When the Red Army liberated Auschwitz in January 1945, what they found was complete horror.
They stumbled across 7000 prisoners who were clinging onto life in the three main camps,
and they also found hundreds of prisoners who had passed away.
They found horrific evidence of the crimes of the camp and the inmates told of the deadly
nature of Auschwitz.
It was the largest site used for mass murder during the Second World War, and over 1.1
million people it is estimated died there due to the gas chambers, conditions, executions
and violence inflicted by the SS guards.
Rudolf Hoess the Commandant who oversaw the camp established a reign of terror and evil
and following the end of the Second World War, he was even brought back to the camp
which he led and was executed on a specially built gallows.
There was Block 11 of Auschwitz which was regarded as the brutal torture and punishment
centre, in which prisoners were sometimes tortured to death and also here were standing
cells, small oubliette style cells where people were crammed into a tiny little prison for
days on end.
But next door to Block 11 was the death wall where many executions and shootings took place,
but next to it also was Block 10 which itself had a horrific reputation for evil and brutality.
Join us today as we look at ‘The HORRIFIC Torture Of Block 10 Of Auschwitz.’
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When prisoners were admitted through the gates of Auschwitz, they were often shaved, disinfected
and were then given their striped uniform.
They would not have known the horror that would await them within the barbed wire fences.
Conditions there were completely terrible and awful, and one female prisoners wrote
of the camp that, ‘There was one latrine for thirty to thirty-two thousand women and
we were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day.
We stood in line to get in to this tiny building, knee-deep in human excrement.
As we all suffered from dysentry, we could barely wait until our turn came, and soiled
our ragged clothes, which never came off our bodies, thus adding to the horror of our existence
by the terrible smell that surrounded us like a cloud.
The latrine consisted of a deep ditch with planks thrown across it at certain intervals.
We squatted on those planks like birds perched on a telegraph wire, so close together that
we could not help soiling one another.’
Executions were carried out in the roll call yards each day in front of everyone to send
a blood-curdling message to the people of the camp not to break the rules.
But there was one element of the camp where prisoners were forced to become involved in
human experimentation and medical studies run by many of the most evil doctors of the
SS and the Nazi party.
It was inside of Block 10, next door to the punishment centre where the Nazi medical experiments
were carried out.
Although it was inside of the mens camps, a large amount of experiments were carried
out on women.
Inside here a number of evil doctors worked conducting different tests.
At Auschwitz, German doctors conducted many different experiments onto the human test
subjects.
Heinrich Himmler and other high ranking SS members stated that they wished to use the
prisoners of the camp to trial certain medications and they also conducted many sickening experiments.
At other camps such as Dachau, doctors were conducting high altitude tests in which people
were forced into high pressure chambers and then the body was pushed to the limit, and
also cold water tests were carried out to see what temperatures the human body could
withstand before it gave out.
These experiments were very cruel and the horror continued at Auschwitz, but there was
almost one thing that the inmates knew if they were selected to take part in the medical
experiments, that they most probably would not make it out alive.
SS doctors at Auschwitz tested how useful X-Rays were as a form of sterilisation device.
The Nazis did not want people they deemed undesirable having more children, so they
embarked on a huge sterilisation programme, and inside Auschwitz many women were forced
to be dosed with huge amounts of radiation from the X-rays in attempts to sterilise them
and prevent them from having children.
One account of this states, ‘Experimental subjects--relatively healthy young men and
women in their late teens or early twenties, who had been obtained by a previous day's
order from the camps--were lined up in a waiting room and brought in one by one, often completely
ignorant of what was to be done to them.
Schumann himself turned on the machine, which hummed loudly...many of the women emerged
with what Marie L. called "substantial burns", which could become infected and take a long
time to heal; and many quickly developed symptoms of peritonitis, including fever and severe
pain and vomiting.
Not long after the x rays, the women's ovaries were removed surgically, often in two separate
operations...
This was incredibly painful, and some evil doctors such as Carl Clauberg went further
trying to glue together Women’s uteruses which is completely sick.
Doctor Clauberg it was said injected a substance into the cervix to block the Fallopian tubes,
and he chose his subjects of women who were married between the ages of 20 and 40 and
had preferably given birth to children.
He tried different substances to do this, and was secretive about this.
One of his victims stated, ‘Dr. Clauberg ordered me to lie down on the gynecological
table...
Dr. Clauberg used this needle to give me an injection in my womb.
I had the feeling that my stomach would burst with the pain.
I began to scream so that I could be heard through the whole block.’
Another set of experiments were funded by Bayer, part of IG farben an industrial conglomerate
and business, and in these they paid 150 Reichmarks for women inmates from Auschwitz.
These were then transferred to Bayer’s research lab and were used to test an aesthetic.
One employee working on this wrote to the commandant Rudolf Hoess that, ‘The transport
of 150 women arrived in good condition.
However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments.
We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the
same price."
Many experiments at Auschwitz took place with the sole intention of studying how the human
body would cope with different medications once exposed to a deadly disease.
Some prisoners were infected with spotted fever and were then given a vaccine of varying
strength to see what happened.
Many of these died from the treatment they received.
Further prisoners were transferred from Auschwitz to other camps for experimentation, for example
20 Jewish children were sent to Neuengamme in Hamburg, where they were then injected
with a virulent tubercular serum and then were forced into other experiments and they
were all later murdered.
At Auschwitz as conditions got worse as the war turned against the Germans, it was said
that there was a shortage of animal flesh to be used for bacteria cultures, and with
this they used human flesh.
It was said that, ‘"Since the SS stole the meat used to produce the culture media, the
chief SS physician found it very simple to replace it with human flesh"...
In Auschwitz, then, human flesh was more expendable than valuable animal meat…’
Another doctor of Block 10 was Eduard Wirths, who was concentrated on pre-cancerous growths
inside of the cervix.
He often amputated this part of the body from female prisoners without consent, and was
also the man who promoted the Angel of Death doctor Josef Mengele.
Mengele was focussed on incredibly shocking experiments, and he carried most of these
out on children away from Block 10 in specially housed barracks.
He did also work inside of Block 10.
Bruno Weber was another doctor who injected prisoners with other blood from other blood
groups, and many died subsequently from blood poisoning and he also tested drugs for mind
control.
August Hirt was a doctor who was responsible for organising and collecting a Jewish Skeleton
collection of 86 prisoners.
The Nazis were obsessed with genetics, and because of this it was said prisoners were,
‘given a sham physical examination for reassurance, then gassed....the corpses were immediately
transported to the anatomy pavilion of the Strasbourg University Hospital.
A French imate, who had to assist the project's director...told how "preservation began immediately,"
with the arrival of bodies that were "still warm, the eyes...wide open and shining."
There were two subsequent shipments of men, from each of whom the left testicle had been
removed and sent to hirt's anatomy lab.’
Inside of Block 10, prisoners when they knew they were heading for the evil human experimentation
department of Auschwitz knew there was a very good chance they would never make it out alive.
Many prisoners were killed from phenol injections to the heart so that autopsies could be carried
out, and many were also murdered by the experiments they were subject to.
This made Block 10 one of the most feared and depraved parts of the largest concentration
camp established inside of the Third Reich.
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