse pointer over a red word in the main text, to view the glossary entry for this word.

Selections and Human Experiments in the Prisoner Infirmary

 a  “Whenever the number of patients in the infirmary rose, the doctors paid a visit to the infirmary block. There, all the patients, naked, had to file past the SS doctor, who was not interested in the nature of the illness but only in the sick man’s appearance. On that basis, he selected prisoners for extermination.”

(Antoni Makowski: “Organisation, Entwicklung und Tätigkeit des Häftlings-Krankenbaus in Monowitz (KL Auschwitz III).” In: Hefte von Auschwitz 15 (1975), pp. 113–181, here p. 137. (Transl. KL))
 
 b  “The camp physician Dr. Hellmuth VETTER conducted typhus experiments on prisoners in the hospital in Monowitz.”
(Leon Staischak [Stasiak], affidavit, September 3, 1947, NI-10928. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, Case VI, PDB 75 (e), pp. 181–186, here p. 184.)
 
 c  Oszkár Betlen testified in a trial: “Dr. Entress also conducted experiments at that time, and in such a way that he gave healthy prisoners blood transfusions from prisoners who had typhus. Then the healthy prisoners also came down with typhus.”
(Oszkár Betlen, examination by the judge on September 18 and 19, 1962, in Frankfurt am Main, Auschwitz Trial, LG Frankfurt am Main, 4 Ks 2/63. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, FAP-1, HA-72, pp. 13587–13595, here p. 13588. (Transl. KL))
 
 d  In his autobiographical novel, Oszkár Betlen describes these experiments with typhus infections: 
“The next day, two prisoners were brought to us from Birkenau. One was a Czech and a driver by occupation, the other was a Polish butcher. Both had been in the camp for only a few days and were healthy and muscular [...] We were directed to give them as much food as they could hold [...] The two healthy patients were as happy as if they'd won a big lottery. To be fed like that here, in the realm of hunger! Did they really not suspect that they had been brought here for some special purpose? Two days later, Entress came back. He did a blood transfusion. The blood of two typhus patients was pumped into the veins of the two healthy men. The experiment obviously was an attempt to determine whether typhus was transmitted through blood and how intense the resulting illness would be. After the experiment was over, only four patients were left in the infirmary: the two men whose blood had been drawn and the two subjects of the experiment. The others were taken away. In the quarantine blocks, no one else reported sick. Those in isolation had noticed that the patients were not cared for, but merely taken away […] Four days after the blood transfusion, one blood donor died. His corpse had to be carried out through the room in which the two test subjects lay in bed. They looked at each other aghast, as if asking in which of them the dead man’s blood was circulating. Suddenly their good mood was at an end. They lost all appetite. Their bread lay untouched. Then the fever appeared.” 
Both were sent to Birkenau at Entress's command after the experiment was concluded.
(Oszkár Betlen: Leben auf dem Acker des Todes  (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), pp. 88–89. (Transl. KL))
 
 e  Julius Paltiel, a Norwegian Jewish survivor, reports: “Mengele har en teori om at ondt skal ondt fordrive. Derfor beordrer han innsprøytninger med 96 prosent alkoholi alle mine ledd. Noe slikt er ikke forsøkt tidligere. De fremmede leger står over meg med sine enogtyve sprøyter. De fører nålene inn i ledd etter ledd, og fyller meg med alkohol. Det svir. Det brenner. Det etser. Kroppen står i en bue av smerter. Jeg kan ikke ligge stille i sengen, klarer ikke å ha teppet over kroppen […] Det gjør så umenneskelig vondt i hele kroppen. Langt borte hører jeg min egen hulking.”
(“Mengele believes in the theory that bad drives out bad. That's why he orders injections of 96-percent alcohol into all my limbs. That kind of thing has never been tried before. The foreign doctors stand over me with their 21 syringes. They insert the needles in my limbs and fill me with alcohol. It hurts. It burns. It cauterizes. My whole body is one giant pain. I can’t lie quietly in bed, I can’t stand to have the blanket on my body […] My whole body hurts in an ungodly way. Far away, I hear my own sobbing.”)
(Vera Komissar: På Tross av Alt. Julius Paltiel – norsk Jøde i Auschwitz [1995] (Trondheim: Communicatio, 2004), p. 80. (Transl. KL))
 
 f  “By agreement and with the knowledge of Fischer, the camp doctor who was interested in this, they also started to cure mental patients from the subcamps of the Auschwitz III concentration camp and from Auschwitz II-Birkenau, women, too […] This was undoubtedly a success for the prisoners who were physicians: they made healing possible for numerous mental patients and kept them alive at least for the time being [...]”
(Antoni Makowski: “Organisation, Entwicklung und Tätigkeit des Häftlings-Krankenbaus in Monowitz (KL Auschwitz III).” In: Hefte von Auschwitz 15 (1975), pp. 113–181, here p. 164. (Transl. KL))
 
 g  Ernest W. Michel, a prisoner nurse, recalls: “Honzo and I went inside. There was a number of SS-doctors standing around, among them the notorious Dr. Mengele. I remembered him from the first day of our arrival, during the selection at the tracks. […] They were conducting medical experiments on women! I put two and two together. It explained the look on those women’s faces. They were mentally disturbed. […] They did the experiments with eight women. Three were dead. The others were in various stages of stupor or agitation.”
(Ernest W. Michel: Promises to Keep. One Man’s Journey against Incredible Odds (New York: Barricade Books, 1993), pp. 70–72.)

“The SS doctors had only a superficial interest in the prisoner infirmary. For them, the important thing was the number of sick inmates and the elimination of those suffering from infections or confined to bed for a considerable time. […] Primarily, he [the SS doctor] conducted selections systematically, to seek out prisoners who were emaciated or afflicted with a protracted illness. These prisoners he sent from the subcamp to the Auschwitz main camp, to be killed by phenol injections, and later on—to the gas chambers of Birkenau.”[1]

 

Because I.G. Farben was willing to pay the SS the agreed-on daily rates for sick prisoners only for a limited time (14 to 21 days),[2] there was a rule in the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp that only around 5 percent of the prisoner population could be reported absent due to illness at any one time. In the administrative office of the prisoner infirmary (HKB; Häftlingskrankenbau), a running tally was kept of the number of sick inmates. Once the percentage reached the critical mark, the inmate personnel could intervene to correct the situation by releasing those who were convalescing or slightly injured and possibly sheltering them in “easy detachments.” If the number of patients was still too high, a selection was scheduled  a : The Sanitätsdienstgrad (SDG; SS hospital orderly) Gerhard Neubert and the camp elder of the HKB, Stefan Budziaszek (Buthner), screened the record cards to preselect candidates. After that, the SS physician and the SDG, accompanied by the camp elder, the respective block physician, and a prisoner clerk, entered the block and decided the fate of the patient. Then those selected waited in the Schonungsblock, the block for convalescents and the very weak, for their removal to Birkenau, where most of them were murdered in the gas chambers.

 

I.G. Farben interevened directly in the operations of the HKB in the firm’s Buna/Monowitz concentration camp. In other camps (such as Buchenwald, Dachau, and the main camp), doctors performed pharmacological experiments on live prisoners. The SS physician Hellmuth Vetter,[3] a former employee of I.G. Farben, played a key role in such human experiments with newly developed medications, especially those involving Bayer scientists. He performed typhus experiments on prisoners in the Auschwitz main camp. In the case of the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp, transfer lists document the performance of several series of typhus experiments on prisoners in the HKB in January and February 1943.[4] Leon Stasiak and Oszkár Betlen, prisoner orderlies in the infirmary, confirm these experiments.  b   c   d  In addition, Hans Frankenthal reported that drilling was done on his healthy teeth, obviously to test new dental filling materials. Julius Paltiel describes injections of alcohol into his joints, the method used to “treat” the articular rheumatism that affected them.  e 

 

In spring 1944, the Polish inmate doctor Zenon Drohocki launched experiments using electric shocks administered with a specially built machine, intended to cure neurolological illnesses and psychiatric disorders. Electric shock treatment had been celebrated as a therapeutic method since the 1920s, but by the 1940s it already had begun to meet with criticism as well. While Zenon Drohocki hoped his experiments would save mental patients from certain death at the hands of the SS  f , SS physicians used them as a means of torture with a fatal outcome: Prisoner orderlies tell of experiments on prisoners: “Among others, women from Auschwitz were brought to Monowitz in a sealed car for experiments with this machine.”[5]  g  Inmates who survived the torture were in most cases taken to Birkenau and  gassed.

(SP; transl. KL)

 



Sources

Oszkár Betlen, examination by the judge on September 18 and 19, 1962, in Frankfurt am Main, Auschwitz Trial, LG Frankfurt am Main, 4 Ks 2/63. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, FAP-1, HA-72, pp. 13587–13595.

Berthold Epstein, affidavit, March 3, 1947, NI-5847. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, Case VI, PDB 75 (e), pp. 168–170.

Leon Staischak [Stasiak], affidavit, September 3, 1947, NI-10928. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, Case VI, PDB 75 (e), pp. 181–186.

Transfer lists of the Monowitz prisoner infirmary, NI-14997. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, Case VI, Prosecution Exhibit 2266, reel 035, pp. 5–318.

 

Literature

Betlen, Oszkár: Leben auf dem Acker des Todes. Berlin: Dietz, 1962.

Borck, Cornelius: Hirnströme. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Elektroenzephalographie. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005.

Frankenthal, Hans: The Unwelcome One: Returning Home from Auschwitz. In collaboration with Andreas Plake, Babette Quinkert, and Florian Schmaltz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2002.

Makowski, Antoni: “Organisation, Entwicklung und Tätigkeit des Häftlings-Krankenbaus in Monowitz (KL Auschwitz III).” In: Hefte von Auschwitz 15 (1975), pp. 113–181.

Michel, Ernest W.: Promises to Keep. One Man’s Journey against Incredible Odds. New York: Barricade Books, 1993.

Mikulski, Jan: “Pharmakologische Experimente im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau.” In: Hefte von Auschwitz 10 (1967), pp. 3–18.

Setkiewicz, Piotr: “Ausgewählte Probleme aus der Geschichte des IG Werkes Auschwitz.” In: Hefte von Auschwitz 22 (2002), pp. 7–147.

Wagner, Bernd C.: IG Auschwitz. Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung von Häftlingen des Lagers Monowitz 1941–1945. Munich: Saur, 2000.

White, Joseph Robert: “IG Auschwitz: The Primacy of Racial Politics.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, NE, 2000.

[1] Antoni Makowski: “Organisation, Entwicklung und Tätigkeit des Häftlings-Krankenbaus in Monowitz (KL Auschwitz III).” In: Hefte von Auschwitz 15 (1975), pp. 113–81, here p. 130. (Translated by KL)

[2] The “IG management” paid the full rate for healthy prisoners; “for sick ones, less was paid, step by step, on a scale descending all the way to zero. Therefore only those who promised to return to work within 14 days were allowed to stay in the infirmary.” (Makowski: Organisation, p. 144.) Dr. Bertold Epstein testified in Nuremberg “that I.G. Farben Auschwitz paid sickness benefits for every inmate for 2 weeks only.” (Berthold Epstein, affidavit, March 3, 1947, NI-5847. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, Case VI, PDB 75 (e), pp. 168–170, here p. 168.)

[3] Vetter intitially experimented with medications on prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp, where he worked in 1941, and in the Gusen concentration camp, where he took a job in 1942. Simultaneously he supervised the series of experiments in Auschwitz, until the end of 1944. See Jan Mikulski: “Pharmakologische Experimente im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau.” In: Hefte von Auschwitz 10 (1967), pp. 3–18, in particular p. 8.

[4] Transfer lists of the Monowitz prisoner infirmary, NI-14997. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, Case VI, Prosecution Exhibit 2266, reel 035, pp. 5–318.

[5] Leon Staischak [Stasiak], affidavit, September 3, 1947, NI-10928. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, Case VI, PDB 75 (e), pp. 181–186, here p. 184.