Poland, 1939. A school teacher named Władysława Karolewska becomes a courier in the anti-German
resistance after the invasion of her country. In February 1941, she’s arrested, and following
interrogation, sent to Ravensbrueck concentration camp. There she is selected to be part of one of
the Nazi’s medical experiments. She can have no idea what’s in store for her, neither can many of
the other women who will share a similar fate. This is a tale of body transplantation,
just one of the medical horrors prisoners at those camps faced.
Let’s stick with Karolewska’s story for now. She survived, and later testified against
the Nazis, but before we get to what she said, here’s how medical professionals
later described such experiments: “The criminal experiments consisted in
the deliberate cutting out and infection of bones and muscles of the legs with virulent bacteria,
the cutting out of nerves, the introducing into the tissues of virulent substances
and the causing of artificial bone fractures.” The experiments conducted showed no regard
whatsoever for something called “asepsis.” This means a state in which the human body
is free from dangerous micro-organisms, such as viruses or pathogenic bacteria.
As you’ll see in this show, some victims died as a result of infections. Others died during
the operations, while some “suffered major and extensive injuries to their organs of movement.”
There were also times that the Nazis, having injured the victim so devastatingly,
just took them outside and shot them. At the beginning of Karolewska's testimony, she
was asked, “Witness, were you operated on while you were in Ravensbrueck concentration camp?”
She replied, “Yes, I was.” Here’s what happened.
On July 22, 1942, she and around 75 other Polish prisoners were ordered to stand before
the camp office. In front of them were several high-ranking Nazi officers and
Dr. Fritz Ernst Fischer, a man later imprisoned for conducting medical experiments at the camp.
The all-female prisoners were inspected, and then three days later, they were summoned to go to the
prison hospital. Karolewska said in court, “On this day, we did not know why we were called
before the camp doctors, and on the same day, ten of twenty-five girls were taken to the hospital,
but we did not know why.” She said a few of the girls
went into the hospital. They were given injections without being told the reason.
They were called again, and they didn’t return to the hut. Karolewska learned the women were
still in the hospital, their legs now in casts. Then she and some other girls were summoned.
This was incredibly frightening. In her own words, she explained why,
“We were called at a time when usually executions took place, and I was going to be executed
because before some girls were shot down.” While she was in a hospital bed, a nurse
gave her an injection without explaining why. Whatever had been put into her made her vomit,
after which she was rushed off to an operating room. There she said Dr. Schidlauski and Rosenthal
intravenously injected her with something else, after which she fell unconscious.
She woke up, only to feel excruciating pain in her leg. Before she could try and understand
what was happening, she was unconscious again. When she awoke, she said she was burning up.
She felt an intense pain in her leg, and when she looked down, she saw that her leg was in a cast.
She said, “I noticed also that my leg was swollen from the toes up to the groin.
The pain was increasing and the temperature, too, and the next day I
noticed that some liquid was flowing from my leg.” On the third day, she was moved to another room.
Dr. Fischer was waiting for her, dressed in a white gown with rubber gloves on his hands.
This time she remained conscious, although the nurse put a sheet over her eyes.
She said in court, “I had the impression that something must have been cut out of my leg.”
In the days and weeks that passed, she went back to the hospital on many occasions,
each time not knowing what was happening to her. At times she was blindfolded, but conscious of
the pain the doctors were causing her. She said, “Two weeks later we were all
taken again to the operating room and put on the operating tables. The bandage was removed,
and that was the first time I saw my leg.” What she saw was a giant incision, so deep she
could see bones. She, and other girls who’d been experimented on, were sent back to their huts.
She couldn’t walk at this point. The doctors weren’t done yet.
On another day, she was carried back to the operating room. That day she saw an
ambulance outside, so she thought she was going to be executed. But the doctor operated again,
although she’d been administered a drug that knocked her out. She woke up in pain. “The
symptoms were the same. The leg was swollen, and the pus flowed from my leg,” she said.
The hut she stayed in was now full of women who couldn’t walk, who each night cried in pain. At
one point, they were told to go back to the operating room, but this time some of them
could only hop, which caused more pain. During her testimony, she was asked,
“Do you remember when you got out of bed and were able to walk?”
She replied, “I stayed in bed several weeks; and then I got up and tried to walk.”
It still wasn’t over, but the girls had had enough. Once they were able to stand,
they stood in the line that was usually for people headed for the gas chamber.
This is what she testified, “We went out of the line and stood before the ninth block in line.
Then Binz (officer) said: ‘Why do you stand so in line as if you were to be executed?’
We told her that the operations were worse for us than executions
and that we would prefer to be executed rather than to be operated on again.”
The next time she was operated on, she woke up with both her legs in iron splints and bandages,
from her toes right up to her groin. She was, of course, one of the fortunate people
to make it out of the camp. He legs were a mess, as she showed people who attended her testimony.
We’ll come back to more victim testimonies, but first, we need to know what the Nazi
doctors were doing to Miss Karolewska. In a paper published in the National Institutes
of Health, the author said that he spent three years looking through the national archives
in Germany in an effort to try and understand what actually went on in the camps’ hospitals.
He wrote that one study found that 27,759 people were victims of Nazi medical experiments in all
the camps, and 4364 of them died as a result. For the most part, these experiments were conducted
in an effort to bolster the German campaign on the battlefield, in the ocean, and in the skies.
We won’t go into it today, but as far as the ocean is concerned, sometimes-deadly experiments
used prisoners to understand better how to treat someone for hypothermia. As for the air,
some also-deadly experiments featured victims being forced into a special chamber
where they experienced changes in air pressure. But it was on the battlefield where most injuries
happened. German soldiers routinely lost limbs; they had bullets fired into them;
they suffered terrible burns, and frequently they almost succumbed to head injuries.
These people had to be operated on quickly, sometimes without much time or expertise at hand.
Untold numbers of German soldiers were getting seriously injured, and that’s why the army
demanded that the medical corps conduct experiments on the prisoners they had in
those camps. According to NIH, experiments “were carried out to observe bone, muscle, and nerve
regeneration, and the possibility of bone and limb transplantation from one person to another.”
Now you likely have a better understanding of what happened
to Miss Karolewska and many of her comrades. Just so you know, Ravensbrück was the biggest
women’s concentration camp, in total holding something like 40,000 Polish prisoners and 26,000
Jewish prisoners. It’s thought about 28,000 of them died in all, from overwork, hunger, disease,
beatings, but also medical experiments. Other sources state that there were about 130,000 from
various countries, of which 30,000 to 90,000 died. Women, of course, weren’t the only ones
experimented on. In the NIH paper, it says 20 men from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp
were used and abused. Just to give you an idea of what sometimes happened, we’ll talk about them.
The Nazis wanted to understand if they could treat an infected wound with a certain drug on
the battlefield, or if that infection needed to be treated surgically in a field hospital.
To understand this, they used Guinea pigs, the prisoners. They sliced open their legs and
purposely infected them with bacteria. They then sewed up the wounds and administered the drug.
Here’s what the actual report said: “An incision was made five to eight centimeters
in length and one to one-and-a-half centimeters in-depth on the outside of the lower leg in
the area of the peroneus longus. The bacterial cultures were put into dextrose, and the resulting
mixture was spread into the wound. The wound was then closed… no serious illnesses resulted.”
Success! But had it not been, those 20 prisoners could have been in serious
trouble. Who knows if they survived anyway? The women at the other camp were known not as
Guinea pigs, but as “rabbits”. They became known as the “Rabbits of Ravensbrück”,
and many were victims of transplantation. That wasn’t always the case, though. The
reports state that because success had been achieved at the male camp regarding infections,
the Germans upped the ante at the female camp. They rubbed many things into their wounds,
hoping to simulate what might happen on the battlefield. Not that it will mean much to
many of you, the bacteria introduced into the wounds included, “staphylococci, streptococci,
clostridium perfringens, and clostridium novyi.” So, when women woke up with wounds in their legs
and their temperature was high, it was sometimes the consequence of one of those experiments.
Sometimes they ensured numerous operations, and the experiment could differ each time.
Take for instance the story of Barbara Pietrzyk. This 16-year old went through
five separate operations, which resulted in paralysis of one of her legs. We don’t
know exactly what happened to her each time, but it’s said she underwent bone operations.
Simulation of the battlefield, as we said earlier, could include many different types of injuries.
One of the most common injuries was getting shot. Bullets pierced through skin,
wrecked muscle tissue, destroyed major organs, broke bones, and left infections. That gave a
lot of scope to doctors working at the camps. Thankfully for the women, when it was proposed
to Dr. Fischer that to better simulate real-life the women should be shot,
he turned his head up and instead said there must be a better way to simulate injuries. Maybe that’s
why he wasn’t hanged after his trial. He actually became a doctor many years
later and died aged 90, a free man. At the Nuremberg Trials, sixteen doctors
were found guilty. Seven were executed, while the others received lengthy prison sentences.
They did stuff like stop blood circulation in the legs by tying off muscles,
which led to deaths and severe infections. The doctors later admitted that with some experiments,
they knew that a number of women would die. It was all for the greater cause, or as many Nazis
later said, they were just following orders. Some German soldiers were so badly wounded
on the battlefield that they lost limbs, but at times they perhaps needed to borrow
tissue or nerves to heal their wounds.That’s why the Nazis were interested in “bone,
muscle, and nerve regeneration, and the possibility of bone and limb transplantation.”
This is why many women woke up with bits of them missing. Some had nerve tissue removed,
which was transplanted to another prisoner. At times, the doctors would remove a part of the leg,
the fibula or tibia, and then they would try to graft that part to another woman,
who now was missing some part of her leg. Muscles were also removed and moved. We’ll give
you some scientific language now, only because we don’t have much medical acumen ourselves. The NIH
paper said about muscle experiments, “These involved repeated myomectomies (removal of
parts of skeletal muscle) from the same anatomic locations, so that the legs got thinner and weaker
over the course of the experiment.” The vast majority of the time,
the doctors were working with bone grafts and tissue grafts, but on some occasions,
they tried to transplant an entire bone. Accounts of this are scant, but it did happen.
In one account, Dr. Fischer said, “I returned to Hohenlychen as quickly as possible with the bone
which was to be transplanted. In this manner, the period between removal and transplantation was
shortened. At Hohenlychen the bone was handed over to Professor Gebhardt, and he, together
with Doctor Stumpfegger, transplanted it.” Limbs of women were sometimes amputated,
and those limbs were used as, er, spare parts, for German soldiers.
Dr. Zdenka Nedvedova-Nejedla later testified to this, saying, “High amputations were performed;
for example, even whole arms with shoulder blade or legs with iliaca were amputated. These
operations were performed mostly on insane women who were immediately killed after the
operation by a quick injection of evipan. All specimens gained in operations were carefully
wrapped up in sterile gauze and immediately transported to the SS hospital nearby.”
What’s perhaps even worse is this doctor said not all women were taken outside and shot. She said
sometimes they were just left on the operating table. The nurses weren’t allowed to assist them,
and they were “not permitted to administer sedatives even against the most intensive
post-operational pains.” Now we need to hear
something from the survivors again. Here’s just a snippet from a former
inmate named Zofia Sokulska. She talked about the kind of professionalism, or
lack thereof, that the women endured. She said: “Dr. Rosenthal dressed the wounds, he tortured
the victims terribly, ripping open the wounds with instruments, vented his sadistic urges,
half- or completely drunk, flirting simultaneously with Gerda Quernheim, who was assisting him.”
Not surprisingly, many women died. Kazimiera Kurowska died from a tetanus
infection. Aniela Lefanowicz died from an edema malignum bacterial infection. Jadwiga Dzido died
from a pyogenic bacterial infection. Stanisława Czajkowska was subjected to
various muscle experiments, but she said surviving the camp itself wasn’t easy.
Just to give you an idea of life in the camp, she talked about the first few days.
She said she and the other women received underwear, “belts for our dresses,
aprons, and white headscarves.” For their first meal, they received two pieces of bread,
a bit of sausage, and a spoonful of fat. They got up at four each morning,
after which was roll call. They were subsequently sent to work for the day, or as you know,
they awaited their doom at the hospital. They usually ate soup and potatoes, although she said
on Sundays and holidays they got a special treat of, “a mugful of coffee or herbal tea, 100 grams
of margarine, and cheese or 50 grams of sausage.” If they were ever out of line, they were beaten
and deprived of any food at all. She said any infraction, even if just being accused of not
working every second, could result in severe punishment. Sometimes they were incarcerated,
but she also said some women were punished by being “mauled by a dog.”
In her own words, she said, “If I recall correctly, Józefa or Maria Bednarczyk was
on several occasions beaten, battered, taken away to the bunker where she was subjected to
various tortures, mauled by a dog, and ultimately finished off. Other women who were severely beaten
include Stanisława Szewczyk and Hanka Stark, who has had an impaired leg ever since.”
She said these punishments and worse punishments were not metered out by the German guards but by
other non-Polish inmates. We are sure you’ve all heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
When given free rein, trustee prisoners can be particularly nasty to each other.
She said they were worked almost to death, suffering from frostbite in the winter and
dehydration in the summer. She said this was deliberate. They were slowly being
exterminated. But then came the medical experiments, when they became more useful.
Here’s how: This following testimony
is from Bogumiła Bąbińska, who was subjected to several different operations. One of them
included an attempt to graft bone into muscle, but her account revealed she endured more than that.
She said one day she woke up from an operation and saw this: “My right leg was in a plaster cast
and saw that I had a piece of plaster near my appendix area; this was covered by gauze held
in place by sticking plaster. The dressing was not tight, so I drew it aside and saw that my stomach
had been cut open and sewn up in this area.” She was given morphine on a daily basis. The
wounds were also washed daily, although with petrol. She said sometimes she and others would
hide the newer bandages. She explained that this was because they were at a premium. She said, “Had
they noticed that we had fresh bandages, there would have been a tremendous row. It was often
the case that the visiting doctors were drunk.” After weeks of pain, a high temperature, puss
leakage, and the inability to walk, she finally felt better again. A female prisoner, who was
also a doctor, inspected her wounds. She informed Bąbińska that some of her nerves had been cut.
Like the other women, Bąbińska fought to not be operated on again. She said if that meant
execution, then so be it. For that, she was locked up with the others. She testified, “Once again we
declared that we would not go for an operation. The door to our cell was closed, leaving us locked
inside.” They weren’t fed for three days after. She said one day something unusual happened.
She managed to find a German newspaper, Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda rag,
the “Das Reich”. It was dated August or July 30, 1943. She said there was an article that
described “the extraordinary achievements of German scientists in the field of surgery.”
Shocked and sad, knowing she’d seen friends die and some rendered disabled, she read about
how scientists had made extraordinary breakthroughs in bone transplantation,
muscle and skin grafts, and more. In her own words, she testified, “There was no indication
of where the experiments had been conducted.” Now you need to watch, “What Actually Happened to
Nazi Leaders After World War 2?” Or, have a look at, “What Was Found Inside Hitler's Last Will.”