| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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[Schu…] mann knew that they [were] alive ... [on]
Block 10, he would kill them straightaway.” They were known as
“Schumann’s girls.”
The depth of these experimental
victims’ sense of violation and mutilation was evident during interviews I
had with some of them thirty-five years later. A Greek-Jewish woman described
her terror as she saw in a reflection “the blood pouring out as they
opened my belly”; and then, after the two operations, “pus —
like a pit from an infected wound, and a high temperature, … pneumonia. My
body swelled up, and there were marks when I pressed my arm [edema]. They gave
me medicine. I was paralyzed …. I couldn't move. My whole body was swollen
up.” In addition: “We knew we were like a tree without fruit ….
The experiment was that they were destroying our organs …. We would cry
together about this”; and “They took us because they didn't have
rabbits.”
Schumann’s experiments with men had a parallel
course, as described by Dr. Michael Z. in a written report: First, the rumor
that “Jews were being sterilized with X-rays” by “an air-force
lieutenant-physician”; then a visit by Schumann to a male medical ward
during which he ordered them to prepare for forty inmates on whom they were to
keep records of medical observations; the arrival of the experimental victims
with burn erythemas [red areas] around the scrotum (“From their
description, we recognized the X-ray machine”); the victims’ later
accounts of their sperm being collected, their prostates brutally massaged with
pieces of wood inserted into the rectum) their exposure to an operation
removing one or two testicles and in some cases a second operation removing the
remaining testicle (conducted with noticeable brutality and limited anesthesia
patients screams were frightening to hear ) disastrous post-operative
developments including hemorrhages, septicemia, absence of muscle tone from
wounds, so that “many … would die rapidly, weakened morally and
physically” and others would be sent to work “which would finish
them.” But “their deaths mattered little since these guinea pigs have
already served the function expected of them.”
Dr. Erich G. told
of the psychological pain of experimental victims and of their questions to him
(“Will I [be able to] be a father? Can I [have relations with]
females?”) but admitted that at the time that was not the greatest
emotional stress (“To survive was more important than to be mutilated or
even castrated”); and the fear was that experimental victims would be
killed (“It was impossible to believe that they would allow people to live
after the war to be a witness”).
Schumann’s callousness was
reflected (as Dr. Tadeusz S tells us) in the little device he constructed to
insert into the rectum to stimulate the prostate and produce ejaculation, which
was “painful and ... humiliating so that the patients suffered a great
deal.” It also produced “terrible infections”: “For
Schumann it was nothing . . . . He was testing the results of his
work.”
One of the male victims told of the sequence from the X rays
(“My genital organ, together with the scrotum, on a machine … the
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