| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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create records of the conditions caused. The prisoner
nurse discussed the large “black closet” used as part of the
photographic equipment, within which experimental subjects had to remain still
and upright for long periods, resulting in further suffering, moans of pain,
and near collapse: “Often I had to carry inanimate beings to their
beds.”57
A third set of
experiments required ingestion by mouth of a powder in order to study the
symptoms of liver damage it caused: nausea, loss of appetite, jaundice, and
discolored urine. This research was thought to follow upon Himmler’s
expressed interest in various forms of liver disease and jaundice because of
problems they created for the German military.
This series of
experiments on Block 28, then, reflects mainly official interest in conditions
affecting the military but probably involved a certain individual
“scientific curiosity” as well. Auschwitz provided a relatively
technologized (in terms of the photography) research laboratory where a young
neophyte physician was encouraged to serve the cause and make his medical name
by means of experiments.
Finally, a series of surgical
demonstrations were performed in various parts of the camp.
There was
one report of the appearance, on Block 41 in Birkenau, of “three
well-known German professors” to carry out vivisections in the form of
exposing leg muscles followed by test application of various medications.58 Another report involved medical students
themselves performing experimental surgery on a female hospital block: the
sudden appearance of “many young doctors in white coats (later
identified a students) … [who] walked through the wards and looked us all
over, who, through orders to the prisoner doctor, chose certain women, put
anesthesia masks on them, and had them taken to an operating area, from which
they returned hours later to wake up in their beds, each with wounds differing
from the others.” The women concluded that “each of the students
performed an operation as an experiment in his specialty: throat, eyes,
stomach, or, gynecology,” the last being the case of the woman who gave
the testimony; and only much later did she discover that her uterus and ovaries
had been removed.59*
We know of the
SS doctors’ tendency to gain surgical experience by attempting various
operations, with or without the supervision of more experienced Jewish or
Polish prisoner doctors, and often on prisoners who had no real medical need
for surgery. The SS doctors systematically combined hospital files or
identified at roll call prisoners with specific diseases or disease histories
of a potential surgical nature — gallbladder, appendix, kidney stones,
etc. — and had them report to the hospital. “If at a certain time a
German doctor was studying gallbladder operations, |
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* Given the Auschwitz
atmosphere, in which any kind of experiment was considered possible,
descriptions such as these could include inaccuracies or distortions, but it is
very likely that something close to what was described really occurred.
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