It’s a warm sunny day in August 1944. Hans Eppinger is sitting in his office jotting down
some notes in a well-worn book. He pushes his spectacles farther up the bridge of his nose,
exhales, and puts down his pen. Just a few feet away are a group of emaciated Romani people.
They are his subjects, his human Guinea pigs. Some of them are already close to death,
so dehydrated they are on all fours licking water that was just used to mop the floor.
Suddenly the door to their hut opens. In walks Eppinger. Pointing with his finger, he says,
‘You, you, and you, come with me.” They won’t be seen again.
That was the Sea Water Torture Experiment we just talked about, and as you’ll see today,
it was just one of many infinitely appalling experiments that happened in those camps.
5. Thirst Let’s finish the
story we started. Eppinger was an Austrian physicist whose name among many others is
written in the annals of human depravity. He was employed by the Nazis during the Second
World War to conduct odious experiments on human beings at the Dachau concentration camp.
Eppinger used mainly Romani people, a nomadic group sometimes referred to as “gypsies” – a
term they don’t like. Back in the war, about 90 of them were chosen for the water experiments.
These weren’t exactly technical. The Nazis wanted to know what would happen if you deprived someone
of food and drinking water and had to survive on seawater. How long would it take to die? What
would happen during the passage to death? In the war, this could happen to one of their pilots.
We know the answer thanks to a survivor of those camps named Joseph Tschofenig. He watched the
experiments with his own eyes, saying later that the victims were so desperate they
licked the floor and sucked on damp rags. The outcome was the people usually died.
Prudence demanded that Tschofenig kept his mouth about this, with him not even showing sympathy to
the victims when any German soldiers were around. He also pretended not to see anything. He later
noted that he’d seen another worker in the camp take too much interest in an experiment and for
that, he was sent straight to the gas chamber. The experiment was related to how humans deal
with extreme low-pressure. 4. The doctor of death
The low-pressure experiments were conducted by a man often called a monster. This was
Sigmund Rascher, an SS doctor of death whose depravity seemed to know no limits.
He’d been a pilot in the Luftwaffe and that made him think about the effect of high-altitude on
pilots. The problem was, as he wrote in a letter to Nazi SS boss Heinrich Himmler,
it wasn’t exactly easy to get people to sign up for experiments. He wrote that he’d already
tried using monkeys, but that didn’t go down too well. He needed humans, he told Himmler,
stating that the experiments would likely end their life. No problem, replied Himmler.
Humans he got, and during the Spring and the Summer of 1942 he rounded up a bunch of prisoners
at the Dachau camp. One by one, he told them to enter a pressure chamber. Once they were in,
Rascher played around with the pressure, making it so low that it corresponded with
being at a very high altitude. He would then quickly change the pressure in an attempt to
see what it might be like for a German pilot parachuting from a plane without any oxygen.
According to reports, the people used in these experiments were mostly Poles and
Russians. Some of them died, and some of them survived. When Rascher told Himmler about this,
the boss said if they survive then spare them the gas chamber. Just give them life
in prison. Rascher then quickly wrote back, reminding Himmler who those people were.
Some of the letters survived the war. Here’s part of one Rascher wrote to Himmler in April 1942:
“Only continuous experiments at altitudes higher than 10.5 Km resulted in death. These
experiments showed that breathing stopped after about 30 minutes, while in two cases
the electrocardiographically charted action of the heart continued for another 20 minutes.”
He said after four minutes the people started to “wiggle” and move their head around.
A minute later, they would cramp up in various parts of the body. Then their breathing would
become rapid and at around 10 minutes they lost consciousness. At around the 30-minute mark,
the subjects would only be taking about three slow breaths per minute. Death came soon after.
He wrote this in May of the same year: “After relative recuperation from such a
parachute descending test had taken place, however, before regaining consciousness,
some experimental subjects were kept underwater until they died.”
You can see just how little concern these people had for human life. But it gets even worse.
Rascher, likely following the orders of Luftwaffe chief surgeon Erich Hippke, experimented on people
to see just how cold you could make them. These were called the “freezing experiments.”
They wanted to know what would happen if a German pilot survived his fall from the sky
and landed in the freezing cold ocean? How best to warm someone up who had hypothermia? In a world
not eclipsed by evil, you couldn’t conduct such an experiment on humans.
Rascher used people from the Dachau camp, this time putting prisoners in a tank of freezing
cold water for up to three hours. Others he made stay outside in the cold weather while
they were naked. Throughout their ordeal, they were monitored to see the effects the
cold had on the body. One experiment was called, “Warming Up After Freezing to the Danger Point.”
In a letter shown at the Nuremberg trials, Himmler gives his approval of
the “warming up” experiments, signing off, “Kind Greetings, Heil Hitler!”
The victims were almost frozen to death and then were warmed up, but we are not talking
about being given a blanket and a steaming cup of tea. They were immersed in hot water, sometimes
boiling water. This was of course a massive shock to the system, and some people subsequently died.
The warming by water was not a good way to treat people suffering from hypothermia was
the conclusion, so Himmler told Rascher to go and ask fisherman who worked in the cold
North sea what they would do. Himmler reportedly said that “a fisherwoman
could well take her half-frozen husband into her bed and revive him in that manner.”
After that, Romani people were frozen half to death and then placed in between
two warm Romani women. They had to be naked of course. The victims were monitored throughout,
and if they died, autopsies were performed. You can see the actual reports. They state
if a person is immersed in water at 5 C it can usually be tolerated for an hour. When
they raised the temperature to 15 C the victim could tolerate the water for four or five hours.
The reports also state that even after the people were taken out of the water their temperature
would continue to drop. They often died soon after, even when revival attempts were made. We
now know about things such as “re-warming shock” and the “after-drop effect” and we know you should
not warm a hypothermic person up using warm water, but back then the science wasn’t up to speed.
The reports state that people whose body temperatures were reduced to 25 C and then
warmed up to 28 C died. No number was written down as to how many died. One report just said
they ALL died. They usually died anywhere between 53 and 106 minutes of cooling. But
then those were the water experiments only. During the trials, two people who said they
witnessed these experiments said 80 to 90 people died. They said they saw only two
people actually get through the experiment, but noted that they became “mental cases” as a result.
Finally, this same doctor conducted what was called the “blood coagulation experiments.”
Basically, the Nazis wanted to know if you took a pill made from beet and Apple pectin would the
blood clot after being shot, therefore possibly saving the life of a soldier.
Again, in a normal world, you could never conduct this experiment on humans, but the Nazis simply
used victims of the camps. They shot them and then gave them the drug. What’s even worse,
they sometimes amputated people’s limbs. This was an attempt to try and duplicate
a person losing a limb on the battlefield due to a bomb. They made it as real as possible,
removing the limbs sometimes without giving the victim any kind of anesthetic.
After that, they got the blood-clotting drug. In his notes, Rascher wrote, “The tests of this
medicine showed no failures under most varied circumstances.” This got back to Hitler himself,
who was impressed with the experiment. As for what happened to the dead, it was
later revealed that Rascher had a thing for human skin, using it to make handbags, gloves, slippers,
saddles, pants, and other items. He sometimes sold these things to his colleagues, according to the
book, “Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich.” Since those reports were released to the world,
scientists have said that Rascher lied in them and there were many contradictions and inaccuracies.
The Nazis also realized he’d lied at times. Rascher was arrested in 1944 on the order of
Himmler after it was revealed he’d kidnapped three children. He was accused of scientific fraud and
even murdering his assistant. He ended up being a prisoner himself at Dachau and then in 1945,
he was executed by firing squad. Ok, now for something very short,
but extremely terrifying. 3. Head injury
This account of one single experiment was told by a Holocaust survivor named Martin Small,
who wrote that one day he and another prisoner were working at the house of a Nazi named Dr.
Wichtmann. He said the doctor took off somewhere, so he did some looking around
and at one point found himself looking into a locked room by a window outside the house.
In his own words, he said, “I placed my hands on the ledge and put my face to the window. I
was not prepared for what was inside and at first sight, I could not find words to
interpret what I was looking at…I put my hand to my mouth as if trying to muffle my own outburst.
I nearly vomited. 60 years later I still cannot erase the vivid, terrible image…”
Ok, so what was he looking at? He described seeing a young boy
strapped to a chair. Above him was a mechanized hammer that struck the boy over the head every
few seconds. It wasn’t hard enough to break the skull, but you can only imagine what that must
have felt like after say, an hour, a day, two days, more. The guy said the boy was already
driven mad, not dead, but not there, either. He said that this same doctor had actually
saved him from being killed by another Nazi, so he was surprised he was torturing a little boy in
the worst kind of way. “I dropped to my knees in sickness and disgust, and I trembled,” he wrote.
It’s hard to imagine a human doing that to another human, but of course you are about
to hear something even worse. Sorry, that’s just the way it’s going to be with this show.
2. Surgery Surgery,
it’s an important thing during a time when many men are being shot to pieces on the battlefield.
The best surgeons practice of course, but who do you practice on besides victims on your own side?
The answer for the Nazis was prisoners at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Without any
anesthesia at all, people had their bones removed, their nerves pulled out, their muscles plundered,
all in the name of medical experimentation. The Nazis had two reasons for this. Firstly,
they wanted to know if you remove something how does it regenerate, if at all. Secondly, they were
interested in seeing how transplants worked. They didn’t seem to give a damn about making people
disabled and putting them through what must have been the worst kind of pain. Just imagine being
tied down and having parts of you removed… That happened to a woman two times and she
survived to tell the story. Her name was Jadwiga Kamińska, and she said as a young girl she was
sent into surgery and they did something to her leg that led to crippling pain. She didn’t
know exactly what they did but said after she was grievously injured and suffered from infections.
It’s hard to say how many people were mutilated like this, but research shows there were a lot
of victims trying to claim compensation after the war. There are photos, too, such as the one of a
Polish woman named Bogumiła Babińska-Dobrowska. She’d had a bit of her leg removed.
The National Institutes of Health wrote that in all there were 27,759 known victims,
made up of many nationalities, with about twice as many male victims as female victims. These people
suffered all manner of injuries and many died. Reports state that the victims were called
‘rabbits” by the Nazis, given the nature of the experiments. Some were cut deeply so it could be
seen how quickly infections ensued. Sometimes the Nazis would rub dirt, cloth fibers, wood shavings,
and even broken glass into the open wound. This was to accelerate the speed of infection. The
victims were then given experimental drugs to see if the infection could be dealt with.
The NIH wrote, “They operated on Barbara Pietrzyk five times in 1942 alone causing
left lower limb paralysis. At 16 years of age, she was the youngest of the “rabbits.”
In another account, Nazi Professor Gebhardt used 24 Polish women for an experiment. He wanted to
see what would happen if you cut off blood flow in a limb, so he just tied something really tight
around part of the limb. The result of course was the area became necrotic. Experimental drugs
were subsequently administered to the women. Nazi reports that were unearthed said in one
experiment 13 people died from gangrene, while six others were taken out and shot so they couldn’t
ever tell anyone about what had happened to them. There is data to back all this up,
so as unbelievable as it sounds, it happened. There are names and photographs of survivors.
Another NIH report stated, “The surviving victims were permanently disabled,
both physically and psychologically. Four of the surviving Polish women, Maria Broel-Plater,
Jadwiga Dzido, Wladyslawa Karolewska, and Maria Kusmierczuk testified during the Doctors’
Trial and exhibited the scars on their legs.” Then there was Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger. He was
partly responsible for bone graft experiments using the tibias of victims. In some cases,
the tibia would be harvested and then transplanted to another victim
who had also had their tibia removed. During those same experiments,
they did something called a myomectomy. That’s removing the skeletal muscle, and as you know,
nerves were also taken out. Again there are names or survivors and photographs.
One such person was named Wladislawa Karolewska. She went through six
separate surgeries each involving the removal of bone, muscles, and nerves.
She testified later, describing how people were slaughtered and how she was experimented on.
This is what she said happened to her after she passed out from pain:
“I regained my consciousness in the morning and then I noticed that my leg was in a cast from the
ankle up to the knee and I felt a very strong pain in this leg and the high temperature. 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.”
One day, she and other rabbits stood in line to be executed. A German officer asked her,
“Why do you stand so in line as if you were to be executed?” She replied, “The operations are worse
for us than executions and we would prefer to be executed rather than to be operated on again.”
She explained in her testimony what happened after the final operation:
“I stayed in the hospital six months. I was in bed. I could not stretch my legs. I could
not move them. I could not walk either.” A doctor named Fischer later admitted to
taking off entire limbs, saying he was just following orders. He wrote of one limb removal:
“I was ordered to go to Ravensbrück and perform the operation of removal on that evening. I asked
Doctors Gebhardt and Schulze to describe exactly the technique which they wished me to follow.”
In a sworn affidavit, a Czech doctor named Dr. Zdenka Nedvedova-Nejedla, wrote:
“High amputations were performed; for example, even whole arms with shoulder
blades or legs were amputated. These operations were performed mostly on insane women who were
immediately killed after the operation by a quick injection of Evipan.” That is a kind
of barbiturate that can kill in high doses. She said eleven people died or were killed
during these operations, and she also stated that pain relievers weren’t administered to
the victims. We know this because she wrote: “After operations, no one except SS nurses was
admitted to the persons operated on, whole nights they lay without any assistance and it was not
permitted to administer sedatives even against the most intensive post-operational pains.”
Ok, so this is a really depressing show, but you all know the expression that history is
doomed to repeat itself if we don’t study it. We need to know the facts. You need to know
that the Nazis purposefully gave people malaria. They tested mustard gas on prisoners. They gave
tetanus to others, and they conducted many awful experiments to see how people could be sterilized.
They even poisoned people to the point of death or actual death, and they burned people to see
how bomb blasts work out for victims... but even after hearing all that, there’s one thing
that sticks out. 1. Twins
These were called the Twin experiments. The Nazis were obsessed with twins, and so they
captured about 1,500 sets and imprisoned them at Auschwitz. About 200 of them survived,
so that’s how we know about what happened. They separated them so they could monitor
what happened to each twin without them knowing the same was happening to their sibling. Again,
they did ad hoc surgeries on them, even trying to change their eye color using dyes. This was
mostly the work of doctors Josef Mengele and Karin Magnussen. The latter made it
clear how she thought, writing this in 1943: “This war is not just about the preservation
of the German people, but is about the question, which races and peoples should live in the future
on European soil… the Jew who enjoys life as a host in our country, is our enemy, even if he does
not actively engage with weapons in this fight.” But why change the eye color, which was very
painful by the way…The reason was just to see if they could. One survivor said Mengele looked
at her mother and saw what he said were "perfect Aryan features" and blue eyes,
but her eyes were brown, which didn’t impress the doctor. His thoughts? Try and change them.
Survivor Jona Laks said she saw Mengele remove one twin’s organs without giving him any anesthetic.
Others said he sometimes just killed twins by giving them injections to the heart. Mengele was
obsessed with what he might have called pureblood, and so he was obsessed with twins and genetic
inheritance. After all, the Nazis wanted to create a super race, partly and wrongly based on
Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “Superman”. He even forced people to have sex,
to see what the child might look like if indeed one was born as a result of
the forced encounter. A survivor later said he did this with a male dwarf and a Romani woman.
Listen to this from a Jewish doctor who was a prisoner himself but had to
work with Mengele. His name was Miklos Nyiszli. He said he worked on many experiments. Sometimes
they’d just kill twins at the same time just to see if the autopsy revealed they were similar on
the inside. He wrote, “In Auschwitz camp there are several hundred pairs of twins, and their deaths,
in turn, present several hundred opportunities!” One twin who survived was named Eva Mozes Kor.
She wrote that Mengele tried to make boys into girls and vice versa. In her own words she said,
he “wanted to discover a way to change girls into boys and boys into girls,
Many of these details I learned forty years later, such as the twin teenage boys who had
some of their private parts cut off in Mengele’s quest to see if he could turn them into girls.”
She also said that when kids died in the camp the doctor became very angry, but it wasn’t
because he was concerned for people’s welfare. She wrote, “These deaths meant the loss of valuable
guinea pigs for his medical experiments.” But perhaps the worst thing, something that
sounds like a disgusting horror movie, was his experiment related to sewing people together.
Yep, you heard that right. Joseph Mengele tried to attach twins together in an attempt to make them
conjoined. He used Romani children for this. It sounds so outrageous you could understand
people thinking it’s not true, but again there’s evidence, although not much in this
case. We have at least one piece of evidence, and again it’s from the twin Eva Mozes Kor.
We’ll let her tell you in her own words what she saw:
“A set of Gypsy twins was brought back from Mengele’s lab after they were sewn back to
back. Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese twin by connecting blood vessels and organs. The
twins screamed day and night until gangrene set in, and after three days they died.”
Now you need to watch, “Shocking US Human Prisoner Experiments Revealed.” Or,
have a look at, “Most Horrible Prison Experiments On Humans of All Time.”