Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  The third category of experimentation, however, elicits the greatest attention and abhorrence from contemporary audiences. To this group belong those medical experiments that sought to advance National Socialist racial policy or to underpin the racialist and ideological tenets of the Nazi worldview. For example, Carl Clauberg82 and Horst Schumann83 undertook experimentation, primarily at Auschwitz, to develop effective and inexpensive methods of mass sterilization that might in time be used to limit the reproductive capacities of “racially inferior” populations. The most infamous experiments founded on ideological bases, however, were those conducted by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz after his arrival in the spring of 1943. Mengele had a variety of research interests, including investigation of the disease Noma, a type of gangrene that destroys the mucous membrane of the mouth and other tissues, most common in malnourished children. As there were plenty of these at Auschwitz, the physician was never without interesting “research material.” Mengele also had a fascination with heterochromia, a condition in which a person’s two irises differ in coloration, and pursued the topic with a passion, collecting the eyes of hundreds of dead subjects in the hope that he could unlock the secret of changing eye color. Mengele is most notorious for his research on twins at Auschwitz. The young physician had become interested in this field through Otmar von Verschuer, a leading figure in twin research. Verschuer experimented with identical and fraternal twins in order to trace the genetic origins of diseases.84 At the time, twin research was seen as an ideal tool in weighing the variant factors of human heredity and environment. Mengele, with his mentor, had performed a number of legitimate research protocols using twins as test subjects throughout the 1930s. Now, at Auschwitz, with full license to maim or kill his subjects, Mengele performed a broad range of agonizing and often lethal experiments with Jewish and Roma twins, most of them children.

  82. Carl Clauberg (1898–1957), a gynecologist by training, began experimentation in Auschwitz in 1942 at the suggestion of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. As the Soviet army approached the complex, Clauberg fled to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where he briefly continued his “research.” Soviet troops captured him there at the war’s end, and Clauberg received a twenty-three-year sentence for war crimes from a Soviet court in 1948. The physician returned to Germany as a result of a prisoner exchange in 1955. West German prosecutors immediately filed criminal charges against him for crimes committed during the Nazi period, but Clauberg died of a heart attack in confinement before proceedings could commence.

  83. Horst Schumann (1906–1983) participated in the “euthanasia” program as a physician at the Grafeneck and Sonnenstein T4 killing centers. Following the halt in the “euthanasia” program, he transferred to Auschwitz, where he conducted sterilization experiments upon male and female prisoners from July 1941 until September 1944. Although arrested by American troops in January 1945, Schumann was released and gradually made his way to Sudan, where he functioned as a hospital director. From 1962 to 1966 he lived in Ghana under the protection of the country’s dictator, Kwame Nkrumah. Following his extradition to Germany in 1966, West German prosecutors attempted to open murder proceedings against Schumann, but these were ultimately put aside in 1972; Schumann died on May 5, 1983.

  84. A leading German eugenicist, Otmar von Verschuer (1896–1969) directed the newly founded Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene at the University of Frankfurt am Main beginning in 1935 and succeeded Eugen Fischer as director of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in 1942. An advocate of compulsory sterilization and the inclusion of racial hygiene instruction in German medical school curricula, he wrote extensively on the “Jewish issue,” calling in 1941 for a “complete solution to the Jewish Question.” Adjudged lightly by a denazification court in the postwar period, Verschuer assumed a coveted position as professor of genetics at Münster, which he succeeded in making a leading center for genetic research in the new Federal Republic of Germany.

  Document 6-13. Relief workers lead child survivors from Birkenau following the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces. Leading the ranks (beside the nurse) are Miriam and Eva Mozes, survivors of Josef Mengele’s infamous experimentation with twins, January 1945, USHMMPA WS# 88591, courtesy of the Instytut Pamieci Narodowej.

  Mengele firmly endorsed National Socialist racial theory and engaged in a wide spectrum of experiments that aimed to illustrate the lack of resilience among Jews or Roma to various diseases. He also attempted to demonstrate the “degeneration” of Jewish and Gypsy blood through the documentation of physical oddities and the collection and harvesting of tissue samples and body parts. Many of his test subjects died as a result of the experimentation or were murdered in order to facilitate postmortem examination. Like most scientists at work in the concentration camp setting, Mengele enlisted the aid of trained medical professionals among the prisoner population to perform the more grisly or mundane tasks and to carry out autopsies on his dead victims. We owe much of our early knowledge of Mengele’s activities at Auschwitz to Dr. Miklós Nyiszli, a prisoner-physician who assisted Mengele under duress and published his experiences, initially in his native Hungarian, in 1946. In Document 6-14, Nyiszli tells the story of a Jewish father and son from the Łódź ghetto whom Mengele had targeted for his research purposes.

  Document 6-14. Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, trans. Tibère Kremer and Richard Seaver (Hungarian ed., 1946; New York: Fell, 1960), 175–78.

  When the convoys arrived, Dr. Mengele espied, among those lined up for selection, a hunchbacked man about fifty years old. He was not alone; standing beside him was a tall, handsome boy of fifteen or sixteen. The latter, however, had a deformed right foot, which had been corrected by an apparatus made of a metal plate and an orthopedic, thick-soled shoe. They were father and son. Dr. Mengele thought he had discovered, in the person of the hunchback father and his lame son, a sovereign example to demonstrate his theory of the Jewish race’s degeneracy. He had them fall out of ranks immediately. Taking his notebook, he inscribed something in it and entrusted the two wretches to the care of an SS trooper, who took them to number one crematorium.

  It was around noon. [. . .] The SS soldier on duty came in and asked me to report to the gate. The father and son, accompanied by the SS guard, were already there. I took the message sent me, which read, “Dissecting room, number one crematorium: that these two men be examined from a clinical point of view; that exact measurements of the two men be made; that clinical records be set up including all interesting details, and most especially those relative to the causes which provoked the bodily deformities.”

  A second note was enclosed for Oberscharführer85 Mussfeld. Even without reading it, I knew what it said. I entrusted it for transmission to a Sonder man.86

  85. This German word is misspelled in the English translation.

  86. That is, to a member of the Sonderkommando, meaning, literally, “special commando” but in this context referring to a specially selected group of prisoners tasked with processing and cremating victims murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

  Father and son—their faces wan from their miserable years in the Litzmannstadt [Łódź] ghetto—were filled with forebodings. They looked at me questioningly. I took them across the courtyard, which at this hour of the day was filled with sunlight. On our way to the dissecting room I reassured them with a few well-chosen words. Luckily there were no corpses on the dissecting table; it would have indeed been a horrible sight for them to come upon.

  To spare them I decided not to conduct the examination in the austere dissecting room, which reeked with the odor of formaldehyde, but in the pleasant, well-lighted study hall. From our conversation, I learned that the father had been a respected citizen of Litzmannstadt [Łódź], a wholesaler in cloth. During the years of peace between wars he had often taken his son with him on his business trips to Vienna, to have
him examined and treated by the most famous specialists.

  I first examined the father in detail, omitting nothing. The deviation of his spinal column was the result of retarded rickets. In spite of a most thorough examination, I discovered no symptom of any other illness.

  I tried to console him by saying that he would probably be sent to a work camp.

  Before proceeding to the examination of the boy I conversed with him at some length. He had a pleasant face, an intelligent look, but his morale was badly shaken. Trembling with fear, he related in an expressionless voice the sad, painful, sometimes terrible events which had marked his five years in the ghetto. His mother, a frail and sensitive creature, had not been able to long endure the ordeals which had befallen her. She had become melancholic and depressed. For weeks on end she had eaten almost nothing, so that her son and husband might have a little more food. A true wife and Jewish mother, who had loved her own to the point of madness, she had died a martyr during the first year of her life in the ghetto. So it was that they had lived in the ghetto, the father without his wife, the son without his mother.

  And now they were in number one crematorium. Once again I was struck by the horrible irony of the situation. I, a Jewish doctor, had to examine them with exact clinical methods before they died, and then perform the dissection on their still warm bodies. [. . .]

  By an immense effort of self-control, I got ahold of myself and examined the boy. On his right foot I noticed a congenital deformity: some of the muscles were lacking.

  The medical term used to describe this deformity is hypomyelia. I could see that extremely expert hands had practiced several operations on him, but as a result one foot was shorter than the other. With a bandage and orthopedic socks, however, he could walk perfectly well. I saw no other deformity to be indicated.

  I asked them if they wanted something to eat. “We haven’t had anything to eat for some time,” they told me.

  I called a man from the Sonderkommando and had some food brought for them: a plate of stewed beef and macaroni, a dish not to be found outside the confines of the Sonderkommando.87 They began to eat ravenously, unaware that this was their “Last Supper.”

  87. Because of the particularly grisly tasks assigned their members, Sonderkommando units at Auschwitz regularly received food of good quality and sufficient quantity.

  Scarcely half an hour later Oberscharführer Mussfeld appeared with four Sonderkommando men. They took the two prisoners into the furnace room and had them undress. Then the Ober’s revolver cracked twice. Father and son were stretched out on the concrete, covered with blood, dead. Oberscharführer Mussfeld had faithfully executed Dr. Mengele’s orders.

  Now it was my turn again. The two bodies were brought back into the dissecting room. So sickened was I by what had just happened that I entrusted the dissection to my associates and confined myself to recording the data. The dissection revealed nothing more than I had previously ascertained in my in vivo examination. The cases were banal but could nevertheless very easily be utilized as propaganda in support of the Third Reich’s theory concerning the degeneracy of the Jewish race.

  During his nefarious tenure at Auschwitz, Josef Mengele was not the only physician at the Auschwitz complex. Nor was he, as common wisdom often maintains, the highest-ranking physician at the camp; this distinction belonged to SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Eduard Wirths,88 whose position as garrison physician made him responsible in all medical matters for the entire camp complex. Mengele began his career at Auschwitz in the spring of 1943 as the medical officer responsible for Birkenau’s Gypsy camp; several weeks after its liquidation, he undertook a new position as chief camp physician of Auschwitz II–Birkenau, in November 1943, still under Wirths’s jurisdiction. Even after his arrival at Auschwitz, he kept in close contact with his mentor Otmar von Verschuer, a prominent German scientist in the field of hereditary pathology. Since September 1937, Mengele had served as Verschuer’s assistant in Frankfurt, and even at his new post in Birkenau, he continued to serve his old professor in singular fashion. In 1944, with a deteriorating war effort, Verschuer was encountering difficulties in obtaining biological materials for his pathological research, but he discovered an unlikely solution in the form of his former graduate student. On March 20, 1944, Verschuer wrote the German Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, or DFG), “My assistant Dr. Mengele . . . has joined me in this branch of research. He is at present assigned as SS-Hauptsturmführer and camp physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp. With the permission of SS-Reichsführer [Heinrich Himmler,] anthropological investigations of the most diverse racial groups are being conducted, and the blood samples sent for processing to my lab.” Mengele’s notorious human experimentation at Auschwitz was funded in part by the DFG, while the young and ambitious physician sent his mentor a vast variety of “research material,” including the skeletons of murdered Jews, the internal organs of Roma (Gypsy) victims, the severed heads of Roma children, and blood samples of various prisoners, including twins that Mengele had infected with typhus. There is no question that Verschuer, in Berlin, knew the origin of this “genetic material” and the circumstances of its procurement.

  88. Eduard Wirths (1909–1945) was the chief SS physician (SS-Standortarzt) at the Auschwitz concentration camp complex from September 1942 to January 1945. At Auschwitz, Wirths was involved in medical experimentation, particularly in gynecological and typhus-related experimental tests. Historians believe that Wirths never directly participated in such experiments but rather delegated these procedures to subordinates. Captured by the Allied forces at the war’s end, Wirths committed suicide in British custody on September 20, 1945.

  Document 6-15. Hygiene-Bacteriological Research Station of the Waffen SS, Southeast, delivery slip for the head of a corpse, signed by Dr. Josef Mengele, June 29, 1944, USHMMPA WS# 00592, courtesy of the Auschwitz Memorial Museum (Pa`nstwowe Muzeum w O´swie˛cim-Brzezinka) (translated from the German).

  Hygiene-Bacteriological Research Station of the Waffen SS, Southeast

  Auschwitz, Upper Silesia, June 29, 1944

  The following accompanies this document:

  Material: Head of a corpse(12-year-old child)

  Taken on: _______________

  To be examined as: microscopic tissue samples histological slices

  Surname, first name: _______________________________________

  Rank, unit:see attached

  Clinical diagnosis: _________________________________________

  Address of the transmitting agency: (C)entral infirmary, Gypsy camp, Auschwitz II [Birkenau] B II e

  Notations____________________________________

  Senior SS Physician

  Concentration Camp Auschwitz II

  [signed] Dr. Mengele

  SS-Hauptsturmführer

  Chapter 7

  The Lives of Others

  “Aryan” Children and the Nazi Regime

  The bulk of documentation featured in this book focuses on the lives and fates of children who fell victim to the policies of the National Socialists or their European Axis allies. This chapter reflects on the experiences and viewpoints of “Aryan” children growing up in Nazi Germany. The National Socialist government hoped to capture the imagination and loyalty of Germany’s younger generation. Accordingly, Nazi strategists shaped their youth policy in a way calculated to win young people to their principles and policies. Quite early in its development, the Nazi Party had initiated official organizations for the young, the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, which served as conduits to ideological indoctrination and political mobilization. Both formal education and structured extracurricular activities were designed to cultivate the new “civic” virtues of obedience, self-sacrifice, and race consciousness. Nazi propagandists also hoped to win the hearts and minds of German youngsters. In an effort to inculcate an unreflecting political
loyalty among the German public, young people became a particular focus of ideological instruction. Nazi propaganda confronted German children everywhere: in the classroom, on the playground, in their bedtime reading. And yet, even as Nazi authorities demanded subservience and allegiance from their youngest citizens, a segment of German youth clearly rejected their complete integration into the Nazi state. The nonconformity of many teens, such as the Edelweiss Pirates (Documents 7-4 through 7-6), suggests that the history of German children and adolescents under the swastika is less a story of uniformity than one of divergence and contradiction. The following documentation illustrates that German youth were at once the benefactors of Nazism and the heirs to its terrible legacy. Young Germans engaged in the daily activities of a country at war: they were its combatants and its targets. They were perpetrators and victims. German “Aryan” children experienced a radically different aspect of National Socialism than did young persecutees of its racialist policies; yet, as witnesses to its national transformation, its conquests, and its defeat, their views and perspectives have much to tell us about life under the Nazi dictatorship.