It’s a warm sunny day in August 1944. Hans
Eppinger is sitting in his office jotting down some notes in a well-worn book. He pushes his
spectacles farther up the bridge of his nose, exhales, and puts down his pen. Just a few feet
away are a group of emaciated Romani people. They are his subjects, his human Guinea pigs.
Some of them are already close to death, so dehydrated they are on all fours licking
water that was just used to mop the floor. Suddenly the door to their hut opens. In walks
Eppinger. Pointing with his finger, he says, ‘You, you, and you, come with me.”
They won’t be seen again. That was the Sea Water Torture Experiment we
just talked about, and as you’ll see today, it was just one of many infinitely appalling
experiments that happened in those camps. 5. Thirst
Let’s finish the story we started. Eppinger was an Austrian
physicist whose name among many others is written in the annals of human depravity. He
was employed by the Nazis during the Second World War to conduct odious experiments on
human beings at the Dachau concentration camp. Eppinger used mainly Romani people, a nomadic
group sometimes referred to as “gypsies” – a term they don’t like. Back in the war, about 90
of them were chosen for the water experiments. These weren’t exactly technical. The Nazis wanted
to know what would happen if you deprived someone of food and drinking water and had to survive
on seawater. How long would it take to die? What would happen during the passage to death? In the
war, this could happen to one of their pilots. We know the answer thanks to a survivor of those
camps named Joseph Tschofenig. He watched the experiments with his own eyes, saying later
that the victims were so desperate they licked the floor and sucked on damp rags.
The outcome was the people usually died. Prudence demanded that Tschofenig kept his mouth
about this, with him not even showing sympathy to the victims when any German soldiers were around.
He also pretended not to see anything. He later noted that he’d seen another worker in the camp
take too much interest in an experiment and for that, he was sent straight to the gas chamber.
The experiment was related to how humans deal with extreme low-pressure.
4. The doctor of death The low-pressure experiments were conducted
by a man often called a monster. This was Sigmund Rascher, an SS doctor of death
whose depravity seemed to know no limits. He’d been a pilot in the Luftwaffe and that made
him think about the effect of high-altitude on pilots. The problem was, as he wrote in a
letter to Nazi SS boss Heinrich Himmler, it wasn’t exactly easy to get people to sign
up for experiments. He wrote that he’d already tried using monkeys, but that didn’t go down
too well. He needed humans, he told Himmler, stating that the experiments would likely
end their life. No problem, replied Himmler. Humans he got, and during the Spring and the
Summer of 1942 he rounded up a bunch of prisoners at the Dachau camp. One by one, he told them
to enter a pressure chamber. Once they were in, Rascher played around with the pressure,
making it so low that it corresponded with being at a very high altitude. He would then
quickly change the pressure in an attempt to see what it might be like for a German pilot
parachuting from a plane without any oxygen. According to reports, the people used in
these experiments were mostly Poles and Russians. Some of them died, and some of them
survived. When Rascher told Himmler about this, the boss said if they survive then spare
them the gas chamber. Just give them life in prison. Rascher then quickly wrote back,
reminding Himmler who those people were. Some of the letters survived the war. Here’s part
of one Rascher wrote to Himmler in April 1942: “Only continuous experiments at altitudes
higher than 10.5 Km resulted in death. These experiments showed that breathing stopped
after about 30 minutes, while in two cases the electrocardiographically charted action of
the heart continued for another 20 minutes.” He said after four minutes the people started
to “wiggle” and move their head around. A minute later, they would cramp up in various
parts of the body. Then their breathing would become rapid and at around 10 minutes they lost
consciousness. At around the 30-minute mark, the subjects would only be taking about three
slow breaths per minute. Death came soon after. He wrote this in May of the same year:
“After relative recuperation from such a parachute descending test had taken place,
however, before regaining consciousness, some experimental subjects were
kept underwater until they died.” You can see just how little concern these people
had for human life. But it gets even worse. Rascher, likely following the orders of Luftwaffe
chief surgeon Erich Hippke, experimented on people to see just how cold you could make them.
These were called the “freezing experiments.” They wanted to know what would happen if a
German pilot survived his fall from the sky and landed in the freezing cold ocean? How best
to warm someone up who had hypothermia? In a world not eclipsed by evil, you couldn’t
conduct such an experiment on humans. Rascher used people from the Dachau camp, this
time putting prisoners in a tank of freezing cold water for up to three hours. Others he
made stay outside in the cold weather while they were naked. Throughout their ordeal,
they were monitored to see the effects the cold had on the body. One experiment was called,
“Warming Up After Freezing to the Danger Point.” In a letter shown at the Nuremberg
trials, Himmler gives his approval of the “warming up” experiments, signing
off, “Kind Greetings, Heil Hitler!” The victims were almost frozen to death and
then were warmed up, but we are not talking about being given a blanket and a steaming cup of
tea. They were immersed in hot water, sometimes boiling water. This was of course a massive shock
to the system, and some people subsequently died. The warming by water was not a good way to
treat people suffering from hypothermia was the conclusion, so Himmler told Rascher to
go and ask fisherman who worked in the cold North sea what they would do. Himmler
reportedly said that “a fisherwoman could well take her half-frozen husband
into her bed and revive him in that manner.” After that, Romani people were frozen
half to death and then placed in between two warm Romani women. They had to be naked of
course. The victims were monitored throughout, and if they died, autopsies were performed.
You can see the actual reports. They state if a person is immersed in water at 5 C it
can usually be tolerated for an hour. When they raised the temperature to 15 C the victim
could tolerate the water for four or five hours. The reports also state that even after the people
were taken out of the water their temperature would continue to drop. They often died soon
after, even when revival attempts were made. We now know about things such as “re-warming shock”
and the “after-drop effect” and we know you should not warm a hypothermic person up using warm water,
but back then the science wasn’t up to speed. The reports state that people whose body
temperatures were reduced to 25 C and then warmed up to 28 C died. No number was written
down as to how many died. One report just said they ALL died. They usually died anywhere
between 53 and 106 minutes of cooling. But then those were the water experiments only.
During the trials, two people who said they witnessed these experiments said 80 to 90
people died. They said they saw only two people actually get through the experiment, but
noted that they became “mental cases” as a result. Finally, this same doctor conducted what was
called the “blood coagulation experiments.” Basically, the Nazis wanted to know if you took
a pill made from beet and Apple pectin would the blood clot after being shot, therefore
possibly saving the life of a soldier. Again, in a normal world, you could never conduct
this experiment on humans, but the Nazis simply used victims of the camps. They shot them and
then gave them the drug. What’s even worse, they sometimes amputated people’s limbs.
This was an attempt to try and duplicate a person losing a limb on the battlefield due
to a bomb. They made it as real as possible, removing the limbs sometimes without
giving the victim any kind of anesthetic. After that, they got the blood-clotting drug.
In his notes, Rascher wrote, “The tests of this medicine showed no failures under most varied
circumstances.” This got back to Hitler himself, who was impressed with the experiment.
As for what happened to the dead, it was later revealed that Rascher had a thing for human
skin, using it to make handbags, gloves, slippers, saddles, pants, and other items. He sometimes sold
these things to his colleagues, according to the book, “Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich.”
Since those reports were released to the world, scientists have said that Rascher lied in them and
there were many contradictions and inaccuracies. The Nazis also realized he’d lied at times.
Rascher was arrested in 1944 on the order of Himmler after it was revealed he’d kidnapped three
children. He was accused of scientific fraud and even murdering his assistant. He ended up being
a prisoner himself at Dachau and then in 1945, he was executed by firing squad.
Ok, now for something very short, but extremely terrifying.
3. Head injury This account of one single experiment was told
by a Holocaust survivor named Martin Small, who wrote that one day he and another prisoner
were working at the house of a Nazi named Dr. Wichtmann. He said the doctor took off
somewhere, so he did some looking around and at one point found himself looking into
a locked room by a window outside the house. In his own words, he said, “I placed my hands
on the ledge and put my face to the window. I was not prepared for what was inside and
at first sight, I could not find words to interpret what I was looking at…I put my hand to
my mouth as if trying to muffle my own outburst. I nearly vomited. 60 years later I still
cannot erase the vivid, terrible image…” Ok, so what was he looking at?
He described seeing a young boy strapped to a chair. Above him was a mechanized
hammer that struck the boy over the head every few seconds. It wasn’t hard enough to break the
skull, but you can only imagine what that must have felt like after say, an hour, a day, two
days, more. The guy said the boy was already driven mad, not dead, but not there, either.
He said that this same doctor had actually saved him from being killed by another Nazi, so
he was surprised he was torturing a little boy in the worst kind of way. “I dropped to my knees in
sickness and disgust, and I trembled,” he wrote. It’s hard to imagine a human doing that to
another human, but of course you are about to hear something even worse. Sorry, that’s
just the way it’s going to be with this show. 2. Surgery
Surgery, it’s an important thing during a time when many
men are being shot to pieces on the battlefield. The best surgeons practice of course, but who do
you practice on besides victims on your own side? The answer for the Nazis was prisoners at the
Ravensbrück concentration camp. Without any anesthesia at all, people had their bones removed,
their nerves pulled out, their muscles plundered, all in the name of medical experimentation.
The Nazis had two reasons for this. Firstly, they wanted to know if you remove something how
does it regenerate, if at all. Secondly, they were interested in seeing how transplants worked. They
didn’t seem to give a damn about making people disabled and putting them through what must have
been the worst kind of pain. Just imagine being tied down and having parts of you removed…
That happened to a woman two times and she survived to tell the story. Her name was Jadwiga
Kamińska, and she said as a young girl she was sent into surgery and they did something to
her leg that led to crippling pain. She didn’t know exactly what they did but said after she was
grievously injured and suffered from infections. It’s hard to say how many people were mutilated
like this, but research shows there were a lot of victims trying to claim compensation after the
war. There are photos, too, such as the one of a Polish woman named Bogumiła Babińska-Dobrowska.
She’d had a bit of her leg removed. The National Institutes of Health wrote
that in all there were 27,759 known victims, made up of many nationalities, with about twice as
many male victims as female victims. These people suffered all manner of injuries and many died.
Reports state that the victims were called ‘rabbits” by the Nazis, given the nature of the
experiments. Some were cut deeply so it could be seen how quickly infections ensued. Sometimes the
Nazis would rub dirt, cloth fibers, wood shavings, and even broken glass into the open wound. This
was to accelerate the speed of infection. The victims were then given experimental drugs
to see if the infection could be dealt with. The NIH wrote, “They operated on Barbara
Pietrzyk five times in 1942 alone causing left lower limb paralysis. At 16 years of
age, she was the youngest of the “rabbits.” In another account, Nazi Professor Gebhardt used
24 Polish women for an experiment. He wanted to see what would happen if you cut off blood flow
in a limb, so he just tied something really tight around part of the limb. The result of course
was the area became necrotic. Experimental drugs were subsequently administered to the women.
Nazi reports that were unearthed said in one experiment 13 people died from gangrene, while six
others were taken out and shot so they couldn’t ever tell anyone about what had happened
to them. There is data to back all this up, so as unbelievable as it sounds, it happened.
There are names and photographs of survivors. Another NIH report stated, “The surviving
victims were permanently disabled, both physically and psychologically. Four of
the surviving Polish women, Maria Broel-Plater, Jadwiga Dzido, Wladyslawa Karolewska, and
Maria Kusmierczuk testified during the Doctors’ Trial and exhibited the scars on their legs.”
Then there was Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger. He was partly responsible for bone graft experiments
using the tibias of victims. In some cases, the tibia would be harvested and
then transplanted to another victim who had also had their tibia removed.
During those same experiments, they did something called a myomectomy. That’s
removing the skeletal muscle, and as you know, nerves were also taken out. Again there
are names or survivors and photographs. One such person was named Wladislawa
Karolewska. She went through six separate surgeries each involving the
removal of bone, muscles, and nerves. She testified later, describing how people were
slaughtered and how she was experimented on. This is what she said happened to
her after she passed out from pain: “I regained my consciousness in the morning and
then I noticed that my leg was in a cast from the ankle up to the knee and I felt a very strong
pain in this leg and the high temperature. I noticed also that my leg was swollen from the
toes up to the groin. The pain was increasing and the temperature, too, and the next day I
noticed that some liquid was flowing from my leg.” One day, she and other rabbits stood in line
to be executed. A German officer asked her, “Why do you stand so in line as if you were to be
executed?” She replied, “The operations are worse for us than executions and we would prefer to be
executed rather than to be operated on again.” She explained in her testimony what
happened after the final operation: “I stayed in the hospital six months. I was
in bed. I could not stretch my legs. I could not move them. I could not walk either.”
A doctor named Fischer later admitted to taking off entire limbs, saying he was just
following orders. He wrote of one limb removal: “I was ordered to go to Ravensbrück and perform
the operation of removal on that evening. I asked Doctors Gebhardt and Schulze to describe exactly
the technique which they wished me to follow.” In a sworn affidavit, a Czech doctor
named Dr. Zdenka Nedvedova-Nejedla, wrote: “High amputations were performed; for
example, even whole arms with shoulder blades or legs were amputated. These operations
were performed mostly on insane women who were immediately killed after the operation by a
quick injection of Evipan.” That is a kind of barbiturate that can kill in high doses.
She said eleven people died or were killed during these operations, and she also stated
that pain relievers weren’t administered to the victims. We know this because she wrote:
“After operations, no one except SS nurses was admitted to the persons operated on, whole nights
they lay without any assistance and it was not permitted to administer sedatives even against
the most intensive post-operational pains.” Ok, so this is a really depressing show, but
you all know the expression that history is doomed to repeat itself if we don’t study it.
We need to know the facts. You need to know that the Nazis purposefully gave people malaria.
They tested mustard gas on prisoners. They gave tetanus to others, and they conducted many awful
experiments to see how people could be sterilized. They even poisoned people to the point of death
or actual death, and they burned people to see how bomb blasts work out for victims... but
even after hearing all that, there’s one thing that sticks out.
1. Twins These were called the Twin experiments. The
Nazis were obsessed with twins, and so they captured about 1,500 sets and imprisoned them
at Auschwitz. About 200 of them survived, so that’s how we know about what happened.
They separated them so they could monitor what happened to each twin without them knowing
the same was happening to their sibling. Again, they did ad hoc surgeries on them, even trying
to change their eye color using dyes. This was mostly the work of doctors Josef Mengele
and Karin Magnussen. The latter made it clear how she thought, writing this in 1943:
“This war is not just about the preservation of the German people, but is about the question,
which races and peoples should live in the future on European soil… the Jew who enjoys life as a
host in our country, is our enemy, even if he does not actively engage with weapons in this fight.”
But why change the eye color, which was very painful by the way…The reason was just to see
if they could. One survivor said Mengele looked at her mother and saw what he said were
"perfect Aryan features" and blue eyes, but her eyes were brown, which didn’t impress
the doctor. His thoughts? Try and change them. Survivor Jona Laks said she saw Mengele remove one
twin’s organs without giving him any anesthetic. Others said he sometimes just killed twins by
giving them injections to the heart. Mengele was obsessed with what he might have called pureblood,
and so he was obsessed with twins and genetic inheritance. After all, the Nazis wanted to
create a super race, partly and wrongly based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “Superman”.
He even forced people to have sex, to see what the child might look like
if indeed one was born as a result of the forced encounter. A survivor later said he
did this with a male dwarf and a Romani woman. Listen to this from a Jewish doctor
who was a prisoner himself but had to work with Mengele. His name was Miklos Nyiszli.
He said he worked on many experiments. Sometimes they’d just kill twins at the same time just to
see if the autopsy revealed they were similar on the inside. He wrote, “In Auschwitz camp there are
several hundred pairs of twins, and their deaths, in turn, present several hundred opportunities!”
One twin who survived was named Eva Mozes Kor. She wrote that Mengele tried to make boys into
girls and vice versa. In her own words she said, he “wanted to discover a way to change
girls into boys and boys into girls, Many of these details I learned forty years
later, such as the twin teenage boys who had some of their private parts cut off in Mengele’s
quest to see if he could turn them into girls.” She also said that when kids died in the camp
the doctor became very angry, but it wasn’t because he was concerned for people’s welfare. She
wrote, “These deaths meant the loss of valuable guinea pigs for his medical experiments.”
But perhaps the worst thing, something that sounds like a disgusting horror movie, was his
experiment related to sewing people together. Yep, you heard that right. Joseph Mengele tried to
attach twins together in an attempt to make them conjoined. He used Romani children for this.
It sounds so outrageous you could understand people thinking it’s not true, but again
there’s evidence, although not much in this case. We have at least one piece of evidence,
and again it’s from the twin Eva Mozes Kor. We’ll let her tell you in
her own words what she saw: “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.” Now you need to watch, “Shocking US
Human Prisoner Experiments Revealed.” Or, have a look at, “Most Horrible Prison
Experiments On Humans of All Time.”
