On January 27, 1945, the Red Army entered Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi extermination centers in German-occupied Poland. At least 1.3 million people were deported to the camp between 1940 and 1945, and at least 1.1 million were murdered there. Soviet soldiers liberated more than 7,000 surviving inmates, most of whom were ill and dying.
Some of those prisoners had been subjected to cruel pseudo-medical experiments. The man responsible for many of these atrocities was Horst Schuman, a Nazi doctor whose brutal methods became infamous.
Schuman was born on May 1, 1906, in Halle, then part of the German Empire. His parents divorced when he was five, and he was raised primarily by his older sister after his father’s second marriage also failed. He followed his father into medicine and joined the Nazi Party in 1930. By 1932, he was a member of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary force also known as the Storm Troopers.
In 1933, Schuman obtained his medical license and began working as an assistant doctor in the surgery department at Halle University Hospital. He married Frieda Meyer that November, but the marriage, which produced two sons, ended in divorce after ten years. From 1934, he worked at the public health office in Halle, and in 1939 he was recruited into the Luftwaffe as a physician.
In October 1939, Schuman met Viktor Brack, chief of main office 2 in the Führer Chancellery in Berlin. They discussed Schuman’s involvement in the Nazi euthanasia program, codenamed T4, which was the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities. Schuman’s first assignment was to establish a killing center at Grafeneck Castle.
In January 1940, the first transport of 25 men arrived from a sanatorium near Munich. Upon arrival, they were murdered in the gas chamber. Schuman remained at Grafeneck until the summer of 1940, during which time more than 1,200 patients were killed under his supervision using carbon monoxide gas. Doctors examined patients for only a few seconds to a minute before sending them to the gas chamber. The doctors then operated the manometer, releasing carbon monoxide into the chamber.
Schuman was later transferred to the Sonnenstein killing center. Under his supervision, nearly 14,000 patients and over 1,000 concentration camp prisoners were killed in the gas chamber between June 1940 and August 1941. Before heading Sonnenstein, he completed a psychiatric training course with Professor Paul Nitsche, the medical director of operation T4.
Just before operation T4 was officially halted in August 1941, Schuman was appointed as an expert for a medical commission codenamed 14f13. This commission selected concentration camp prisoners deemed unfit for work or incurably ill. Camp commandants prepared preliminary selection lists, and prisoners were sometimes encouraged to volunteer, believing they would be sent to a recovery camp. Many believed the lie, but after being gassed at the killing centers, their belongings were sent back to the camp warehouse, revealing the truth.
Schuman first came to Auschwitz at the end of July 1941 and selected 575 prisoners to be sent to Sonnenstein for gassing. He carried out further selections in Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, and Mauthausen concentration camps from December 1941 to April 1942. He then transferred to the Eastern Front, where he set up an emergency hospital in Minsk.
In the autumn of 1942, Schuman was ordered by Hitler’s Chancellery to transfer to Auschwitz and begin sterilization experiments on prisoners using X-rays. The aim was to develop an efficient method to permanently prevent reproduction among those deemed genetically or racially inferior. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, had assigned several doctors to research sterilization methods. Professor Carl Clauberg conducted his own experiments at Auschwitz, injecting a chemical preparation into fallopian tubes to cause inflammation and blockage.
In November 1942, Schuman began his experiments in Block 30 of the women’s infirmary at Auschwitz-Birkenau. After sterilizing around 200 Jewish prisoners, he expanded his research in February 1943, moving the experiment station to Block 10 of the main Auschwitz camp. There, he conducted radiation experiments on female prisoners, exposing reproductive organs to radiation. He tested various doses and exposure times to determine the most effective method.
Many victims suffered severe burns and painful infections in the abdomen, groin, and buttocks. These injuries caused excruciating pain and often led to agonizing deaths. To confirm the effects of his experiments, Schuman ordered the surgical removal of irradiated ovaries. Prisoner doctors reportedly performed 4,000 surgical experiments without anesthesia. Some young women died from complications.
One inmate who experienced Schuman’s experiments was a Polish Jew named Heim Balitski, who testified after the war. He was subjected to X-ray sterilization experiments, during which his testicles were exposed to high doses of radiation, causing severe burns, swelling, and pain. Before the surgical removal of his testicles, he was given an injection that numbed the lower part of his body while leaving the upper part fully conscious. He recalled seeing the entire procedure reflected in the mirror of a surgical lamp. There was no prior examination, no consent, and no regard for his suffering. He was left permanently sterile, scarred, and broken.
X-ray sterilization proved ineffective for large-scale use. In April 1944, Schuman submitted a report to Himmler titled “On the effects of X-rays on human reproductive organs,” concluding that traditional surgical castration was faster and more reliable. His note suggested that with two tubes, approximately 150 to 200 people could be sterilized per day, and with 20 factories, 3,000 to 4,000 per day. He ended his sterilization experiments at Auschwitz that same month.
According to French author Frédéric Koder, who described Schuman’s crimes in his book *Out of Reach*, Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, attended Schuman’s experiments at Auschwitz. Schuman also performed typhus experiments, injecting people with blood from typhus patients and then attempting to cure the newly infected subjects.
Schuman left Auschwitz in April 1944 and was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. There, he sterilized and castrated 120 to 140 Romani children as young as eight. He also injected silver nitrate into the uteri of young girls and conducted X-ray-based experiments. Witnesses saw him in civilian clothes with a medical kit.
He divorced his first wife and married Josefine Autz, an office worker he had met at the Sonnenstein killing center. This marriage produced three children. In January 1945, Schuman was sent to the Western Front as a troop doctor, where he was captured by the Americans in June 1945.
Schuman spent eight months in a detention center for Nazi criminals in southern Germany, but American authorities failed to connect him with his wartime crimes, and he was released. He and his wife moved to Gladbeck in West Germany, where he worked as a sports physician and later opened a private practice.
His past caught up with him in January 1951 when he applied for a hunting and fishing license. A routine police background check revealed he was a wanted man, but due to slow-moving investigations, Schuman fled the country in February 1951. For the next three years, he worked as a ship doctor. In February 1954, the German consulate general in Osaka, Japan, reported that Schuman had obtained a German passport. By 1955, he had moved to Egypt and later settled in Sudan, where his wife eventually joined him.
After his presence was exposed in April 1959, Schuman fled through Nigeria to Ghana, where he set up and ran a jungle hospital in the small town of Keteki. In 1962, a reporter from the British newspaper *Daily Express* tracked him down, but an extradition request filed by West Germany in 1961 was ignored by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, who considered Schuman a friend.
On February 24, 1966, Schuman returned home from a hunting trip, unaware that his protector had just been overthrown. A few weeks later, he was arrested and held for four months in Ussher Fort prison. On November 17, 1966, Schuman was extradited to West Germany. During the flight, he made his only confession: “The accusation of euthanasia is true. I was the man responsible at Sonnenstein. I performed sterilizations with X-rays at Auschwitz. It was a bad thing we did.”
While in West Germany, Schuman was placed in pre-trial detention at Bussbar prison. The charges against the “Beast of Block 10” were severe: active participation in mass murder in the gas chambers, killing prisoners through X-ray radiation, and performing operations as part of large-scale sterilization experiments.
On September 23, 1970, the trial of Horst Schuman began before the Frankfurt Regional Court, 19 years after the first arrest warrant was issued. When Schuman appeared in the packed courtroom, he was nearly smiling. The prosecution presented four volumes of documentation weighing two tons, including testimony from 115 survivors. Schuman was charged with the murder of 30,000 Jews. During the trial, he shockingly admitted to killing as many as 80,000 Jews, but added, “I have no numbers.”
Schuman’s former assistant described him as the devil himself, saying he refused to give water to women despite their pleas, later sending them to gas chambers or the brothel of kapos if they were less injured.
In March 1971, Schuman claimed he suffered from stomach issues and hypertension. He faked illnesses and even self-harmed to delay proceedings. The court suspended the trial, citing his supposed health problems. On November 1, 1971, a medical report detailed chest pains, irregular heartbeat, dizziness, and headaches. In July of the following year, he was released from prison due to his heart condition and rapidly deteriorating health.
Referring to Schuman’s former comrade Adolf Eichmann, who had been executed in Israel in 1962, prosecutor Fritz Bauer declared, “Eichmann would have been delighted to be tried in Germany. He would have only received a few years in prison.”
Schuman never faced true justice for his crimes. He died on May 5, 1983, in Frankfurt, West Germany, at the age of 77. There were no tears shed for Horst Schuman.