War first strikes the weakest and most defenseless, and under Nazi Germany, that meant women and children above all. The Nazi campaign in the East was not merely a war for territory. It was a war of annihilation, aimed at wiping out entire peoples to clear living space for the so-called Aryan race. Those who were not born Aryan were deemed surplus, even harmful, and were meant to serve as fuel for the comfort of the chosen.
That word, fuel, was not a metaphor. The crematoria of the concentration camps ran constantly and at full capacity, and for countless victims, the gas chamber and the crematorium became a release from torments so horrific that death itself appeared merciful. Among the worst perpetrators were men who called themselves doctors. Names like Josef Mengele, Karl Clauberg, Eduard Wirths, Karl Brandt, Viktor Brack, Waldemar Hoven, Joachim Mrugowsky, Herta Oberheuser, Gerhard Rose, and Horst Schumann became synonymous with the corruption of medicine.
These men, many of them trained physicians, conducted unspeakably cruel experiments on living prisoners. Women, already among the most vulnerable in the camp system, were of particular interest to them. Mengele, known as the Angel of Death, was not alone in his sadism. His colleagues matched him in cruelty.
Karl Clauberg, a professor of gynecology and an SS Gruppenführer, worked with colleague Horst Schumann to develop methods for the rapid sterilization of what they considered inferior races. They used both physical and chemical means, X-rays and caustic substances like formaldehyde, carefully recording the effects on their victims. The fate of the women meant nothing to them. The goal was to solve the problem the SS had set: how to quickly and easily reduce the population of occupied territories.
They were equally interested in the scientific results of their terrible work, the physiology of their subjects, and the impact of their torture on the human psyche. Eduard Wirths, the chief physician at Auschwitz, was another who took a particular interest in women’s diseases, pregnancy, and the causes of infertility. He, too, ordered sterilization operations on women, though he rarely performed them himself. He preferred to work through prisoner doctors, leaving himself the role of observer and researcher.
Under his authority, a woman could be subjected to genital surgery multiple times. The scientific purpose of this cruelty remains unknown, but many prisoners did not survive the second or third operation. The suffering was not limited to the medical block. Irma Grese, a notorious female guard, began her career at Ravensbrück and later became a senior guard at Auschwitz.
She hunted prisoners with hungry dogs, lashed them with a whip, and kicked them with heavy army boots. Women suffered particularly under her. She would lure young women with a glass of milk, then drop it deliberately just out of reach. Starving women would fall to the ground to lap up the spilled milk while she watched and laughed.
But even she was not as feared as the SS medics, fanatics who could abuse and torture prisoners for hours or even days, as long as the human body could endure it. Some tested vaccines they were developing by injecting prisoners with contagious diseases, typhus, malaria, and other viral fevers. After infecting them, they administered what they called a vaccine. It usually did not work, but failure did not stop them.
They simply started over with a new batch of prisoners. The undisputed leader in monstrous experimentation was Josef Mengele. He conducted his work with absolute calm, often cheerfulness. He would whistle a tune or tell a joke while injecting a victim with a harmful substance or administering electric shocks.
He carefully studied the endurance of the female body and how certain factors affected reproductive function. When an experiment ended, he subjected any survivor to sterilization, sometimes using electric discharge. Few survived their encounter with Dr. Death.
Mengele was also obsessed with questions of race. The Nazis believed true Aryans had blonde hair and blue eyes, but among prisoners they encountered people with unexpected traits, blonde hair with brown or even black eyes. An important question arose: how to make them look like true Aryans. The answer, of course, was to change the color of the eyes.
Mengele distinguished himself here as well. He injected unknown liquids into prisoners’ eyes, without anesthesia, in an attempt to change their color. Strangely, scientific results were sometimes achieved. The color might change and the eyes turn blue, but those who survived the procedure often went blind.
They were then useless as labor and written off as waste material for further experiments. On the other hand, a Gypsy or a Jew who happened to have blue eyes, a rare phenomenon, suffered an equally terrible fate. Their eyes were removed so that researchers could study why a member of an inferior race had that coloring. Mengele was so obsessed with this that he could begin the procedure himself, without even allowing the prisoner to be unloaded from the transport.
The camp doctors also forced women to become pregnant, then removed the fetus at a certain stage of development for study. Women usually died from these procedures, and even twelve or thirteen-year-old girls were subjected to them. Testing new drugs was routine. Sulfonamides, phenols, formaldehyde, even kerosene, anything could be injected into the camp guinea pigs, as the SS doctors called their prisoners.
The victims experienced terrible torment, and many begged for a quick death. The sadistic doctors refused them even that mercy. They meticulously observed the purity of their experiments, recording in their diaries how prisoners reacted to pain, how long they survived after losing an organ, how they tolerated new medications. Prisoners were placed in freezers and high-temperature ovens to see how long they could survive and which organs would fail first.
Psychological torture was added to the physical. Women were forced to watch others suffer, then forced to have sex in order to become pregnant. Pregnant women were made to watch brutal torture while the doctors observed how it affected the development of the fetus and the course of the pregnancy. The testimony of Maria Gąsaw-Zabińska, a Polish prisoner at Auschwitz, captured what so many experienced.
She said she saw such terrible things, such horrific poverty of people, such barbarism, such atrophy of everything human, and at the same time such flares of pure hearts, that she could safely say she saw everything a person can see and experience, both in hell and in heaven. Justice, when it came, was partial. On December 9, 1946, the trial of the SS doctors began at Nuremberg. In total, 176 killers in white coats went through the process.
Only seven were sentenced to death. Hitler’s personal physician, Karl Brandt, was executed, as was Viktor Brack. The others were given life sentences, various prison terms, or were acquitted. Karl Gebhardt, Himmler’s personal physician, Joachim Mrugowsky, and others received severe sentences.
But not all Nazi doctors were brought to justice. Some escaped retribution entirely. Despite the incomplete justice, the world learned an important lesson. Retaliation for crimes against humanity and for the violation of medical ethics and the Hippocratic oath was inevitable.
After the war, such cruel medical experiments on living people were no longer acceptable. The hope remains that this lesson endures.