The Scourge of the Swastika

by Lord Russell of Liverpool

  For a considerable period, the senior medical officer at Ravensbrück was Dr Schidlausky. He first joined the SS in 1933, two years after becoming qualified. Arriving at Ravensbrück in December 1941 he remained there until December 1943 when he was posted to Buchenwald concentration camp. Buchenwald was a larger and more important camp than Ravensbrück and his posting was in the nature of a promotion. He went there with all the experience of two years’ bestiality behind him; and proved himself in his new appointment so worthy of the promotion he had received that had he not been sentenced to death by a British Court for his crimes at Ravensbrück he would later have faced trial upon similar charges, together with Use Koch and his other colleagues, before the American Tribunal which tried the Buchenwald case in Dachau in April 1947.

  When a convoy of new arrivals was inspected in the bathhouse, as previously described in this chapter by Fru Salvesen, Schidlausky was generally one of the inspecting officers. The women were always made to strip naked but no medical examination was ever made. Schidlausky’s only contribution to the parade was to walk down the ranks indulging in obscene abuse.

  He, like Thea Binz, found it amusing to ride his bicycle into the queues of women when they were waiting for sick parade. When taking sick parades he rarely gave any treatment but pushed the patients away and told the orderlies to remove them. As the inmates knew that the chances of being given any treatment by the medical officers were negligible, they never attended sick parades unless they were so seriously ill that they could not even crawl to work. When Schidlausky refused them treatment, therefore, it often happened that within a day or two they were dead.

  In September 1943, a few months before he went to Buchenwald, Schidlausky selected ten women in perfect health for experimental operations. Two of these who were sisters were operated on by another doctor with the assistance of Schidlausky who attended to them after the operation. He had incisions made in both the legs of one, and the other had a piece of bone removed and an incision made in each leg. Artificial gangrene was then induced in the wounds.

  Schidlausky himself admitted that he had assisted in operations connected with research into gas gangrene. At one such operation he assisted Doctors Oberhauser and Rosenthal and supervised the administering of the anæsthetic. He also admitted that with his knowledge and approval lethal injections were given to patients who were seriously ill though not incurable, and that he carried out bone transplantation tests in the camp upon perfectly healthy young women, small pieces being taken from the shin bone and put in a different place in the same patient, many of whom as some of the illustrations in this book confirm, were permanently disfigured.

  This murderous medico was described by those who knew him in his home circle ‘as unable to have an evil idea, much less to do an evil thing’. Such a description ill fits the Schidlausky of Ravensbrück where he did so much evil and no good.

  The part played by Percy Treite, the second doctor in the camp, has already been described. His was a complex character. He was completely ruthless when it suited him and many prisoners died directly through his actions, yet he appears to have shrunk from some of the more unpleasant tasks which fell to him, and it is not surprising therefore, that some of those over whom he once exercised powers of life and death, were still prepared after their liberation to say something in his favour.

  Some of these have stated that Treite did the best he could for the inmates making full allowance for all the circumstances. Some asked for clemency on his behalf on the grounds that there were extenuating circumstances; others called for ‘just punishment according to the strictest standards’.

  Some, while admitting that they knew little about the case, took the view that it was ‘a little hard to judge Germans according to the standards of civilized nations’.

  One distinguished lady even expressed doubt as to the fairness of his trial. His counsel, Dr von Metzler, in his final address speaking for himself and all the other counsel said:

  I feel it to be my duty, as spokesman for the defence, to express our most respectful appreciation of the fair and just manner in which this trial has been conducted. You will no doubt realize, Mr President, that the position of the defence in a trial of this nature, when public feeling is running high, is rather difficult, but in spite of all this may I be permitted to say that the just and fair manner in which this trial has been conducted will always be outstanding in our memory as a fine example of justice and fairness.

  In some ways inexplicable, a mixture of refinement and inhumanity, Percy Treite was perhaps more morally guilty than any of his colleagues for he was a young man of good birth and education, not a low brutal moron like Binder, not a trained SS thug like Schwartzhuber, not a sadistic slut like Binz and insofar as he sinned, he sinned against the light.

  Another of the camp doctors, Rolf Rosenthal, had been well educated for a medical appointment in a concentration camp for he joined the Hitler Youth as early as 1928 and the Party in 1929. He had even been a member of the SA (Hitler’s thug army) in 1932 when it was still an illegal organization. He was posted to Ravensbrück ten years later.

  This disgusting creature had been himself in trouble during the war in his own country and had been sentenced by an SS court to eight years’ imprisonment for having illicit relations with one of the female prisoners on whom he had carried out several abortions.

  According to many of the prisoners, Rosenthal surpassed all the other doctors in his brutality to the sick. On one sick parade some of the patients were so weak that they had to lean against a wall. Rosenthal kicked them and hit them and sent them away without seeing them.

  One patient reported sick, being ill with suspected typhus and a temperature of 106°. Rosenthal never even examined her; his diagnosis was ‘get out’. He was present when Schidlausky selected a large number of healthy young women for experiments at which he assisted. In July 1942 seventy-five women were so selected, eight of whom died as a result of the operations.

  There is ample evidence that this doctor had no regard whatsoever for the sanctity of human life. He has admitted giving lethal doses of morphia to sick prisoners; it was easier than to try to cure them. He described such conduct as ‘affording facilities to people who were seriously ill to die by administering injections of morphine’; he has admitted hitting patients ‘in order to maintain discipline, and as an example to them’, he has admitted assisting in experimental operations of bone transplantation and to discover an effective drug against gas gangrene, on unwilling inmates.

  In September 1942 he assisted at an operation performed by a Dr Oberhauser on a young Polish woman named Zofia Sokulska. Dr Oberhauser, a woman, was subsequently tried by a United States Military Tribunal in Nuremberg together with a number of other German members of her profession for performing operations on non-consenting human guinea pigs.

  One day in September 1942 Zofia Sokulska was told to report to the camp hospital. She was undressed, examined, and informed that she would have to undergo an operation. At that time she was in good health. When she recovered from the anæsthetic she found that her left leg was in plaster from the thigh down to the foot. Present at the operation were Dr Oberhauser, Dr Schidlausky, and Dr Rosenthal, and also some SS Sisters. Sokulska describes the post-operative care thus:

  After eleven days the plaster was removed in the presence of the same three doctors and I was employed in the hospital for the next three weeks on making bandages…. On 2nd December I was told that I was to be operated on a second time. I protested, but in vain. The old wound was reopened and I remained in hospital for another two weeks. During this time I received no medical treatment and my bandages were not even changed.

  In the spring of the following year Sokulska was threatened with another operation but none took place.

  During this period seventy-three other Polish women were operated on experimentally. None of these consented. Five of them died as a result of the operations and nearly all were seriously disfigured.


  In March 1943 a third attempt was made to operate on Sokulska. She obtained advance information about this, however, escaped from the hospital, and hid in one of the blocks. For some reason she was not submitted to a third operation but was sent instead to the punishment block. Here she came under the tender care of Margarete Mewes, a little shrew of a woman, who consoled herself for the rather unhappy life she had led before coming to Ravensbrück by making the lives of her prisoners as wretched as she could.

  For over four years Margarete Mewes remained in charge of the ‘Strafblock’ to which the prisoners were sent upon the flimsiest of pretexts and there they were systematically ill-treated. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that during this period she retained the confidence of her superiors, and there is little doubt that she deserved it.

  The conditions in the ‘Bunker’, as the punishment block was called, were grim. Prisoners were confined in tiny, dark, damp cells for long periods.

  Mrs Odette Sansom was confined in the Bunker for many weeks. She had arrived at Ravensbrück in July 1944, and after the usual reception in the bath-house where she was made to spend the night, was brought before the Commandant the following morning. She had arrived at Ravensbrück under the name of Mrs Churchill and this was not without interest to Fritz Suhren who asked her if she was a niece of the British Prime Minister.

  Mrs Sansom obtained the impression that the Commandant had received orders from RSHA to give her exceptionally bad treatment but that he did not much relish his instructions and was more interested in keeping her as a hostage. The circumstances of her final departure so graphically described in Jerrard Tickell’s book Odette fully confirmed her impression.

  She was, nevertheless, as a result of her interview in the camp orderly-room sent to the Bunker. There she spent nearly three and a half months in a small cell ten by six feet, her daily diet consisting of ersatz coffee and a small piece of bread in the morning, some cold soup at eleven, and some more coffee or tea at three.

  After having been in confinement for five weeks, Mrs Sansom was then kept a whole week without any food at all. This, Mewes said, was in accordance with orders she had received. The other prisoners in the Strafblock were similarly treated.

  In August, central heating was put on at full strength for three days as a punishment. This was not an uncommon form of German ‘frightfulness’ and was used at the German Air Force Interrogation Centre near Frankfurt in order to induce Allied airmen to be more co-operative during their interrogation by German Intelligence officers.

  Such was the Straf block and such was its chief jailer. Had it not been for the severity of the punishment regime and the callousness and cruelty of Mewes, some of the prisoners might have appreciated its privacy after so many months of the overcrowded filth and squalor which they had experienced in their living quarters.

  Last but not least in this gallery of rogues was the camp dentist, Hellinger.

  He too, was an early member of the SS having joined it in 1933, and by 1944 he had been promoted to Hauptsturmführer. He arrived at Ravensbrück in the spring of 1943 and remained there until the end.

  The dental treatment which the inmates received was negligible and occupied but little of Hellinger’s time. He was, however, an executive SS officer and assisted the other officer members of the camp staff in their general duties. He was present at the illegal execution without previous trial of fifty women in one evening and made no attempt to stop it.

  His most important professional duties, however, were performed as scavenger to Reichsbank President Walther Funk. As a result of an agreement between Himmler and Funk, the SS sent to the Reichsbank the personal belongings, including gold teeth and gold fillings, taken from the victims who had been exterminated in concentration camps.

  To collect gold from the mouths of corpses at Ravensbrück was the personal responsibility of the camp dentist. In a deposition which he made while he was in arrest pending trial he admitted carrying out this grim duty. When he could not do it himself he delegated the task to one of his ‘collaborators’. When the prisoners had died from what in the camp were known as ‘natural causes’, that is to say from neglect, starvation, and other ill-treatment, no time was lost. Hellinger soon arrived, forceps in hand. He was present at all executions and when the officiating medical officer had ascertained death, Hellinger immediately looked for gold teeth or fillings and removed them before any ‘unauthorized’ withdrawals could take place.

  In this capacity he was present at the execution of two young English women who were captured after being dropped in France in 1944.1

  At his trial, Hellinger was closely questioned about these incidents. He admitted that he had on one occasion stood in the crematorium for an hour and a half with Dr Treite whilst women were being pulled in ‘like carcasses of meat’, still bleeding, having just been executed by being shot in the back of the head; and that he, a qualified dentist, then examined ‘those shattered heads’ to see whether he could get a small quantity of gold out of their mouths.

  Nevertheless, he resented the suggestion that by so doing he had abandoned the professional standards of his calling and adopted those of the SS concentration camp hierarchy. He even argued that the extraction of gold fillings in such circumstances, ‘though it hurt one’s feelings of reverence’ did not constitute an indictable offence and that the practice had historical precedent. Such an argument is not attractive to cultured peoples and throughout the civilized world it has long been a criminal offence to rob the dead.

  Such was the Hell they called Ravensbrück—L’Enfer des Femmes—and such were the men and women who ran it.

  The concentration camps were the final link in the chain of terror with which Nazi Germany bound Occupied Europe from 1940 to 1945.

  Every road of misery led to the concentration camp and death. The Jew, the Russian prisoner of war, the partisan, the slave no longer fit for work, the Allied Commando, the Nacht and Nebel prisoner, and a host of other innocent men and women who had been dragged from their homes by the Gestapo because they refused to collaborate with the aggressor, or showed some spark of resistance to the conquering Master Race.

  Thousands of these eventually found themselves at Belsen, at Buchenwald, at Dachau, at Mauthausen, at Ravensbrück, there to die or perhaps emerge years later, broken in body and warped in mind.

  1 Amt 4 was the department of RSHA which dealt with all Gestapo affairs. Obergruppenführer Müller was then its Chief.

  1 The Kapos were in charge of individual huts and were brutal to their charges and greatly feared.

  1 The name of this punishment was Stehzelle.

  1 Lethal injections were used elsewhere for the same purpose. On 6th July 1944 at the Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace four women members of SOE (Special Operations Executive), who had been parachuted into France to maintain communications between HQ,, SOE and the French Resistance movement and had been captured by the Germans, were murdered by injections of evipan.

  1 German Crimes in Poland, Vol. 1. (Central Commission for Investigation of Crimes in Poland.)

  2 The German for this practice was Genickschuss.

  1 ‘By the chimney’ (Durch den Kamin) meant, of course, by way of the crematorium. The saying, ‘You had better be careful what you say or you’ll go up the chimney,’ was a species of threat in fairly common use in Germany during the war years.

  1 Schutzhäftlinge—literally, those in protective custody.

  1 The author has himself seen these shrunken heads. See illustration.

  2 Extract from the introduction to the official information pamphlet issued at the trial.

  1 Dr Blaha’s affidavit made on 9th January 1946 and sworn at Nuremburg.

  1 Extract from a letter written by Reichsführer SS Himmler to SS General Pohl on 16th November 1944.

  1 The Women’s Hell.

  1 Lit., youth camp.

  1 Odette Sansom was dropped in France by SOE and when arrested was tortured by the Gestapo in an effort
to get information out of her. The Gestapo were unsuccessful and she was then sent to Ravensbrück. Odette, now Mrs Peter Churchill, was awarded the George Gross for her services.

  1 A German word, with no equivalent in any other European language, signifying a feeling of enjoyment at another’s misfortune.

  2 The name for the daily early morning roll-call.

  1 Both were members of the Women’s Transport Service who were dropped in France by SOE (Special Operations Executive) as W/T operators and arrested by the Germans. After being interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo, they were sent to Ravensbrück and eventually executed in the usual manner, by Genickschuss.

  CHAPTER VII

  THE ‘FINAL SOLUTION’ OF THE JEWISH QUESTION

  HANS Frank, who for many years of the German occupation of Poland was Governor-General, gave evidence in his own defence at the trial of German major war criminals at Nuremberg in 1946.

  ‘We have fought against Jewry for years,’ he said, ‘and have indulged in the most horrible utterances—my own diary bears witness against me … a thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.’

  The persecution of the Jews in the countries which the Nazis invaded and occupied between 1939 and 1945 was indeed on a stupendous scale, but it cannot have taken by surprise anyone who had followed the rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 or their Party programme.

  Point Four of that programme declared: ‘Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently, no Jew can be a member of the race.’