The 20th of August 1947, Luneberg, Germany. After more than 8 months on trial, 23 defendants, who
either participated in a deadly Nazi euthanasia program - killing mentally ill or physically
disabled people deemed “ unworthy of life “ ; or who conducted cruel, painful and often lethal
medical experiments on thousands of prisoners without their permission in the Nazi concentration
camps during World War II, hear their sentences read. Thanks to the gruesome testimonies of dozens
of witnesses, the world finally learns the truth about these devastating and inhumane experiments,
which violated medical ethics by both their means and their ends
and required the approval by the SS chief Heinrich Himmler. One of those who performed
these pseudo-medical experiments is a German medical doctor Fritz Fischer
Fritz Fischer was born on the 5th of October 1912 in Berlin,
then part of the German Empire. As with millions of Germans in the 1930s, he believed that Hitler
and his Nazi party would create a strong Germany, fix the economy, and put people back to work.
Thus, in February 1934 he joined the SS and in 1937 he joined the Nazi Party. After he completed
his studies of medicine in 1936 and received his doctorate in 1938, he became a surgeon.
World War 2 started on the 1st of September 1939.
Two months later on the 1st of November 1939, Fischer became a member of the Waffen-SS
which was the military branch of the SS. He was assigned as the assistant
surgeon to the Hohenlychen Sanatorium where injured or convalescing SS-men were treated.
In 1940, Fritz Fischer became troop physician of the SS Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
which was an elite division-sized unit during World War II. After he was seriously wounded
during fighting on the Eastern Front, Fischer was posted back to Hohenlychen Senatorium
and worked in the nearby camp hospital of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Here he actively participated in the surgical experiments carried out on concentration camp
inmates, mostly Polish female prisoners condemned to death, without their consent.
At Ravensbrück, Fritz Fischer and his colleague Herta Oberheuser
became the assistants of Karl Gebhardt, who had been sent to Ravensbrück to conduct medical
experiments on inmates in treating infections with sulfonamide which was an early antibiotic.
After an assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich on May 27,
1942 when Heydrich was attacked and wounded by Czechoslovak paratroopers, Karl Gebhardt refused
to treat Heydrich with sulfonamide and the Nazi architect of the Holocaust contracted an infection
and died 8 days later. In Ravensbrück Gebhardt wanted to prove that his method of treating
Heydrich had been correct and that sulfonamide was useless in treating the infections.
As a result, all three – Gebhardt, Fischer and Oberheuser started to conduct medical experiments
on healthy prisoners, mostly young Polish women, who would become known as “The Rabbits.”
They carried them out ruthlessly as human life meant nothing to them.
They often used a hammer to break legs of female prisoners, then infected the open
wounds with aggressive bacteria and monitored the healing with and without antibiotics
Another employed method of these experiments was to spread the mixture containing gangrenous
bacterial cultures into an incision, which was made five to eight centimeters in length
and one to one-and-a-half centimeters in depth on the outside of the lower leg. The wound was then
closed, and the limb encased in a cast which had been prepared. However, the infections
which resulted from these experiments were not typical of battlefield gangrenous infections.
In order to simulate battle-caused gangrene, they added tiny fragments of wood and glass to
these wounds, which would simulate the crust of dirt customarily found in battlefield.
The prisoners were subsequently monitored and treated with and without antibiotics.
Another purpose of their experiments was to determine the effectiveness of sulfanilamide
on the bullet wounds. To simulate battlefield conditions without actually shooting the patients,
Fischer together with Gebhardt decided to tie off the blood vessels at either end of the muscle
so the affected area becomes a fertile field for the growth of bacteria.
Most of the prisoners became sick from the gangrenous infection. In better cases,
the prisoners ended up with an amputated leg and mutilated for life. But in the
worst cases, they either died in pain within a few days or were shot.
They also experimented with removing and damaging nerves, muscles, and bones in the
legs to see if they would regenerate. They even attempted to transplant the
limbs from one person to another believing it could help in treating amputee soldiers.
In Fischer’s trial testimony he describes in detail how he removed the prisoner’s arm including
the scapula, wrapped it in a clean sheet and drove with it back to the SS hospital of Hohenlychen
to hand it over to professor Gebhardt who would surgically attach it to a German patient.
It is perhaps most terrifying that these horrific medical experiments
were often performed without any anesthesia.
After the war, Fritz Fischer claimed that his behavior towards all patients on whom
he conducted these cruel medical experiments was very considerate,
and that he was very careful in the operations to follow standard professional procedure.
In May 1943 Fisher left the concentration camp and went to the front. In August 1944
he was wounded and as with his concentration camp victims, had his right arm amputated.
After the war, the unethical and inhumane medical experiments which Fritz Fischer had conducted,
were uncovered, and he finally faced justice for his crimes. He was arrested and tried at the
Nuremberg Doctors' trial where he was one of the few accused doctors who showed signs of remorse
over his actions and openly talked about how he felt badly for operating on healthy young women.
To defend himself, he claimed that the order to conduct medical experiments on human beings had
come from Adolf Hitler himself via Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and that it was
his duty to simply obey and do what he was told. He also claimed that his participation
was solely that as an assistant and it was not his function to analyze the legal situation.
When he was asked if it was permissible to experiment on persons condemned to death
without their consent, he replied he had acted at that time as the soldier Fischer,
not as a doctor and a person. Fischer compared his situation to the one in which the individual
soldier fires a torpedo against a ship or when another soldier is under orders to drop bombs
on an unprotected city. He believed that they all had to overcome their innermost objections
and felt themselves to be justified in what they were doing through the fact that they
were acting under military orders, contributing to the victory of their own people and nation.
When he was asked about Herta Oberheuser who murdered numerous women by injecting them with
petrol and who was involved in forced abortions of women who were already seven or eight months
pregnant, he said that she played no active role in these experiments and added that he
had the impression that Oberheuser had had a human contact with the prisoners in the camp.
In summer 1947 the military tribunal found Fritz Fischer guilty of war crimes,
crimes against humanity and membership in a criminal organization, the SS and sentenced
him to life imprisonment. However, his life sentence lasted only a few years.
In 1952 his sentence was reduced to 15 years and in 1954 Fischer was released for good behavior.
Although the German authorities restored his license to practice medicine,
unlike Herta Oberheuser - his fellow colleague from Ravensbruck concentration camp,
Fritz Fischer never returned to the profession of the doctor.
Instead, he started a new career at the chemical company in Ingelheim,
where he stayed until his retirement in 1978. In 2003, when he died at the age of 90, he was the
last known living of those charged at the Doctors' Trial. There were no tears shed for Fritz Fischer.
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