Former Luftwaffe pilot, now SS doctor, Sigmund Rascher, chooses two prisoners from a lineup,
Russian men barely out of their teens.
These strong men have no idea that they are about to become test subjects in Rascher’s
profoundly unethical medical experiment bearing the innocuous title, “Warming Up After Freezing
to the Danger Point.”
A few hours hour later, Rascher jots down in his notebook, “Subject 115763-naked:
Time of death: 64 minutes.
Subject 115306-clothed.
Time of death: 102 minutes.”
This was not unusual.
Those that underwent the Nazi’s freezing experiments rarely escaped with their life
intact.
We know a little bit about the experiments of doctor Rascher due to the fact that many
of the letters the Nazis wrote while they were experimenting on prisoners were later
used in evidence during the Nuremberg Trials.
Take for instance this letter, dated October 9, 1942.
The correspondence is between Rascher and Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS.
After Adolf Hitler, Himmler was the most powerful Nazi that ever shouted “Sieg Heil!”
The letter started with, “I ask for leave to submit to you the second interim report
concerning the freezing experiments.”
Interestingly, lower down, he also wrote that Professor Holzloehner declined to perform
the freezing experiments on humans out of “shame”.
Rascher then added, “I shall take over the exploitation of them”, meaning the humans.
It seems not all Nazi doctors were happy about experimenting on humans.
In the testimony of SS officer Rudolf Brandt, he talked about Himmler, stating, “He further
asked Rascher to submit the names of people who were opposed to experiments on human beings
and stated that such peoples were to be considered as traitors.”
Still, if there were such traitors, they were in a very small minority.
They did exist, though, with Himmler writing to Rascher in one letter, “I regard those
people as high and national traitors who, still today, reject these experiments on humans,
and would instead let sturdy German soldiers die as a result of these cooling methods.
I shall not hesitate to report these men.”
Such was the mindset of the inner circle of Nazis.
Being outside all day during the winter in some parts of the world could easily be lethal.
Ending up in the bitterly cold waters could be lethal much faster.
The Germans wanted to know how to treat their soldiers when they were suffering from hypothermia.
These experiments happened at the Dachau camp from August 1942 until May 1943.
They consisted of freezing a person to the point of death, although sometimes that part
did end in death.
This was useful information for the Nazis since such experiments gave them an idea of
what a person could survive.
Another part of the experiment was called “warming up”, in which the doctors used
various methods to warm someone, so they didn’t just survive but were brought back to good
health.
It was almost as if the Nazis were playing God, trying to resurrect people from what
looked like certain death.
What’s also interesting is that there seemed to be some competition going on between various
doctors, with some medical personnel expressing that experimenting on humans wasn’t necessary
when animals could be used – in some cases, “shaved cats.”
Rascher told Himmler that humans were indeed better, saying in one letter that he needed
more “Russians”.
You might wonder why Russians.
The answer was the Germans had to fight on the Eastern Front, where temperatures could
get very low.
The Germans weren’t used to this.
The Nazis wondered if the Russians had a genetic advantage when it came to surviving the cold,
and if they did, they wanted to know why.
Further down the letter, he wrote, “The experiments of rewarming by body heat, which
were ordered, will be carried out as soon as the women necessary for this experiment
arrive, in about two days.
I shall report the results of this experiment separately.”
This didn’t mean that Rascher was now freezing only women, but that he was addressing Himmler’s
contention that the best way to warm up a freezing man was to place him between the
bodies of two other men.
It was Himmler’s contention that animal warmth, in this case, human warmth, was better
than artificial warmth.
He told Rascher “that a fisherwoman could well take her half-frozen husband into her
bed and revive him in that manner.”
This was actual testimony from a former Nazi during the Nuremberg trials.
The man who said the words was again Rudolph Brandt:
“The report on the rewarming of an intensely chilled human being by animal warmth stated
that the experimental subjects were cooled until they all lost consciousness.
The test persons were then placed between two naked women in a spacious bed.
It was noted that several of the subjects revived sufficiently to perform sexual intercourse.”
These experiments were supposed to emulate what it would be like when one of their pilots
was shot down and ended up in the frigid North Sea.
To replicate this, sometimes prisoners were dropped into a bath of ice-cold water.
According to researchers, some of them were anesthetized, and others weren’t.
Although we said that Professor Holzloehner may have felt some amount of shame regarding
the human experiments, we found a report with his name attached to it that beggars belief.
The other names were Rascher and Dr. Finke.
The letter concerned giving narcotics to a person before they were forced into the iced
bath.
It started, “If the experimental subject was placed in the water under narcosis, one
observed a certain arousing effect.
The subject began to groan and made some defensive movements.
In a few cases, a state of excitation developed.
This was especially severe in the cooling of head and neck.”
The report said the person then suffered from a kind of “rigor”, after which, the subject
started twitching.
The report concluded, “With still more marked sinking of the body temperature, it suddenly
ceased.
These cases ended fatally, without any successful results from resuscitation efforts.”
Some subjects were naked, but others were fully dressed, usually in German air force
uniforms to create a facsimile of natural conditions.
Rascher’s letters illuminate the details.
He wrote in one report, “The experimental subjects were placed in the water, dressed
in complete flying uniform, winter or summer combination, and with an aviator's helmet.
A life jacket made out of rubber kapok was to prevent submerging.
In one experimental series, the occiput (brain stem) protruded above the water, while in
another series of experiments the occiput (brain stem) and back of the head were submerged
in water.”
We’ll come back to why he didn’t always fully submerge the person.
The doctors checked the person’s body temperature throughout and also wrote down obvious “clinical
manifestations”, which in simple terms just means the outward signs of what happened to
the freezing person.
They also checked for biochemical and physiologic changes, which again relate to the changes
in the body.
If the person died, an autopsy would reveal more information.
So, there was Doctor Rascher, thinking he was doing his bit for the cause.
During the Nuremberg Trials, his experiments were called inhumane and criminal, and of
course, they were.
But what’s also strange about the man is he lied when he wrote down the findings of
his experiments, or at least, he lied from time to time.
This didn’t help the cause at all.
It’s now said that Rascher was operating under the orders of another person.
That was Erich Hippke, the Chief Medical Officer of the Luftwaffe.
Together they came up with the ice-cold water experiments, and they also left some prisoners
outside in the cold during the winter months at Dachau – usually naked.
The reports we have now state that when left outside, they were usually there for around
14 hours.
As for the tub of ice, that could be up to three hours, although most people died well
before that.
The prisoners were usually male, but of various nationalities and ethnicities.
We can’t always be sure who was part of the experiments because the Nazis destroyed
much of the evidence when the war was lost.
But thanks to those letters, as well as a 228-page report from the investigator, Leo
Alexander, we know some things.
We know that the prisoners were forced to do the experiment most of the time, but sometimes
they volunteered on the promise that they would be awarded for their participation.
It’s reported that those rewards weren’t given if the person survived.
In total, there were between 360 to 400 experiments which amounted to between 280 and 300 victims.
The temperature of the bath that the people were dropped in was sometimes between 2 and
12°C (35.6 F and 53.6F).
During the winter, the North Sea’s temperature is usually about 6 °C (43 °F).
As for hypothermia, that occurs when the temperature of the body drops below 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
So, if a person sits in a bath of water that is around 40 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, very
serious injury and death can happen pretty fast, within possibly 30 to 90 minutes or
around the one to three-hour mark depending on various factors.
It’s these factors that the Nazis wanted to understand.
In some of the reports, the Nazis wrote that when a person was immersed in water that was
5C (41 F), they could generally tolerate it for about one hour.
If the water was 15C (59F), they would usually last about four or five hours.
One report said that no test subject survived having their body temperature dropped to 25C
(77F) and then being heated up to 28C (82.4F).
Some prisoners who later testified to seeing the experiments said they saw around 90 people
die but noted that some did survive after being warmed up.
They also said two people became mentally ill, but we don’t know when this mental
illness occurred.
The onset of severe reactions to the cold was fast, as was stated in another report.
It said, “The rapidity of which numbness occurs is remarkable.
It was determined that already 5 to 10 minutes after falling in, an advancing rigor of the
skeletal muscles sets in, which renders the movement of the arms especially increasingly
difficult.”
That report also said that those considerations had to be taken seriously, given that German
soldiers in cold water would likely lose most of their manual dexterity.
The report noted, “It is certainly extremely difficult even at the beginning of numbness
to climb into a rubber raft, to blow up a rubber raft for one person, or to make use
of instruments or to signal or call.”
One of the ways the Nazis warmed prisoners up was by immersing them in hot water, but
that too is very dangerous.
It produces a kind of shock, what we now call “re-warming shock” or the “after-drop
effect”.
You can look at any medical website these days and it will tell you that if you’re
dealing with a person suffering from hypothermia then DO NOT put them in a hot bath.
Instead, passively warm them using dry, unheated blankets.
Doctor Rascher disagreed with this, stating that passive re-warming didn’t work.
He wrote in one report, “Re-warning by animal warmth-animal bodies or women's bodies-would
be too slow.”
He explained this by saying, “During attempts to save severely chilled persons, it was shown
that rapid re-warming was in all cases preferable to slow re-warming, because after removal
from the cold water, the body temperature continued to drop rapidly.”
According to research, the Nazis used at least seven different procedures to warm a person.
We know that in two experiments a warm bath was used, although some witnesses later said
they saw someone being immersed into boiling hot water.
We also know that massage was used in some experiments, as were heated light sources,
but again, there isn’t much data as to how they worked.
We should say here that in Rasher’s reports there are lots of inconsistencies, which is
one reason why things didn’t end too well for that guy.
Rascher’s report also stated heart failure was the reason for freezing experiment deaths,
but that’s also come into question.
As has his conviction that if a person is not immersed above the neck, he won’t become
hypothermic.
Academics now state that Rascher was not even qualified to conduct such experiments, which
is why it seems they were either botched or the results were made up or exaggerated.
One scientist later wrote, “The Reichsführer expressed special interest in the hypothermia
project and traveled to Dachau several times to witness experiments.
Thus, the study represents a private venture by two unqualified ideologues, conducted in
a prison setting quite alien to the standards of an academic environment.”
We now know that because Rascher was so close to Himmler, no other scientists dare question
what he did even though they knew full well he was somewhat of a charlatan.
At the Nuremberg Trials, it was said that their “connections were so strong that practically
every superior trembled in fear of the intriguing Rascher who consequently held a position of
enormous power.”
When you hear this next bit of information, you’ll agree that he certainly fitted the
glove of what we call mad scientists.
With so many dead bodies around him, Rascher made use of some of the human skin.
With it, he created “saddles, riding breeches, ladies' handbags, and other personal items.”
He sold what he’d made to some of his colleagues.
But his end soon came when it was discovered that some of his children weren’t his and
he’d actually abducted them.
He was also accused of killing his lab assistant and of being a scientific fraud.
For those reasons, he ended up in Dachau himself.
Himmler felt this guy he’d protected and supported for so long had not only lied to
him but made a fool of him.
On Himmler’s orders, on 26 April 1945, Rascher was killed by firing squad in his cell.
The last words that Rascher heard were, “You pig, now you've got the punishment you deserve.”
Well, that’s if he lived long enough to hear them.
In the 1980s, some scientists said the data might be useful to help save lives.
Baruch Cohen, a Holocaust researcher, had something to say about that.
He said, ‘‘Although use of the Nazi data might benefit some lives, a larger bioethical
problem arises.
By conferring a scientific martyrdom on the victims, it would tend to make them our retrospective
guinea pigs, and we, their retrospective torturers’.”
For some time, it was assumed that Rascher’s experiments could be of some use, but academics
were quick to state that there was great risk thinking “these grotesque Nazi medical exercises
yielded results worthy of consideration and possibly of benefit to humanity.”
It’s thought the number of victims was around 27,000 for all the various experiments, with
about twice as many men as women.
About 20 percent of the victims were Jewish, with about two percent being Roma and Sinti.
Other ethnicities were stated as “other” or “unknown.”
When we look at nationalities, there were many.
The countries with the most victims of experiments were Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary, and
Austria, although over 6,000 cases were marked as “unknown” nationality.
Then there were some countries’ residents picked out for lesser-known experiments, such
as the handful of British commandos who were captured in Norway.
The Nazis tested new kinds of amphetamine on them in “high performance” experiments.
Now you need to watch “The WWII Nazi Breeding Plan.”
Or, have a look at...