Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  70. For an examination of the fate of Estonian Roma during the Holocaust, see Anton Weiss Wendt, Murder without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009); Ruth Bettina Birn, Die Sicherheitspolizei in Estland, 1941–1944: Eine Studie zur Kollaboration im Osten (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006).

  71. Following the war, Ain-Ervin Mere (1903–1969) fled to Great Britain. In 1961, the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic tried several Estonian collaborators in Nazi crimes in the Baltic countries. Mere was tried in absentia and sentenced to death for his actions, but British officials refused to extradite him, and he died a free man in Leicester, England, in 1969.

  72. Following his stint as commandant at the Jägala camp, Aleksander Laak served as commandant of the Tallinn central prison until September 1944. He ultimately fled to Canada after the war, where all evidence suggests he committed suicide in Winnipeg in 1960. His colleagues Ralf Gerrets and Jan Viik received death sentences in the Mere Trial in 1961 and were executed. See Birn, Die Sicherheitspolizei in Estland, 232ff.

  Document 6-11. Trial proceedings of Supreme Court of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic v. Ain-Ervin Mere (in absentia), Ralf Gerrets, and Jaan Viik (Mere Trial), USHMMA, RG-06.026.12, Estonian State Archives of the former Estonian KGB State Security Committee, Records Relating to War Crimes Investigations and Trials in Estonia, 1940–1987.

  Prosecutor: By whom were [the Roma] shot?

  Gerrets: By Lieutenant Laak.

  Prosecutor: All alone?

  Gerrets: Yes, all alone. The last to be slain was an invalid, an old woman who had no legs. The warders were drunk; they seized her and dragged her, like a sack, along the ground. It was only when she gave them her gold ring and some money that they lifted her up and threw her “gently” into the pit. [. . .] When Gerrets opened the door of the second car, it turned out that there were small children there.

  Prosecutor: How old were they?

  Gerrets: Something between three and five, not more. They were crying.

  Prosecutor: What was done with them?

  Gerrets: The warders came and took them away.

  Prosecutor: Where?

  Gerrets: To the pit. There were seven men, each of them carrying two children. Two children were left in the bus. I took them. I was about five or six meters [sixteen to twenty feet] from the pit when the warder Purka ran to meet me and took the children from me. I myself did not get quite near to the pit.

  Prosecutor: But you took the children out of the car?

  Gerrets: Yes. A warder wanted to help me, but I said it was not necessary, I’d manage by myself.

  Prosecutor: Who shot the children?

  Gerrets: When I took a glance at the pit, I saw that Laak was standing on the right, Viik on the left, both with automatic guns in their hands. When we got back to the camp, we sat down to dinner and the commandant brought a bottle of vodka. Viik, too, came there, having already emptied his bottle. Laak praised him: “You were a brave man, Viik, to be the first to shoot!”

  Children As “Research Material”

  As we have seen in the case of Eva Justin, Romani (Gypsy) children figured not only as the objects of racial discrimination and persecution but also as “research material,” gathered and studied in order to further the career of a woman who had played such a vital role in the enforcement of anti-Gypsy policy. German medical professionals and scientists performing human experimentation under the Nazi aegis felt little compunction about utilizing “inferior” individuals of every category to develop pharmaceuticals and treatment methods, to promote Nazi racial goals, or to advance their own academic or professional standings, even when the “test subjects” for that research were children. SS physician Kurt Heissmeyer, whose consuming ambition was to find a cure for tuberculosis, serves as a case in point.

  Born in 1905, Heissmeyer received his physician’s license in 1933 and shortly thereafter took up a position at the Hohenlychen sanatorium, 120 kilometers (about 75 miles) north of Berlin.73 By 1944, after nearly ten years at this post, he still aspired to become a professor of medicine, a goal supported by his superior, Dr. Karl Gebhardt, Hohenlychen’s head clinician and the author of a series of grisly medical experiments conducted on female prisoners at the nearby Ravensbrück concentration camp. As a topic of research for his Habilitation, Heissmeyer proposed to combat primary tuberculosis (tuberculosis of the lung) by the artificial introduction of cutaneous tuberculosis (tuberculosis of the skin) in an ailing patient. As the nephew of influential SS general August Heissmeyer,74 the thirty-eight-year-old physician gained entrée into the highest SS circles and, with Gebhardt’s intervention, obtained permission from Reich Physician Leader (Reichsärzteführer) Leonardo Conti75 and from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to test his hypothesis on concentration camp prisoners. Unfortunately, pulmonologists had long rejected Heissmeyer’s theory, first suggested by Austrian physicians a decade earlier; it says much about Heissmeyer’s professional competence that he was not sufficiently acquainted with his own field to be aware of these earlier findings. In early June 1944, Heissmeyer began experimentation with several dozen Russian and Polish prisoners at the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. In the autumn of that year, he himself came to the conclusion that the theory was erroneous when the condition of the adult male prisoners manifestly worsened as a result of his treatments. Desperate to fulfill the requirements for his Habilitation, however, Heissmeyer decided to press on with his last cohort of “test subjects,” juveniles, and ordered the transfer of twenty Jewish children from the Auschwitz concentration camp.76

  73. During the war years, the Hohenlychen clinic for tubercular patients acquired an unsavory reputation in light of its designation as a health resort for SS officers in 1942 and as a result of the grisly experimentation by its director, Karl Gebhardt (1897–1948), at the sanatorium and at the nearby Ravensbrück concentration camp. In August 1947, Gebhardt was convicted and sentenced to death by an American military tribunal in the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial; he was executed on June 2, 1948. See Birgitt Morgenbrod and Stephanie, Merkenich, Das Deutsche Rote Kreuz unter der NS-Diktatur, 1933–1945 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2008), 139ff.

  74. August Heissmeyer (1897–1979) served provisionally as Theodor Eiche’s successor as inspector of concentration camps in November 1939. With the outbreak of war, Heissmeyer received his own bureau (Dienststelle Obergruppenführer Heissmeyer) through which he was responsible for the military training of students of the National Political Education Institutes (Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten). In 1940, he married Reich Women’s Leader (Reichsfrauenführer) Gertrud Scholtz-Klink. After the war he received a three-year prison sentence from a denazification court in the French zone of occupation.

  75. Replacing his rival Gerhard Wagner as Reich Physician Leader in 1939, Leonardo Conti (1900–1945) was initially involved in the T4 “euthanasia” program, although Hitler’s choice of Karl Brandt and Philipp Bouhler to spearhead the clandestine operation meant that Conti would ultimately play an auxiliary role in the measure. Conti committed suicide while in Allied custody in 1945.

  76. Michael Kater, “Criminal Physicians in the Third Reich: Toward a Group Portrait,” in Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices, Legacies, ed. Francis Nicosia and Jonathan Huener (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), 84–85; Günther Schwarberg, Der SS-Arzt und die Kinder: Bericht über den Mord von Bullenhuser Damm (Hamburg: Stern Verlag, 1979), 11–15, 30–34.

  On November 27, 1944, the youngsters, ten girls and ten boys, arrived at Neuengamme. They were mainly Polish, Dutch, and French Jews, entrusted to the care of French prisoner-physicians René Quenouille and Gabriel Florence and two Dutch male nurses, Anton Hölzel and Dirk Deutekom.77 The eldest children of the group were twelve years old, the youngest just five. Shortly after their appearance at the camp, Heissmeyer made
incisions in the skin of each child and infected him or her with tubercular bacillus cultures. By Christmas 1944, the children were severely ill with tuberculosis, but their ordeal was not over. In mid-January, Heissmeyer, himself not a surgeon, ordered a Czech prisoner-physician to remove the youngsters’ axillary lymph nodes, located in the underarm area, in order to determine how each child’s lymphatic system reacted to tubercular infection. Throughout the winter, the children remained bedridden. They quickly attracted the sympathy and solidarity of their fellow prisoners, who, in violation of regulations, came in significant numbers to visit the young patients and to supplement their diet from their own meager rations.

  77. The four men had been arrested for resistance activities in their native countries. The four female Polish nurses who had accompanied the children on the transport from Auschwitz were murdered in Neuengamme shortly after their arrival.

  By mid-April 1944, British troops stood only a few miles from Hamburg. Everyone knew that occupation was close at hand, and Heissmeyer, still based at Hohenlychen, had not dared to visit Neuengamme or his test subjects for several weeks. On April 20, guards of the Neuengamme camp received orders to murder the children before the arrival of Allied forces. At ten that evening, prisoner-physicians Florence and Quenouille and male nurses Deutekom and Hölzel were instructed to wake their young charges and dress them. Shortly thereafter, SS physician Alfred Trzebinkski and a handful of Neuengamme guards drove with the prisoners to the Rothenburgsort district of Hamburg, to a large school building on the Bullenhuser Damm. The area had been bombed out since 1943, and the ruins of the facility had since served as a Neuengamme satellite camp. Improvising, because he did not have a sufficient supply of sedatives to murder the children, Trzebinkski injected the children with morphine. While they slept, Obersturmführer Arnold Strippel and SS men Johann Frahm and Ewald Jauch hanged the children from coat hooks in the school’s abandoned cloakroom. The group also murdered their four adult attendants, as well as several other Soviet detainees newly transferred to the satellite camp. In October 1946, British authorities executed Trzebinkski, Jauch, and Frahm for their part in crimes at the Neuengamme complex. Imprisoned for other crimes, Strippel was charged in 1983 by the Hamburg prosecutors’ office for his role in the deaths of the twenty children, but after several years of legal wrangling, Strippel was finally adjudged unfit to stand trial. Kurt Heissmeyer, author of the tuberculosis experiments, eluded arrest for nearly twenty years, working as a lung specialist in Magdeburg. In 1966, an East German court finally sentenced the physician to life imprisonment.78 In 1980, the city of Hamburg established a memorial in the former schoolhouse to the Children of Bullenhuser Damm.

  78. Kurt Heissmeyer died in custody fourteen months later of a heart attack.

  Document 6-12. Testimony of Johann Frahm, March 3 to June 18, 1946, UK v. Max Pauly, et al. (Curio-Haus Case) March 29, 1946, USHMMA, RG-59.016M, Reel 4, Judge Advocate General’s Office, United Kingdom, War Crimes Case Files, Second World War, 1945–1953, Public Record Office.

  Defense Counsel Dr. Lappenberg: I must ask you whether you have not withheld something from the court?

  Johann Frahm: Not that I know of.

  Lappenberg: You said that the children fell asleep. What happened after that?

  Frahm: They were all bedded down in one room.

  Lappenberg: Did you see them lying in the room?

  Frahm: Yes, they slept and did not wake up again.

  Lappenberg: How did you know that those children were dead?

  Frahm: One could see that.

  Lappenberg: What kind of an injection did they get?

  Frahm: I cannot say.

  Lappenberg: Did those children die as a result of those injections, or did they die because of anything else?

  Frahm: They died as a cause of the injections. Some of the children were hanged on top of that.

  Lappenberg: And when did that hanging happen?

  Frahm: Immediately afterwards.

  Lappenberg: Who was taking part in that?

  Frahm: Dr. Trzebinkski and I myself helped.

  Lappenberg: You said immediately afterwards. What do you mean by that?

  Frahm: I mean if they had still a breath of life in them after a quarter of an hour, but I cannot say for certain about a quarter of an hour, whether it was shorter or longer.

  President of the Commission: Do you mean that after about a quarter of an hour, if they had any life in them, they were hanged?

  Frahm: Yes.

  Lappenberg: Who put the rope around the neck of the children?

  Frahm: I [did]. [. . .]

  Lappenberg: Where did you get your orders from to go into the cellar with these children?

  Frahm: From Oberscharführer Jauch.

  Judge Advocate79: Was he the senior of the SS personnel in this outstation or was there an SS officer in charge of this outstation?

  79. This was the chief prosecutor in British and American military proceedings.

  Frahm: He was responsible for that working party or for that detachment, but there was an officer responsible for several detachments, and he was of course senior.

  Judge Advocate: Do you know the name of that officer?

  Frahm: Obersturmführer [Strippel].80

  80. Throughout the transcript of this very early postwar crimes trial, Obersturmführer Arnold Strippel is incorrectly identified as Strible.

  Judge Advocate: [. . .] How long did this hanging of the children take?

  Frahm: They were left hanging for about ten minutes, but I am not sure about the time.

  Judge Advocate: Did anybody explain to you why it was necessary first of all to inject these children and then afterwards to hang them?

  Frahm: No. [. . .]

  President: You said just now that [the children] were injected one by one; if that was so, were the rest who were waiting to be injected all in one room in the cellar or not?

  Frahm: Yes, that is correct.

  President: Were the children in your opinion ill and all lying down in this room and waiting to be injected or did they appear to be fairly healthy?

  Frahm: I believe that the great majority were slightly sickly—not ill and not healthy.

  President: Were they able to walk?

  Frahm: Yes.

  President: Who brought each child in to be injected in this one room?

  Frahm: They were called in.

  President: Did each child walk in?

  Frahm: Yes; some of them were fetched.

  President: Who fetched them?

  Frahm: I fetched them also. [. . .]

  President: Am I right in saying that only those who were still alive after the injections, after a certain period had elapsed, only this certain number were hung?

  Frahm: That is correct.

  President: Is it correct that you said about ten were hung?

  Frahm: I am not quite sure about the number.

  President: Is it correct to say that only one was hung at a time?

  Frahm: Sometimes two at a time.

  President: You mentioned just now the pipe over which the rope had been put to hang these children. Do you say there were two?

  Frahm: It is correct [that] the grown-ups81 were hung with this rope over the pipe. The children were hung at a wall where some ropes were passing over some [coat] hooks.

  81. This refers to the two prisoner-physicians, Renè Quenouille and Gabriel Florence, and two Dutch male nurses, Anton Hötzel and Dirk Deutekom, who served as caretakers for the children.

  President: What was the largest number of children hanging at any one time?

  Frahm: There were two hooks and two children were hanging at a time. [. . .]

  During World War II, German physicians and scientists engaged in unethical and often deadly human medical exp
erimentation upon thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Within the context of Nazi policy, physicians and scientists received full license to perform painful and dangerous experimentation upon prisoner populations without their consent. Test subjects often died as a result of the experiments or were murdered in order to facilitate postmortem examination.

  Unlike the Nazi sterilization and “euthanasia” programs—crimes also perpetrated by members of the German medical community—human experimentation using concentration camp prisoners was not a matter of state policy. It was, rather, with few exceptions, a crime of opportunity carried out by various agencies for the enhancement of the war effort or by individual physicians and scientists for personal gain, either through pursuit of research interests or for the attainment of university degrees, career positions, or higher civil service status. Generally speaking, inhumane medical experimentation under Nazism may be divided into three categories. The first consists of experiments aimed at facilitating the survival of German military personnel in the field. In Dachau, for instance, physicians and scientists of the German air force (Luftwaffe) conducted high-altitude (low-pressure) experiments in order to determine the maximum altitude from which crews of damaged aircraft might parachute to safety. At the same camp, German scientists conducted so-called freezing experiments to develop an effective treatment for hypothermia and tested various protocols for making seawater potable. The second category of experimentation embraced similar aims in the testing and production of pharmaceuticals and treatment methods to combat or prevent diseases and injuries German military and occupation personnel encountered in the field. In this context German scientists and physicians tested immunization compounds and sera for the prevention and treatment of diseases such as typhus, tuberculosis, malaria, typhoid fever, and infectious hepatitis. Karl Gebhardt, director of the famed Hohenlychen clinic, conducted grisly sulfa drug and bone-grafting experiments using female prisoners at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, while scientists at the Natzweiler and Sachsenhausen concentration camps subjected detainees to poisonous gasses in order to test possible antidotes.