On the 9 December, 1946 in Nuremberg, Germany, the Doctor’s trial began with
23 defendants who had either participated in deadly Nazi euthanasia programs
killing mentally or physically disabled people deemed “unworthy of life “ ; or conducted cruel,
painful and often deadly medical experiments on prisoners in Nazi concentration camps during World
War II. Out of 23 defendants, 22 were men and 1 was a woman. Her name was Herta Oberheuser.
Herta Oberheuser was born on May 15, 1911 in Cologne, then part of German Empire.
Her father was an engineer and because the family was not wealthy, Herta had to partially finance
her studies of medicine in Bonn and Düsseldorf herself. She completed her studies in 1936 and
received her doctorate 1 year later in 1937 when she also became a member of the Nazi party.
In 1940, she noticed a job advertisement in a medical journal for a position of camp’s doctor
in a "women's retraining camp” which was Ravensbrück
concentration camp. Oberheuser worked in Ravensbrück from the beginning of 1941
until summer 1943. She was known to see her patients not as people but as rabbits.
Herta Oberheuser and her colleague Fritz Fischer became the assistants of Karl Gebhardt,
who had been sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp to conduct medical
experiments on inmates in treating infections with sulfonamide which was an early antibiotic.
After an assassination attempt of Reinhard Heydrich on May 27,
1942 when Heydrich was attacked and wounded by Czechoslovak paratroopers,
Karl Gebhardt refused to treat Heydrich with sulfonamide and the
Nazi architect of the Holocaust contracted an infection and died 8 days afterwards.
In Ravensbrück Gebhardt wanted to prove his method of treating Heydrich had been correct
and sulfonamide was useless in treating the infections. As a result, all three – Oberheuser,
Gebhardt and Fischer started to conduct medical experiments on prisoners.
They often used a hammer to break legs of female prisoners in Ravensbrück concentration camp,
then infected open wounds with aggressive bacteria and monitored the healing with
and without antibiotics. They also experimented with removing and damaging nerves, muscles, and
bones in the legs to see if they would regenerate. They even attempted to transplant the limbs from
one person to another believing it could help in treating amputee soldiers. It is perhaps most
terrifying that these horrific medical experiments were often performed without any anesthesia.
Obeheuser’s tasks also included selecting the inmates –primarily young Polish women - for the
experiments, assisting during the operations, and providing follow-up care, which mostly consisted
of deliberate non-care or deliberate worsening of the healing process in order to achieve a
maximum level of infection. After the treatment, numerous women were murdered by Oberheuser who
injected them with petrol injections. She later portrayed these killings as a humanitarian act.
She was also involved in forced abortions of women who were already seven or eight months pregnant.
In addition to these forced abortions, they were also known for the beating of pregnant
women to cause miscarriages and the killing of newborns
After the war, these unethical and inhumane medical experiments were uncovered,
and Herta Oberheuser finally faced justice. She was arrested and tried at the Nuremberg
Doctors' trial where she was the only woman charged with crimes against humanity.
Oberheuser tried to justify herself in court with her "femininity"
and the argument that she as a woman could not be so brutal and orders seemed to her as if they
came directly from Adolf Hitler and were therefore legitimate. Her lies did not help her. In summer
1947 a tribunal sentenced Herta Oberheuser to 20 years in prison for crimes against humanity.
Unlike Karl Gebhardt, she avoided a death sentence and,
in the end, spent only a few years in prison until she was released in 1952.
She became a doctor in Stocksee and lived as if nothing had happened during the war until
in 1956 she was recognized and reported by a survivor from the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
In 1958, after protests of former Ravensbrück prisoners and a great deal of international
press coverage, her medical licence was revoked and her practice shot down.
She died in January 1978 at the age of 66. There were no tears shed for Herta Oberheuser.
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