We all know of the horrors that people who opposed Hitler had to live through during
World War II.
No one could think differently than the Nazis did and it only took a simple accusation or
suspicion to earn you an all-expense paid train ticket to the terrible concentration
or forced labor camps scattered throughout German Europe, where you would be subjected
to inhumane treatment and torture while waiting for your turn in the gas chambers.
Today we will put ourselves in the shoes of the poor men, women and children who were
deprived of their lives by a tyrant with delusions of superiority in order to empathize and learn
more about their suffering.
Welcome to Copernicus’s Galaxy.
The women who became torturers for the SS
You may find it hard to imagine a woman carrying out such cruel acts in the name of Hitler,
as most historical films and books talk about ruthless male soldiers, but little mention
is made of the SS division in charge of women prisoners.
Under the orders of Heinrich Himmler, a high-ranking Nazi officer, prisoners, or "Enemies of the
State" as they called them, were separated by gender, and Ravensbrück, the first and
only concentration camp for women was built.
This camp, being only for women, only accepted female personnel to fulfill the role of control
and surveillance, but there were very few who willingly enlisted in the ranks of the
SS, so the Nazi party chose to publish the vacancies in the labor exchange, with a description
that omitted the place where they would perform the work and promised above-average salary,
clothing, uniforms and free accommodation, which began to arouse the interest of low-income
women.
They were looking for women between 20 and 45 years old, preferably childless and loyal
to the Führer.
No skills or previous studies were necessary, thus making it easy to indoctrinate them in
the Nazi ideologies of the time.
Over time, divisions were created in each concentration camp to accommodate the growing
number of female prisoners, demanding at the same time more female guards for each camp,
eventually increasing to more than 3,000.
Recent interviews with survivors portray these Nazi women as cruel and violent, earning them
nicknames according to their actions against the prisoners, such as "Bloody Brygyda" or
"Revolver Anna" among others.
Salma van de Perre, a 98-year-old woman who once belonged to the Dutch Jewish resistance
helping Jewish families escape, recounts how inmates were brutalized by female guards,
beaten, tortured and killed.
In her words, at least 30,000 women died gassed, hanged, starved, sick or worked to death in
the Ravensbrück camp, thousands of women and girls who found little justice before
the law, as most of these guards were exonerated after the war, claiming to have acted under
threat, arguments that were later largely disproved.
Medical Experiments on Humans
It was to be expected that the prisoners were the perfect guinea pigs for the unethical
experimentation of the Nazi doctors and scientists of the time.
Thousands of tests were carried out during the long years of World War II without consent,
mainly on Jews.
Needless to say, these experiments were extremely painful and inhumane, not to mention that
most of them ended in the imminent death of the subject, all mainly for 3 general purposes:
military survival, testing of drugs and treatments, and advancement of Nazi racial and ideological
goals.
Among the most unpleasant and terrifying are those performed on more than 1,500 pairs of
twins by Josef Mengele with the intention of demonstrating genetic similarities and
differences between them, as well as studying whether it was possible to manipulate the
human body in an unnatural way.
He carried out these macabre tests at the Auschwitz extermination camp, where he tried
everything from changing the color of their eyes by direct injections of chemicals, to
sewing them together to create monstrous Siamese twins, of which only 200 survived.
Dr. Wichtmann conducted ruthless experiments involving head injuries within the walls of
a small building behind his house, including one in which he strapped an 11 to 12-year-old
boy to a chair while a mechanical hammer suspended above him struck him in the head every few
seconds.
In early 1942, Dr. Rascher's mission was to investigate how to help German pilots who
had to eject at high altitudes to survive, so he used 200 subjects from concentration
camps who were locked in low-pressure chambers to simulate the pilots' conditions, and it
is rumored that the survivors had their brains vivisected in order to study the effects of
the experiment.
Tests with poisons and irritants such as mustard gas and phosgene that caused severe burns
on the skin, and deadly diseases administered secretly to study the effects of a new drug
are some more of the experiments that were carried out by Nazi doctors, many of whom
surprisingly continued to practice after the war.
Children during the Holocaust
The Nazis did not distinguish between gender or age when it came to wiping out all those
they considered a plague in their ideal society.
Under this premise, Jewish children and the elderly were especially vulnerable, raising
the number of infanticides during the Holocaust to 1.5 million at the hands of Hitler and
his followers.
The reasons were simple, children under the age of 12 were too young for forced labor
and the elderly were too old, so they were considered "useless eaters", mouths to feed
that were of no use to the Nazi cause, as well as those with a disease or disability,
so they were commonly selected first for the gas chamber.
That is if they made it to the concentration camps, for some were killed in mass shootings
against opposition settlements or in reprisal operations.
Others were taken to the foot of a mass grave together with their parents and shot immediately,
while some did not live more than a couple of days after birth.
With a little more luck, those over the age of 13 were taken to forced labor camps, where
you could survive until the poor conditions and indifference of the German guards took
your life.
Thousands of children survived because they were hidden by other prisoners inside the
ghettos or even by Germans who did not sympathize with such inhumane methods.
Some escaped thanks to rescue operations carried out by allies or directly slipped out of the
concentration camps by miracle, showing great bravery and courage.
If the genes had played in your favor, giving you eyes as blue as the sky, hair as golden
as the sun and skin as white as snow, you could be taken away from your parents and
put at the disposal of an "acceptable" family by Nazi Germany thanks to the fact that your
appearance matched the ideal of the "Aryan race" ... lucky?
I don't think so....
By the end of the war, thousands of photos of Jewish children circulated in the newspapers
in the hope of being reunited with their lost families.
Horrors in the Concentration Camps
In general, the concentration camps were a not-so-small sample of hell on earth, and
once inside, surely more than one of those poor people would have preferred to have been
executed immediately rather than endure what went on behind those fences and barbed wire.
Forced labor bordering on the limit of what a normal human body could withstand, such
as swamp cleanups in heavy rains with little or no protective clothing, and heavy chores
were nearly impossible to perform on a diet of beets, leaves and potato peels, practically
the waste from the actual food.
The beatings were the daily bread and were happening at all times, leaving cases such
as those of Johanna Hill, who due to these punishments lost all possibility of pregnancy
within only a month and a half of having been imprisoned.
Thousands of people were left with injuries for life due to various tortures and even
medieval executions such as crucifixion.
They were in such extreme situations inside these camps that there was more than one case
of cannibalism among the prisoners due to the lack of food and water.
Sleeping at night could be a death sentence since the law of the jungle prevailed.
These and many more horrors were witnessed by all those people who, during the Second
World War, were unjustly deprived of their hope, freedom and life... men and women, boys
and girls who surely turned their gaze to heaven wondering, if there was a just and
kind God, why did He allow so much suffering?
And the last words of a Jewish prisoner who reflected "If God exists, He will have to
beg for my forgiveness".
It was undoubtedly one of the greatest failures that we as a species have committed and that
continues to arise on a smaller scale under our ignorance.
Surely there are still hundreds of unrevealed stories about the disgusting actions of the
Nazi party that will gradually emerge, so rest assured that we will be ready to tell
you here, at Copernicus’s Galaxy.