| Prisoner Doctors: Collaboration with Nazi
Doctors |
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movement against the French Occupation in Cologne.
Probably for these reasons, he arrived in Auschwitz with instructions that he
be afforded special consideration; and although then sixty-two years old, he
was not selected for the gas chamber.
He first worked at Buna, where at
least one prisoner doctor who became ill remembers him as rendering considerate
medical help. But before long he was transferred to Block 10, where his
gynecological experience was put to use as he became increasingly involved in
the experiments on women conducted there. One of his major activities was the
surgical removal of the cervix from a considerable number of women who were
part of the “research project” conducted by Eduard Wirths on
pre-cancerous growths (see pages 391-92). Some inmates claimed that he was a
little more considerate than Nazi doctors who did the operation in that he
removed less of the cervix, but most prisoner doctors were impressed by
Samuel’s extreme “diligence” in working closely with the Nazis.
Furthermore, he denounced to Nazi doctors another prisoner physician who
refused to continue to give anesthesia for his operations. There was also some
evidence that Samuel made reports on inmates to the notorious Political
Department.
Of the people I interviewed who knew Samuel, only one made
a positive comment. A woman who had been subjected to sterilization procedures
on Block 10 remembered him as having been “kind to us,” as having
spoken gently to the Jewish victims, and as having attempted to make whatever
procedures he and others performed on them as painless as possible. But she may
have wished to see a Jewish doctor in that favorable light. Certainly most
former prisoners I spoke to, Jewish or otherwise, remembered Samuel as either
arrogant or pathetic, or both.
They also recognized that he was a
broken man. His wife had been killed upon their arrival in Auschwitz with their
nineteen-year-old daughter. The daughter was selected for work, and there was a
strong impression that Samuel’s activities were part of his desperate
efforts to save her life. He went so far as to write a letter from the camp to
Himmler himself, pointing to his own First World War record and pleading that
his daughter be spared. (The letter was left unsealed in the block office,
where it was seen by another prisoner doctor.)
Then, in the middle of
the experiments, Samuel was suddenly put to death. Speculations I heard from
survivors about why he was killed varied greatly. Some stressed the extensive
skin lesions or eczema he developed (which a few survivors attributed to his
extreme tension and fear) as having rendered him too sick to be any longer
useful, or caused his face to become “repulsive” to the SS. Other
survivors spoke of his argumentativeness and conflicts with Clauberg; still
others thought he had become superfluous with the arrival of a younger Jewish
woman doctor, Wanda J., to take charge of Block 10. But most of all, inmates
considered him to have seen and done so much as to have reached the dangerous
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