September 26, 1945. A newspaper in the
USA runs a story with the headline, “Women Prisoners Subjected to Cruel Nazi Experiments.”
The article talks about how 45 German men were about to stand trial in a British court for crimes
they perpetrated at two concentration camps, crimes that included hanging women upside
down and artificially inseminating them. In what the newspaper called “sadistic”
procedures, many of the women “twisted in great pain and soon, often died.”
That’s an extremely grim way to open one of our videos, but if you know
anything about Nazi medical experiments, you’ll know a great many horrific things
happened in those camps. The Nazis weren’t conducting these experiments just because they
were sadists, even though many of the people involved may have had sadistic impulses. There
was usually a reason for the experiments, such as replicating battlefield injuries, dealing with
hypothermia, and testing all manner of medicines in experiments where humans stood in for rabbits.
Importantly, where this video today is concerned, the Nazis were obsessed with genes, human
reproduction, and the female reproductive organs. The exact number of victims from all
Nazi medical experiments is unknown. According to a research paper published
by the US National Institutes of Health, there were 15,750 documented victims of Nazi human
experimentation, but researchers say the number of victims would have been much higher. It’s just
that many of the crimes were not documented. The experiments started in 1942 but really
picked up speed in ’43, and the horrors didn’t stop until the end of the war when the camps
were liberated. About one-quarter of the people who were experimented on survived, although often
with horrific injuries. Many of them were women. Many were Polish. Many were Jewish, but many were
also Christian of various nationalities, civilian and sometimes military. Of those who survived,
quite a number testified against the Nazi doctors, nurses, and camp supervisors. It’s thanks to those
testimonies that we can tell you this story today. If you haven’t seen any of our
other shows on this matter, we’ll give you some examples of the experiments.
Many German soldiers on the battlefield fighting in the winter months in the frigid towns and
fields of the Eastern Front risked dying from hypothermia, so the Nazis conducted freezing
experiments on inmates in which they froze people and then tried to heat them up. Not only
were these experiments terrifying for the victims, but many of them died. There were between
360 and 400 hypothermia experiments that were conducted on 280 to 300 victims.
Then there were the seawater experiments, in which the victims of choice were usually
Roma people, an Indo-Aryan ethnic group that reside in Europe. Such people have been oppressed
and hounded for centuries, and World War Two certainly added to this historical trauma.
The Nazis introduced limitations on freedom of movement for Roma and Sinti people, and in
1935, new race laws made them racially alien, denying them rights as the Nazis did with Jewish
people. Over 5,000 Roma and Sinti were forced to live in the Lodz Jewish ghetto, from where
many were often sent to the Auschwitz camp. In total, 23,000 Sinti and Roma were deported
to Auschwitz throughout the entire war, and around 21,000 died, often murdered in the
gas chambers. Some were forced to drink seawater; others took part in the often-deadly
low-pressure experiments, in which they were subjected to dangerous levels of low
pressure, similar to what a Nazi pilot could face. Both these experiments were about replication,
trying to see how German soldiers might overcome adversity. One of the most infamous experiments
not related to the battlefield became known as the twin experiments. You may have heard of the
story of the notorious doctor Josef Mengele and his experiment that involved trying
to attach two Roma children surgically. This story stands out as an act of the utmost
depravity, although it seems Mengele didn’t try this often. Still, you can hear
testimonies that defy understanding, such as the words of Vera Kriegel, who
said she saw Mengele kill people with an injection through the heart. According to her,
Mengele had a thing for eyes. She said once she walked into his laboratory and saw “A whole
wall of human eyes.” In some experiments, he’d inject adrenaline into children's eyes
in an attempt to change their eye color. In the years we’ve been researching Nazi
experiments, we’ve read about scores of women whose limbs were transplanted, whose
tissue was removed in painful surgeries, whose wounds became infected, and, in some
cases, the wounds were purposefully infected so the Nazis could test various drugs on the
women. Other experiments included shooting people in the chest or neck after they’d been given
a drug that should make the blood coagulate. There was an experiment involving around 100
twins, in which the kids were given injections of bacteria that caused something called Noma
disease - an infection of the mouth or genitals, which usually causes boils to spring up
and can become gangrenous. Moti Alon, who arrived at Auschwitz at age nine in 1944,
said one of the things that forever scarred her memory was seeing an experiment in which Mengele
forced a dwarf and a Roma woman to have sex. As we said, the Nazis weren’t doing this out of
some sick perversion. In this last experiment, the purpose was related to breeding. As you
know, the Nazis were obsesive in their drive to create a pure Aryan race. This is one of
the reasons why the Nazis were so heartless when it came to conducting experiments on
people is they deemed them racially impure. They spent a lot of time and effort trying
to ensure these supposedly racially impure people could not procreate. In what became
known as the sterilization experiments, the Nazis secretly blasted prisoners with powerful
X-rays in their genital region. This made them sterile. In the theory of what we call eugenics,
the Nazis believed they could alter the gene pool, both by trying to wipe out certain genes
and promoting certain people to procreate. In the early 1900s, many countries, including
the US, promoted eugenics, but the Nazis took this to an entirely different level. This video
today is mostly related to eugenics, so let’s talk some more about that in the wider sense.
The Nazis wanted to propagate what they deemed to be pure blood. They went to great lengths to
produce a nation of what they believed were Aryan kids, and this is why they introduced something
called the Lebensborn program. These were special homes for women who were going to have what the
Nazis believed were racially pure children. Women were encouraged to breed with SS men, and if
single, they could be cared for at these homes away from the prying eyes of the public.
If a woman could give birth to a lot of so-called pure children, she might even have
been awarded the Cross of Honor of the German Mother. The program, led by Heinrich
Himmler, wasn’t really that successful. Himmler was hoping to fill Germany with
blond-haired, blue-eyed children, or ones that, at least, could pass as Aryan, but over nine
years of this eugenics project, only around 7,000 children were born into the Lebensborn
homes. Himmler was disappointed. The program was close to a failure. He believed that even
with Germany’s abortion laws, there were still around 100,000 German women who had abortions
each year and were going to have racially pure kids. Therefore, he thought, if he opened these
homes, they could be taken care of, and Germany would see an increase in its Aryan population.
He wanted them out of the abortion clinic and into the home, where they would be well looked after.
These homes, it should be said, were not places where SS men came to impregnate women by force
or as a financial transaction. The pregnancies, according to researchers, usually happened
the natural way. Still, Himmler didn’t see enough Ayran kids being born, so the Nazis went
to some very immoral lengths to make it happen. They kidnapped around 200,000 Polish kids, some
of whom were given to German families and handed new identities. They were literally grabbed
from the streets and later sent to “children's education camps” (Kindererziehungslager).
This also included about 20,000 kids from the Soviet Union and around another 10,000 from
the rest of Europe. Not all of them were accepted, and the so-called rejects were
treated in ways that beggar belief. After the kidnapping, the kids were tested as
a means to see their “value” as potentially good Aryan Germans. Some were chosen, given new
names, and taught Nazi values. Those that didn’t pass the test were often thrown to the wolves
at the concentration camps where their future, as you already know, was incredibly grim.
If the kids were sent to a place called Medizinische Kinderheilanstalt, located
in Lubliniec in Upper Silesia – they were often exterminated. Here’s an actual
snippet from a German report written in this place that was found after the war:
The children were “administered barbiturate products, mostly Luminal in large doses, from
0.1 to 0.6 per day, regardless of age. Initially, all the children vomited after they had been
given Luminal, some of them seemed to be adapting. After some time, they got a high fever, stopped
eating, made growling sounds, had foaming mouths, sometimes with blood, and they eventually died.”
The same thing happened at a place in Cieszyn in southern Poland, but this was only
for young kids since it was a nursery. There, they were often experimented on. Here’s
a testimony from a woman named Ruta Heczkówna: “They were beaten, tortured, pinched. During
feeding time, they were placed on laps with their head down, their noses were clenched, and
a portion of food was poured into their throats while they were being punched in their heads.
The children were so scared of the feeding time.” If they ended up at Auschwitz, their fate
wasn’t any better. There, records show there was a practice of something called “needling” in
which children aged 8-14 were cruelly killed with a long needle filled with the substance Phenol.
This toxic substance was often injected into their necks. Death occurred soon after.
Here’s an actual report from Auschwitz talking about something that happened
during the winter of 1942 and 1943: “Circa 90 boys were brought by Palitsch to
block 20 and they were killed there with injections by an NCO paramedic, Scherpe.”
Scherpe, who later testified in court, was a medical aid. He later said he saw 20
kids receive injections to their hearts. He explained, “You didn't protest when you
saw the children lined up to be given carbolic acid injectors? I did, but in the end, I
just handed the bottle containing the acid to a trusted inmate who had been standing
ready with a hypodermic needle.” He added, referring to the kids as gypsies,
“Death was always instantaneous.” Back to Gerhard Palitzsch, he
was one of the absolute worst Nazis (non-commissioned SS officer) at Auschwitz,
known for his speech when prisoners arrived there. Part of it went: “With joy, we will hound you all through the
chimneys of the crematoria. Forget your wives, your children, your families.
You will die here like dogs.″ He bragged that he killed around 25,000
people with a gun to the back of the head at what was called the “death wall.”
He was so corrupt the Nazis moved him to different camps where they hoped he might
not cause as much damage and steal so much. He took particular enjoyment in hurting
kids. A Polish prisoner at the camp, Witold Pilecki, who wrote down a long
list of Nazi atrocities, said about him: “In Block 11, Palitzsch, a particularly dedicated
torturer, would hunt children. He told girls to run around a closed yard and would shoot at them,
killing them like rabbits…A true degenerate, tears, and death followed him. Having committed
a most heinous crime, he would come out smiling, handsome, and polite, calmly smoking a cigarette.”
Said by many to be the worst of the worst, Palitzsch never faced trial. He was likely
killed in action before the war ended. The Nazis were so wrongheaded they would capture
Polish kids with blond hair and blue eyes and act surprised that the kid seemed genuinely
German. Hans Frank, the General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland during WWII, summed that
up when he said, “When we see a blue-eyed child, we are surprised that he is speaking Polish.”
Many decades after the war, German men and women were still finding out that they’d been born into
one of those homes or were one of the kidnapped kids. Right after the war, teams were sent to
Germany to find some of the kidnapped Polish kids, but by that time, some had been brainwashed,
and others simply didn’t seem to realize they’d been kidnapped. Some just said they
were not Polish, or Ukrainian, or Russian, they were German, so please go away, they pleaded.
We think you now have a good idea of how the Nazis tried to create life and how they rubbed out life
when they deemed certain people were not racially pure. This brings us to the main topic of
the show today: artificial insemination. Let’s now turn to that newspaper article we
talked about in the introduction. Part of it went, “The Nazis practiced artificial insemination
of nude women prisoners hanging helplessly head down. So painful were the experiments that many
victims died.” The same article said survivors were sometimes given deadly “bloodstream
injections of gasoline and disinfectants.” You already know this was pretty common for
kids, but adults often faced that fate, too. One of the witnesses to these experiments
was Helen Hammermasch, a woman described by the newspaper as a “25-year-old Polish
Jewess and former medical student.” She said the women were strung upside down and
given something to stimulate their hearts, after which the sperm was introduced.
This happened at the Oswiecim and Belsen concentration camps, so let’s have at them.
The latter was in northern Germany. When the British liberated it on April 15, 1945, they found
around 13,000 bodies scattered around and 60,000 people, most of whom were close to starving
to death, seriously ill from disease, or both. As it was often a holding camp for POWS, many of
the people who died there were Soviet soldiers, although it was also home to many Jewish
people. Two of its most well-known occupants, who both died there, were Margot and Anne Frank. Oswiecim was part of the Auschwitz complex,
which consisted of 40 different camps. This was a massive camp where 1.1 million of the 1.3 million
sent were exterminated, mostly Jewish people. At the Belsen camp, sometimes called
Belsen-Belsen, the Brits could not believe what they were seeing. Rotted bodies lay
around the entire camp, some so putrified they fell apart when the Brits tried to move them.
The stench was unbearable. The BBC reported: “Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things
that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for
her child and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the
bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.” In 1945, the world heard about the Belsen trials,
which was one of the first opportunities for the public to understand the depravity of
what happened in those camps. The Brits had arrested a number of Nazis who worked
there, from the Commandant, Josef Kramer to the camp doctor, Fritz Klein, to the head warden, Elisabeth Volkenrath. Prior to the British - and also Canadian soldiers
- entering the camp, the Nazis had agreed to a truce so there would be no more fighting. This
meant the swift arrest of those who worked there, men and women who had to help with
the clean-up. About 500 people had been dying each day from typhus. It really was
a sight you could call hell on Earth, although not every prisoner was in such bad condition.
Some prisoners had arrived earlier from another camp, and they looked a lot better. Those men,
once Belsen was liberated, turned on the Germans and the foreign kapos (prisoners forced to work
for the Nazis) and murdered about 170 of them. But the ones that survived that ordeal faced trial.
This included 12 kapos, 16 female SS members, and 16 male SS members. Three SS members had been
shot trying to escape, while 17 SS members were already dead from typhus before the trial began.
Many of the transcripts, and there are a lot of them, show how people, sometimes Polish, had
become kapos and were accused of cruelty to other prisoners. One Polish kapo got 15 years
in prison after being accused of beating a sick French prisoner to death by hitting
him over the head with an iron soup ladle. As much as we’d like to tell
you all about these transcripts, we’d be here until next week doing it, so let’s
now focus on artificial insemination again. While sterilization was the norm at many
camps, the main artificial insemination testimony came from the woman we just mentioned,
Helen Hammermasch, who you know was a student of medicine. She’d run away to Hungary when the Nazis
entered Poland but was sent back and handed over to the Gestapo. In her testimony, she talked
about the train journey to the camp, saying: “There was a selection immediately [after]
we got out of the train, and some people were sent by vehicles to the crematorium, I
being one of the few to be sent to the camp.” She said they were lined up and chosen in a
selection process and beaten if they cried. Dr. Kramer and Dr. Klein performed
the selection. Klein once said: “My Hippocratic oath tells me to cut
a gangrenous appendix out of the human body. The Jews are the gangrenous appendix
of mankind. That's why I cut them out.” Klein and Kramer weren’t the only problem.
The people who ran the camp were just as bad, according to Helen. Of her work in the leather
factory, she said, “They treated us very badly there. We had two overseers called Pfor and
Otto Graff. Graff beat us every day, and once, a girl called Marilla Dombroska was so severely
beaten that she was taken away dead. He kicked her and beat her with a rubber truncheon.”
She said Graff once beat a French girl in the factory and let her lie on a floor next to
the workers. She lay there all day in pain and died in the evening. Helen said that Graff worked
half the time in the crematorium. She explained he enjoyed telling the women in the factory
about how much better female bodies burned than male bodies. He was an out-and-out sicko.
Since Helen was a medical student, she got to work in the hospital, and that’s where she saw
people dying after being injected with petrol and Lysol. Her testimony is astonishingly vivid. She
talks of women being beaten, of men being beaten, including a Russian man kicked to death by
Dr. Kramer, but her words about artificial insemination are actually about something she was
told. The American newspaper got this part wrong. In her actual testimony, she said:
“I was told by one of my friends, who worked as a nurse in the hospital, that in
Block 10 (Auschwitz), there were young women on whom experiments were made with artificial
insemination. The victim was hung up by her legs and was injected in order that her blood
might circulate freely. She then received an injection in which the sperm was introduced.
After a short time, the victim was in great pain and quite often, not long after, died.”
Also, in the Belsen trials, a woman named Ada Bimko testified. She described herself as “a
Jewess from Poland and a Doctor of Medicine.” Thousands of people were taken from her town
in Poland. The day she was pushed onto a train, many were sent loaded onto trucks for the
crematorium. She said in court, “My father, mother, brother, husband, and small son of six
years of age were included in that number.” It is hard to imagine what that would feel like.
But at the camp, she experienced another hell where the goal of every day was just to survive.
One day, she met a woman who was talking about ending it all. She asked the woman what had
happened, and the woman told her the Nazi doctors had just tried to artificially inseminate
her. She said she was worried they had rendered her “physically incapable of bearing children.”
There isn’t too much other evidence in the Belsen trial testimonies we can find regarding
artificial insemination. Truth be known, so often, the women were tampered with and had
no idea what those doctors were doing to them. At Auschwitz, these experiments on women’s
reproductive organs usually happened in Block 10. One of the main experimenters was the gynecologist
Carl Clauberg, who was highly regarded for his work on female fertility hormones. He was known
to sterilize women, sometimes by injecting caustic substances into their uteruses. A report stated
these procedures sometimes led to “peritonitis and hemorrhages from the reproductive
tract, leading to high fever and sepsis.” One of the women in Block 10, Dr. Dorota Lorska,
later talked about her experience, calling the block a mix of “hell and a madhouse.” She said
Clauberg caused sterilization by irradiation. He often injected the women with something, but she
didn’t know what. She did know that sometimes he removed the woman’s ovaries.
In her notes, she wrote: “I cannot say what he plans to do with them in the
future. He performs all the procedures personally, with the help of untrained staff, who
do not understand what he is doing.” In another passage, she wrote:
“There was no doubt that this gynecologist, so very well-known in the academic world, was
devising artificial insemination experiments.” We should add here that the first successful
birth of a child born through artificial insemination didn’t happen until 1978, but the
first animal to give birth that way, a rabbit, was in 1939. Perhaps the Nazis thought they could
pioneer this procedure. We can find no evidence that explains why they were performing these
experiments as all records have been destroyed. It’s well-known, though, that all over the world,
scientists in the 1930s and 40s talked about the possibility of artificial insemination. The
British wondered if they could repopulate their country with it. The New York City gynecologist
Dr. Frances Seymour talked about the wonder of “eugenic babies.” It’s hardly surprising that
the Nazis would try to make it a reality. Clauberg spent just seven years in prison
after the war but, after being released, was captured again after an uproar, and he died
before his next sentence. Mengele escaped to South America and died there in 1979, aged 67.
One question you might have is: where did the sperm came from for these experiments.
Here’s a testimony of a man who said the Nazi doctors shoved something up his
backside to make him ejaculate. He said, “He then turned the stick and caused an
involuntary ejaculation of sperm. A female SS officer who worked with the other officer held
two pieces of glass underneath my genitals in order to collect a sample of my sperm for the
lab. They then made me stand up on a special machine that gave electric waves to both sides of
my genitals until again a sperm was ejaculated.” Both Dr. Klein and Dr. Kramer were hanged by
the British, as were six other men in the Belsen trials. Three women were sent to the gallows, too.
One was the guard Irma Grese, the so-called “Hyena of Auschwitz,” said to be a very feared woman
in the camp due to her sadistic proclivities. Eighteen other people were also
sentenced to one to 15 years. Now you need to watch “How They
Finally Caught The Nazi Butcher.” Or, have a look at “Real Reason Why Nazi
Officers Fled to Argentina After WW2.”
