by Donald Hunt
The two women were silent for a moment and then Anna grabbed her notepad and her bag. “I’m off to the meeting,” she said lightly. Theresa looked down at her notes.
“Yes, the eugenics meeting,” she said aloud. “Good luck.”
But Anna was already out the door. She took the side stairway down one flight and then across a long elevated corridor that led from the main hospital to the medical school building. The corridor was poorly heated and she walked quickly, drawing her white lab coat tightly around her chest. The main lecture hall was on the same floor. As she approached, two SS. sergeants stood at the door. They nodded, a gesture she acknowledged with a returning nod but without making eye contact.
Some thirty faculty members were already gathered in the lecture hall. Most were from the departments of medicine, pediatrics, anesthesia and surgery. Anna’s eyes scanned the crowd until they found Christian. They looked at each other but neither one allowed their expressions to change. Anna took a seat near the front, the sole female and one of only three Jews on the faculty of the school.
Within minutes, one of three SS. officers stood to address the group.
“My name is Col. Gregor Papen. I am the deputy commissioner for the Counsel on Eugenics. We are here to inform the medical community of our program and to enlist your help in accomplishing our task. The Fuhrer understands and appreciates the dedication your staff has demonstrated in saving lives and fighting diseases. Our program is also a noble effort and will be carried out with the same dedication.
The program will have two components. The first will be research to aid our military. The second will aid our cause to purify the German people, something we must accomplish.”
Papen went on to explain that there would be complete secrecy about the program. It would be administered by the faculty but would take place in various ‘clinics’ outside the main medical campus. Papen stressed that the ‘subjects’ would all be enemies of the state and would be moved from the prison system to the clinics. The research would be on living subjects to study gas gangrene, burns and the effects of hypothermia.
One group would be injected with Clostridia bacteria, the agent that causes myonecrosis or gas gangrene. The physiologic responses would be noted. The second group would be anesthetized and given scald burns on 30 to 50 percent of their bodies. He explained that the treatment of burns in warfare was critical to the welfare of German soldiers. The third group would be placed naked in ice water until their core temperature reached 88 degrees F. The patient’s physiologic reactions would be observed. “The second phase of our program will be the cleansing phase,” he said.
Papen’s eyes showed no emotion. He did not appear angry or even stern. He may not have been gifted as an orator, but he was clever enough to know that there was no place for sentiment in instructions such as these. Sentiment could lead to failure. And his was a program that must succeed.
In clinical fashion, Papen carefully outlined the cleansing phase. It would consist of sterilizing children and young adults with birth defects and mental and emotional problems. Thus, the disabled would not be capable of procreation.
Anna felt herself sinking into her chair. The movement was imperceptible to others and she didn’t make a sound. But from someplace deep within, she felt a weight settle over her like a blanket. What rose from it was an unfamiliar sense of anger and shame. She could no longer hear Papen. She was seeing in her mind, the ‘program.’ She had been taught to heal. She had taken an oath. Now she would have patients upon whom she was to inflict extreme physical harm and pain. This was not a medical program. This was a series of barbaric and sadistic experiments…. professional crimes; inhumane practices….. the antithesis of her profession.
Anna brought her lips together. Had anyone been looking directly at her, they might have thought she was about to whistle. Instead, she silently and softly exhaled, breathing out the fear and tension. She was going deeper into herself and into her chair. Anna looked just slightly to the left of Papen. She could not look directly into his face. She found a point on the wall just behind his ear and tried for a moment to find another image. But for the first time in her life, Anna could not think of pretty things or lovely people. She couldn’t conjure images of stolen kisses with Christian. The man before her was fading. And in his place, Anna could see the definitive outline of horror.
The faculty was dismissed. They began to file silently out of the lecture hall. They were now, each of them, participants in ‘the program’ which would begin in one month. Anna forced herself to stand. She was still trying to find the strength to take a step when Papen approached her.
“Dr. Eichenwald.” He said. Anna heard her name and drew in her breath again. She turned to him, unable to speak.
“We would like a few moments of your time,” he continued. “You, Dr. Meitner and Dr. Richburg.”
Anna and the other two Jewish faculty members were being detained. She looked around for Christian but he had already left the room.
Papen escorted them into a small filming room where there was a movie projector and seven chairs. They sat down methodically. In silence, they each asked themselves how their beloved country could have come to such a place or succumbed to such indignity and inhumanity. They also knew that it no longer mattered just how Germany had gotten there. What mattered was that it had. And they were trapped in it.
Papen dimmed the lights and started the projector. The first image on the screen was Berlin’s Plotzensee Prison. The next image that came into view was an execution chamber. Six men were led in, hands bound behind them and black hoods covering their faces. They were forced to stand on a long bench, while piano wire, attached to a series of meat hooks, was placed around their necks. The bench was then kicked from under them. Their deaths took three to four minutes. The final minute or so found their bodies contorted with agonal convulsions. The projector stopped and the lights came on. Papen stood before them with a look of contempt.
“The Fuhrer expects this program to be implemented!” For the first time, he shouted when he spoke. Then he turned and walked out of the room leaving the three doctors to sit in stunned silence. Anna legs were shaking and she knew she couldn’t stand up. The seconds ticked by. Still no one spoke. Finally, Dr. Meitner stood.
“Well…” he began. But he couldn’t lift his eyes off the floor and his colleagues could not meet his. They left the room in silence.
Chapter 2
Anna & Erin
The 1920s ushered in radical changes throughout Germany. The Eichenwald family, though not politically active, was not exempt. Dinner table conversations increasingly centered on politics, and primarily, the terms of the Versailles Treaty signed after the Armistice ended World War I. With the war behind them, Germans wanted to get on with their lives. But the terms of the treaty were harsh and it was clear that the country was being punished. The Eichenwalds knew, as did every other German, that they were looking at an industrial recovery that could set the nation back 20 years.
One evening during dinner, Anna became animated in her discussion about the French.
“Father, they want to humiliate us,” she exclaimed. “That’s their only goal.” An enormous problem was in the making for the democratically elected government. It was beginning to be viewed as the illegitimate child of the war. Five years earlier, two million front line defeated troops did not feel defeated, but were returning to a demoralized country spiraling into massive inflation and unemployment.
Despite this, not all of the radical changes in Germany were negative. In the miasma of defeat, the University of Berlin was establishing itself as the leading University in Europe. The 1921 Nobel Prize for science had been awarded to Albert Einstein for his 1905 paper describing the photoelectric effect. At least something in the country was going right.
Graduation ceremonies were routine for the faculty. But that was not the case for the graduates, and in
particular, the Eichenwald and Nitschmann families. Daughters
Anna and Erin had both excelled and were now entering graduate school. Anna was beginning to build a reputation, as she was the first woman to be admitted to the medical school in the history of the institution. Her admission had been controversial. Three of the faculty had expressed opposition and threatened to resign if she were admitted. The Dean, however, was a progressive thinker. He realized that at some point, qualified female students would have to be admitted and he saw this time as the time to do it. Anna’s parents, Hanz and Marlene, could not have been more proud. But as they made their way to the graduation ceremony on that Saturday in May, they were both lost in their own thoughts of this unique young woman, born to them 22 years earlier on a rainy Sunday in Munich.
“Hanz, remember how loud she was when she was born?” Marlene said with a quiet laugh. “I could not believe how something so small could make so much noise.” Hanz chuckled and nodded. “I suppose she was trying to announce her arrival to the entire world.”
The assembly hall was packed when they arrived, but Anna and Erin had been watching for them and met them as soon as they entered the doors. Best friends for more than a decade, the two had been inseparable though they were as different as night and day. Anna was all business. She knew what she wanted to do and set out with determination to achieve it. Erin was all passion. Music was her life and she had never lost sight of her goal to become a concert violinist.
The Eichenwalds were soon joined by Erin’s parents, Paula and Isaac Nitschmann. They made their way through the assembly hall, the largest auditorium in Berlin, and found their places among the 4,000 seats. Situated on the campus of the main undergraduate college, the hall was an enormous gray stone structure with eight large paired Doric columns in front and three sets of massive 30-foot steel doors. Some 800 students were graduating so seating was limited to immediate family members. Both of the girls had received honors, not surprising their parents.
The ceremony was followed by a celebration dinner the parents had planned for the girls at the Romanische Café. It was a big unattractive building across from the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Like a great barn, the Café seated 1,000 and was considered the place to go for Berliners. Up in the balcony, chess players sat at rows of small tables playing endless games late into the night. The only time Anna and Erin had been there before, they had seen two celebrities, Greta Garbo of the theater and Arthur Schnabel, the famous pianist.
Anna and Erin had both been awarded scholarships for graduate studies, Anna in medicine and Erin in music. They were sharing an apartment on Mittelstrasse, one block north of Unter den Linden and three blocks west of the main campus, in the center of the city. Their flat was on the second floor with two small bedrooms, a bath and a small front room with a stove and fridge. The fridge was essentially a wooden outer box covering an inner tin compartment. Ice, delivered on Mondays and Thursdays, was placed in a lower separate space keeping the compartment cool. Anna’s room was sparsely decorated. She had a small desk and three book cases lined up against bare walls. This was a place to study. Erin, as the opposite of the two, had already adorned her walls with pictures of her family and favorite composers. She often put fresh flowers into vases and placed them decoratively on lace doilies. This was a room for an artist.
Despite their differences, the relationship worked. They often took breaks and sat across from each other talking about boys or Hebrew school or the latest fashions.
Runaway inflation had imposed a difficult time in Germany. Everyone felt the stress. Those with regular jobs got paid every day. Celebrated conductor, Bruno Walter, generally halted his symphony rehearsals for the mid-day rush. His musicians were paid with sacks of banknotes and they would dash out to exchange them for food. One day one of his trumpet players returned to rehearsal with a bag of salt, and a base player with two sausages. The wife of Henry Lowenfeld, a noted psychoanalyst, taught anatomy to three Chinese students. They could not understand German and she spoke no Chinese. So she used charts and diagrams and as a result, was paid with tea and ‘the most wonderful rice cakes’. The machinations employed during times of extreme economic instability were most imaginative.
Most Berliners were managing to survive. Neighbors looked out for one another, working together through bartering and sharing. As bad as the economy was, it drew out the goodness of people and drew neighbors together. Oddly, there was an influx of foreigners to Berlin because of the inflation. One American writer who came with his family lived in a duplex apartment with a maid and a cook, something he never could have afforded in the U.S. He booked riding lessons for his wife, put his children in private school and he and his wife dined at the finest restaurants, all for his monthly salary of 100 U.S. dollars.
Anna’s admission to medical school was unprecedented. And although that could have put her on a difficult pathway, there were three things working in Anna’s favor. She was the daughter of an associate professor in the department of physics. She had achieved the highest score on the entrance exam. And the Dean had stepped in on her behalf.
From the start, both girls found the course work strenuous. Anna was taking gross anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, histology, and bacteriology. Erin was fully ensconced in music theory, advanced composition, violin, music history and classic composers. While Erin basked in her artistic studies, Anna was drawn to anatomy. As difficult as the course was, it would eventually draw her to the field of surgery.
Being the only female in her class did have its drawbacks. Gross anatomy lab was every Monday afternoon for five hours. She was frequently the first of four dissection partners to her cadaver, a 19-year-old boy who had died in a farm horse accident. Horses were used for plowing and riding and also for pulling logs, buggies, and stumps out of the ground. This unfortunate young man had been in the process of getting his horse into harness. As he walked behind the animal, a cat jumped from a loft in the barn and landed directly in front of the horse. Spooked, the animal kicked both hind legs and one hoof caught the boy flush on the left side of the head. The force of the blow caused massive brain damage and he lived only 36 hours. His grieving parents donated his body to the medical school hoping medical science might somehow benefit from his tragic death.
Anatomy is best studied from human specimens. The course was challenging, and it fascinated Anna. There were literally thousands of structures to dissect and Anna was more than willing to look to her sixty-year old bespectacled professor for the knowledge she was seeking. He was a grandfather several times over and delighted to have a young woman in his class for the first time. He went to great lengths to instill respect for the cadavers. They were human beings – deceased, but human.
During the months of work there were occasions when this fact was lost on some of the young men. Anna was not amused on one morning when she found her young male cadaver propped up and holding a magazine filled with pictures of nude girls. As her male counterparts burst into laughter, she coolly took the magazine to the rubbish bin and tore it in two. “Children,” she said, in her best alto voice. “It’s time to get to work.”
Anna was tall, beautiful and bright, all attributes which enabled her to keep the respect of her classmates.
The rigorous experience of medical school produced a mutual respect and bond among the students. There was an unspoken understanding that the experience was not only unique but in a strange way, sacred. This may have been what appealed to Anna most during her course of study.
The Berlin Philharmonic was on a six-month tour of 20 U.S. cities and Erin’s parents went with it. As musicians with the symphony, they were reimbursed in U.S. currency. This put Erin’s family in the top 10 percent of wage earners in Germany. Simultaneously, Hanz Eichenwald was becoming internationally known in the new field of quantum physics. He was in demand as a speaker and being reimbursed in foreign currency stipends for his lectures out of the country. Sadly, most m
iddle-class Germans were not so fortunate.
After the end of WWI, Germany was in turmoil. Campaigns of terror were being waged on the streets by both left-wing communist agents and right-wing extremists. The leading Catholic politician, Matthias Erzberger, was murdered by terrorists masquerading as patriots. He was the principle armistice signatory, and as such, was placed in an impossible position. He could only do his duty as a German diplomat to sign the document. The Allies had given the Germans no choice. Now he paid with his life. Another group threw prussic acid in the face of former Chancellor Phillip Scheidemann. The following year the highest-ranking Jewish official in Germany, Walter Rathenau, was shot to death while in route to his office. The assassin’s slogan: “Kill off Walter Rathenau now, that god-damned Jewish sow.” The anti-Semitism that was an undercurrent in all of Europe was now being openly displayed in Germany.
The political street thugs created enormous instability and chaos. But while murder and lawlessness were actively being used as instruments to acquire political power, the greater threat to the country’s survival was inflation. Faith that the central government could turn the economy around was almost non-existent. The murder of Rathenau shook what little faith there was to the core.
One evening, Erin walked into Anna’s study. “The Allies want the government to re-pay 130 billion marks for the war!” she exclaimed. “That is outrageous. It’s going to be extremely difficult for Germany to honor this debt. Not only that, the Ruhr area of western Germany, which of course is being partially controlled by the French, is our most valuable industrial asset. How in God’s name do they think we can pay all of that money? We don’t have anything to pay it with!”