A German soldier sits in a muddy trench, hoping for a hiatus in what’s been constant
shelling for hours. Unbeknownst to him, noxious gas wafting over No-Man’s Land will be over
him soon. The so-called “King of the Battle Gases” is about to change his life forever.
Some years later, the Nazis didn’t want to see a repeat of this.
All sides during the First World War used mustard gas. It was potent and very effective
in hurting your enemy, even when gas masks were worn. When they weren’t being worn,
soldiers would sometimes report smelling burned garlic, or rubber, or even dead horses.
That’s when they knew they were in trouble. The gas was also said to smell like horseradish,
hence why it got the name mustard gas. You might have thought until now that soldiers were throwing
pots of spicy Helman’s mustard at each other, but the gas was actually a bunch of pernicious
chemical compounds, not a delicious condiment. If inhaled in vast quantities, the soldier was
always going to have a very bad day. The effects of the gas were not immediate,
but if breathed in, there was no way out. At first, the victim’s eyes would tear. This would
intensity until it became very painful, sometimes leading to temporary blindness.
Make no mistake, mustard gas could kill, but in warfare, almost blinding a complete
regiment was certainly a way to get ahead. It also produced blisters on a soldier’s skin,
which weren’t just irritable. They often popped and turned into oozing wounds,
therefore putting the soldier at risk of getting a dangerous infection.
If that wasn’t bad enough, there were long-term effects of exposure. One of them was cancer.
It was hard to get away from the stuff since it stuck to clothes. A soldier’s body could then
be severely burned, bad enough to cause immense pain, disfigurement, and over time, death. This
is how a wartime British nurse explained treating soldiers injured by mustard gas:
“They cannot be bandaged or touched. We cover them with a tent of propped-up sheets.
Gas burns must be agonizing because usually, the other cases do not complain, even with the worst
wounds, but gas cases are invariably beyond endurance and they cannot help crying out.”
Bear in mind we’re about to tell you how the Nazis used this gas on prisoners.
There were other milder, long-term effects, too, as the British soldier
Cecil Withers explained after the war. “I suffer badly from phlegm and from
coughs and colds a lot. That all started when the British were shelling hard at
the last Battle of the Somme. One of the shells disturbed the residue of mustard gas
that had been lying there for months. They talk about secondary smoking. I got secondary gas.”
Mustard gas didn’t just blister the skin, it also blistered the lungs. In a bad case, the end
result was pulmonary edema and sometimes death. In fact, just to give you a better idea of how
dangerous this stuff was, making the shells in factories injured and killed people in Germany,
Britain, France, and the US - the country that ended up making the most mustard gas weapons.
One paper we found on this topic said, “The most dangerous job regardless of location involved
filling artillery gas shells. This produced even more injuries than normal chemical production,
and German workers suffered as much as British, French, and American workers.”
As you can see, mustard gas was a useful weapon, albeit some folks thought it was unethical. Others
said, hey, if you can blow a man’s head off and shove a bayonet through his heart,
why can’t you kill him slowly with gas. The typical British response to mustard gas
might have been, “It’s just not cricket,” meaning it’s not how things were done.
Obviously, supporters of the gas likely never went within 100 miles of a trench.
Mustard gas was first used by German troops on July 12, 1917, near Ypres, Belgium. The victims
of the gas were British and Canadian soldiers. Chemical weapons were nothing new at that time.
All sides were using them, but it was the Germans that got ahead with the king of battle gases.
US soldiers also suffered once they were in the war in 1917. Harry L. Gilchrist,
medical director of the Gas Service, US Army Expeditionary Force, wrote about what happened
to some US troops hit with the gas. He said: “At first, the troops didn’t notice the gas
and were not uncomfortable, but in the course of an hour or so, there was marked inflammation
of their eyes. They vomited…Later there was severe blistering of the skin, especially
where the uniform had been contaminated…The men were virtually blind and had to be led about.”
On top of that, not knowing when some gas would waft into them really messed up soldiers’ minds.
Many suffered from a kind of PTSD called “gas fright”. By the time the war had finished,
untold numbers of men suffered from psychological conditions.
While only around 90,000 men died from chemical agents, about 1.3 million suffered gas injuries.
Ok, so you don’t need much more convincing that mustard gas was a formidable weapon
that not only set back an army but also ruined a man’s life. That’s why the Germans were so
dead set on trying to create something to protect their soldiers during the next war.
But as you know, The Nazis didn’t exactly wait for the German equivalent of FDA approval before using
an agent. They also didn’t have too many scruples about human testing during experimental trials.
That’s because they had concentration camps full of people they deemed enemies and generally just
inferior to their master race. These people, they thought, were entirely expendable. They could be
tested on, pulled apart, frozen, and when they died, they were useful for autopsy purposes.
As always, years later, when it came to experimentation, everything had to go through
Adolf Hitler’s number one man, the guy said to be the architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler.
Some of the letters written to him were discovered after the Nazis were beaten.
We found one written by Ernst-Robert Grawitz, a physician to Hitler and
before that someone who was part of the Nazi’s mass euthanasia program.
He also took part in experiments in which he tried to “cure” homosexuality.
In the letter, he talks about experimenting with the “N-substance.” This referred to chlorine gas,
not mustard gas, which was very useful during the previous war, albeit not too effective
when the enemy donned its gas masks. This is part of the original letter,
in translation: “In accordance with
these investigation experiments carried out on 25 September 1944, the necessity has now arisen
to carry out several experiments on human beings for the final clarification of the physiological
effect of N-substance on and through human skin.” He asked for five prisoners, stating that it
was “improbable that the experiment will cause any permanent damage.”
The Nazis maimed and killed many people in various experiments, so we don’t know why
exactly Grawitz stated that part. We do know such experiments were kept secret as much as possible
from people in the camps, and we also know that injured prisoners did not make good workers.
We found another letter written by Grawitz, again to Himmler, but this time about something called
the “LOST” program. LOST was a kind of sulfur gas. It got the name from the two people that
invented it: Wilhelm Lmmel and Wilhelm Steinhaus. The prisoners had already been purposefully
injured by the gas and the experiment consisted of trying to treat them, just as any German soldier
would require medical help on the battlefield. The letter states:
“The persons experimented on suffered considerably under the wound caused by LOST.
The arms in most of the cases are badly swollen and the pains are enormous.”
In four cases, the wounds became infected. We then find out that “drug-H” did nothing to help
the specific wounds caused by LOST. Drug H was otherwise known as the Holzmann remedy.
The emphasis when using LOST was usually to burn the prisoner with the stuff until
those horrible blisters formed. The Nazis then treated the burns with various drugs.
Evidence tells us this happened at Sachsenhausen camp in 1939,
at Natzweiler camp from 1942 to 1944, and at Neuengamme camp only in 1944. Also,
as you already know, just making the shells that carried the gas was dangerous business,
so the Nazis of course sometimes used camp inmates to do just that.
On September 8, 1939, Polish troops hit German troops with mustard gas after blowing up a bridge
at a place called Jaslo. 14 German soldiers were injured, and two died. According to one
researcher, “The incident immediately led to an investigation by German chemical warfare experts.”
The Nazis were somewhat upset, so they took 31 prisoners and experimented on them.
They did this at Sachsenhausen camp, which was mainly used for German political prisoners and
Soviet prisoners, but other nationalities stayed and died there, too. About 12,000
men died there from malnutrition and disease. Others were just shot or died in experiments.
We know the prisoners suffering from mustard gas experiments were treated with the experimental
drug Freskan, a powder codenamed F 1000 and F 1001. We also know various ointments were
used for their infections. What we don’t know is what happened to most of those Guinea pigs.
One survivor did tell his story, though. He was Hans Kargl, a German political prisoner.
Kargl was a prominent anti-fascist in Germany, and so the Nazis convicted him of high treason
and labeled him an “enemy of Hitler.” He later wrote that at the camp he had
a “yellow liquid” pasted over his arms. This was a liquid form of mustard gas. He said he came out
in painful blisters, which became open wounds. He was then treated with two ointments, which
caused intense pain. The Nazi doctors recorded the healing process with photographs and film.
Later, another eight prisoners suffered a similar fate, but two of them had streptococcus,
staphylococcus, and pneumococcus bacteria rubbed into the open wounds.
This is what a researcher wrote about that: “The infected prisoners developed sepsis with
high temperatures, shivering, swelling of the glands, and enlarged spleens.
The prisoners’ suffering led to the insight that neither Holzmann’s remedy nor the Freskan powder
had any healing effect on the mustard gas wounds or the infections.”
Ok, so the experiment failed. The Nazis tried again, of course.
They also performed more experiments with the substance LOST. One gram of it was smeared under
the arms of several prisoners. So much of it was applied to them that their wounds became necrotic,
although it seems the Nazis were able to treat those wounds.
Later, at the Natzweiler camp, things went a little different. LOST was still
applied to prisoners, but now a Dr. August Hirt treated the prisoners by giving them
injections of vitamins. He’s better known for his “Jewish skeleton collection” experiments.
He also stood out, having severe facial injuries from fighting in the first war.
On November 25, 1942, 15 inmates were picked out for testing. It turned out that the earlier tests
done on animals were “not applicable” to humans. The application for Vitamin A had worked on rats,
but in humans, it actually made the wounds worse. They then conducted what they called a “major rat
experiment” using 1000 rats and four different vitamins. Humans came next, 15 of them.
They were all German political prisoners, and according to Hendrik Nales, a former Dutch inmate,
all suffered “terrible, festering wounds” over their entire bodies.
Some of them went blind. Three died in horrible pain just after,
and two more died within a few days. The reason for death was edema of the lungs or pneumonia.
Hirt then wrote up his report, stating that vitamins A, B-complex,
and C, by mouth seemed to work, as did Vitamin B-1 when injected with glucose.
What he totally left out of the report were the severe injuries, the extreme pain, and the deaths.
The Nazis also experimented with phosgene gas, which is similar to mustard gas.
In June 1943, up to 150 prisoners at Natzweiler camp were dosed with some of this gas and around
50 of them “suffocated in agony”, although apparently scholars still debate this today.
More experiments happened, often using German prisoners but also gypsy prisoners taken from
another camp. They were gassed, and then doctors gave them a drug called Urotropin orally,
while others got nothing, and some received injections of Urotropin.
A survivor named Willy Herzberg said he and others were led to the gas chamber where a Nazi doctor
threw vials on the floor and smashed them with his feet. He walked out and the doors were locked.
In about ten minutes, Herzberg said that all he could hear was “muffled splashing”
caused by what he assumed was “bursting lungs”. He said prisoners were on all fours,
writhing around, with foam coming out of their mouths. As for himself, he said the pain was
as if someone was sticking needles into his lungs. He said on his chest he felt “a pressure,
as if hundreds of kilos were put upon it.” 14 people suffered pulmonary edema.
Four German gypsy inmates died. They were Zirko Rebstock, 37;
Adalbert Eckstein, 20; Andreas Hodosy, 32 and Josef Reinhardt, 38. As terrible as that was,
it was a result for the Nazis who worked out just how much Urotropin could be used to limit the
effects of usually-lethal phosgene poisoning. We now come to the last experiments. These
were conducted by Ludwig Werner Haase at the Neuengamme camp.
He was trying to develop a drug that would help German soldiers who’d been poisoned
with the blister agent Lewisite. It also caused terrible burns that festered and got infected, but
if soldiers swallowed the stuff, which was very possible, they could be looking at severe internal
tissue damage after painful bouts of vomiting. Haase wrote to Himmler and Himmler gave
him the green light to start testing on prisoners. Notably,
Haase was one of Hitler’s favored physicians. Haase believed that adding hypochlorous acid to
water could have a positive effect on men poisoned with Lewisite. First, he had to see what happened
when men drank water with hypochlorous acid in it. He had the water supply contaminated,
and 10,000 prisoners drank the water. They were all ok. This was progress.
So, then the doctor and his associates took 150 men and laced their water with Lewisite.
They drank that and then had to drink water with hypochlorous acid in it to see if it affected
their perhaps rapidly declining health. Other experiments used Nitrogen mustard as the poison.
According to research, low dosages of these poisons in water didn’t seem to
damage the unwitting prisoners. Haase then said he wanted to give prisoners high, harmful doses,
and others smaller doses, to work out the right amount of hypochlorous acid to put in the water.
To this, Himmler actually said no. His reason was the “current situation”. That was the advancing
allied troops and Germany soon to lose the war. That just about covers the chemical
agent experiments at the camps. Now you need to watch “Deadliest
Chemicals In The World.” Or, have a look at “Weapons Even The Military Made Illegal.”