When Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, the Nazi Party set out to lead what it called the German master race to victory in a racial struggle against those it deemed inferior, especially the Jews. The German medical profession played a central role in shaping and implementing Nazi policies, and many doctors and nurses became involved in crimes of the regime.
Some German physicians welcomed the Nazi regime because it supported their beliefs about racial hygiene. Others joined to take advantage of opportunities to advance their careers. Between 1933 and 1945, roughly half of all German doctors became members of the Nazi Party and its organizations.
One such doctor was Herta Oberheuser. During the Second World War, she conducted inhuman and painful medical experiments on women at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Oberheuser was born on May 15, 1911, in Cologne, then part of the German Empire. The daughter of an engineer, she grew up in Düsseldorf, where she graduated from high school in 1931.
She then studied medicine in Bonn and Düsseldorf. Because her family was not wealthy, she had to partially finance her studies herself by tutoring and helping in a medical practice.
Scouting and youth movements had been popular in Germany since the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When Hitler and the Nazis came to power in January 1933, many political, social, and religious youth groups existed. As the Nazi Party gained popularity in the early 1930s, it sought to increase its influence and reach with Germany's youth.
The Nazis expanded the Hitler Youth, their organized youth movement, to include both boys and girls. By 1931 it had four sections organized by gender and age. Later, the Nazis created a voluntary section of the League of German Girls for young women ages 17 to 21 called Glaube und Schönheit, meaning Faith and Beauty.
Oberheuser joined the League of German Girls in 1935. Her activities included providing medical assistance to female participants in youth shows who were overloaded with exercise. Practicing sport was not the only activity in which members of the Nazi youth movement were involved. At the 1936 Nuremberg rally, where some 100,000 participants of youth organizations were present, 900 girls between 15 and 18 years of age returned home pregnant.
In 1937, the same year she received her doctorate, Oberheuser joined the Nazi Party. Determined to specialize in dermatology, she started work at the Dermatology Clinic in Düsseldorf as an assistant physician and obtained the desired qualification in 1940.
She then worked at the public health department in Düsseldorf, where she specialized in research experiments on live animals. However, she had to financially support her family after her father became ill, and she needed a better-paid position.
A chance to earn well came when Oberheuser learned from a professional medical journal that the SS was looking for a female doctor for a women's retraining camp near Berlin. She applied, and after three months of training, in December 1940, the 29-year-old Oberheuser was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Ravensbrück opened in May 1939 and was the largest concentration camp for women within Germany's pre-war borders. In the concentration camp system, it was second in size only to the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The first prisoners interned at Ravensbrück were approximately 900 women.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939. By the end of 1942, the female inmate population of Ravensbrück had grown to about 10,000. In January 1945, the camp had more than 50,000 prisoners, mostly women.
At Ravensbrück, Oberheuser first worked under the site physicians Walter Sonntag and Gerhard Schidlowski, who performed experiments on the camp's female inmates. They extracted healthy teeth without the use of anesthetic, and the preferred method of killing was by injecting petrol and phenol directly into prisoners' veins. They also experimented on prostitutes interned at Ravensbrück, using them as lab rats in the search for a cure for gonorrhea and syphilis.
Since her colleagues could no longer stand the conditions of the experiments, Oberheuser, an ardent Nazi herself, gradually took over more and more of her colleagues' functions, thus ensuring that the experiments were carried out.
On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia and a principal architect of the Holocaust, was in his convertible Mercedes when he was mortally wounded by Czechoslovak paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. The same day, Himmler sent his personal physician, Karl Gebhardt, to Prague to assume care.
Hitler's personal doctor, Theodor Morell, suggested the use of the new antibacterial drugs sulfonamides, but Gebhardt thought Heydrich would recover and declined the suggestion. Despite a fever, Heydrich's recovery appeared to progress well, and Gebhardt decided to monitor Heydrich's recovery alone because, according to him, the intervention of several doctors could have led to harmful nervousness.
On June 3, Heydrich was able to eat his midday meal sitting up. A few hours later he collapsed, dying the next day. Himmler accused Gebhardt of negligence for not treating Heydrich with sulfonamides and advised Gebhardt to conduct medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners to prove he was not responsible for Heydrich's death.
Gebhardt's sulfonamide experiments on inmates in the Ravensbrück concentration camp began on July 20, 1942. His assistants during these experiments became doctors Fritz Fischer and Herta Oberheuser.
Believing it could help in treating amputee soldiers, Gebhardt and his assistants also tested various methods of setting and transplanting bones. Such experiments included amputations and were often performed without any anesthesia. They often used a hammer to break the legs of female prisoners, then infected opened wounds with aggressive bacteria and monitored the healing with and without sulfonamides.
The SS selected nearly 80 women, mostly Polish, for these experiments. The women on whom the experiments were conducted nicknamed themselves "rabbits" because they felt used like experimental laboratory animals, and because the experiments made them unable to walk, they could only hop.
Wanda Szwava-Kozłowska, a Polish teacher arrested for joining the anti-German resistance in Poland as a courier, was one of the involuntarily selected Ravensbrück female prisoners for experiments. Against her will, she became a subject in bone regeneration experiments. She survived the war to give detailed, gruesome testimony of the physical and mental abuse she underwent.
She and her fellow prisoners who were selected to come to the hospital were given no answers to their questions. The injection they received caused Wanda to vomit before she was taken to the operating room. After the operation, when she recovered consciousness for a while, she felt severe pain in her leg, which was in a cast from the ankle up to the knee. The whole leg was swollen from the toes up to the groin, and to add to her suffering she had a high temperature.
She was operated on three times. For a long time she could not walk, and pus flowed from her leg until June 1943, nine months after the first operation. Although she was blindfolded during some of the procedures, she could name the doctors responsible for her operations and treatment: Gebhardt, Fischer, Schidlowski, and Oberheuser.
Wanda described one of her encounters with Oberheuser from the days when she felt the worst. She said that while she was in the hospital, cruelty from Dr. Oberheuser was performed on her. When she was in her room, she remarked to fellow prisoners that they were operated on in very bad conditions and left in the room, and that they were not given even the possibility to recover.
This remark must have been heard. The German nurse entered the room and told them to get up and dress. They answered that they could not follow her orders because they had great pain in their legs and could not walk. Then the German nurse came with Dr. Oberheuser.
Dr. Oberheuser told them to dress and come to the dressing room. They put on their dresses and, being unable to walk, had to hop on one leg going into the operating room. After one hop they had to rest. Dr. Oberheuser did not allow anyone to help them. When they arrived at the operating room quite exhausted, Dr. Oberheuser appeared and told them to go back because the change of dressing would not take place that day. Wanda could not walk, but another prisoner whose name she did not remember helped her back to the room.
Stefa Lotka, another survivor, remembered another example of Oberheuser's post-operative care, or better said non-care. According to her, Oberheuser refused water to many victims, and when she did give it, she mixed it with vinegar. She also ordered that victims were not to be given medicine to relieve their pain.
Oberheuser later tried to justify her inhumane actions and claimed that the Germans had the right to experiment because the victims were members of the Polish underground resistance against the Nazi regime. After the treatment, numerous women were murdered by Oberheuser, who injected them with phenol or petroleum injections. She would later portray these killings as a humanitarian act.
She was also involved in the forced abortions of women who were already seven or eight months pregnant. In addition to these forced abortions, she was also known for the beating of pregnant women to cause miscarriages and the killing of newborns.
After the war, Anna Hye, a German woman, recalled how she had received news that her sister had died in Ravensbrück and contacted Oberheuser hoping to discover more details on her sister's final days. Oberheuser hit Hye in the face and stomach while screaming at her that she was gone because she was only a useless eater and that they really did not need those sorts of people around anymore.
In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through Ravensbrück, including Poles, Russians, Jews, Romani people, and others. Of that number, over 92,000 women perished. When the camp was liberated by the Red Army on April 30, 1945, there were about 3,500 sick women, men, and children in the camp.
Justice finally caught up with Oberheuser when she was tried in the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, which began on December 9, 1946. She was the only female defendant at the trial. On her gender she commented, saying that being a woman didn't stop her being a good National Socialist, and that she thought female National Socialists were every bit as valuable as men in keeping alive what they believed.
During the trial she claimed that she had helped the women who were subjected to the experiments and that they had always been glad when she was there to change their bandages. However, those who survived her treatment had different recollections of what had happened. One of them was Isabella Re, who recalled that Oberheuser at first promised to dress her wounds and, smiling, went out of the ward, and they saw no more of her that day.
Sources from the seven different Ravensbrück trials and the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial reveal that Oberheuser treated patients extremely callously. As Keith Mant of the Royal Army Medical Corps noted, her post-operative care was little more than sadistic.
When Oberheuser was asked if she knew that sulfonamide experiments caused considerable pain to the women, she replied that the way they were carried out, she did not believe the patients suffered that much, because they never expressed any kind of disagreement either with treatment by Professor Gebhardt or by Dr. Fischer. She said she herself never had any difficulties but always believed that they were pleased with her care, and moreover they had a chance of being pardoned.
When she was asked how many people she had killed with injections of petroleum, she replied that she killed nobody, and added that it was her medical help for suffering patients in their death throes. She said she gave morphine and then got another mixture from the war doctor, and that she did not know exactly what it contained. However, she lied: this mixture contained petroleum, and it took three to five minutes from the time the injection was administered to the time of death. Until their last moment, the victims were fully conscious. She killed at least five women this way.
Oberheuser tried to justify herself in court with her femininity and the argument that a woman, and therefore herself, could not be so brutal. To defend her actions she also stated that the orders had seemed to her as if they had come directly from Adolf Hitler and had therefore been legitimate, and that she served the purpose of saving the lives of 100,000 wounded German soldiers.
Her lies did not help her escape justice. On August 20, 1947, Oberheuser, whom a survivor of Ravensbrück called a beast masquerading as a human, was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Military Tribunal One found her guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity as charged under the indictment filed against her, and sentenced her to imprisonment for a term of 20 years, to be served at such prison or prisons or other appropriate place of confinement as determined by competent authority.
In the end, Oberheuser remained in prison for less than five years. Her sentence was commuted to 10 years in January 1951, and she was released for good behavior in April 1952. She then became a family doctor in Stocksee near Kiel in West Germany.
In August 1958 she lost her position after a Ravensbrück survivor recognized her. The minister of the interior of Schleswig-Holstein, Helmut Lemke, revoked her medical license and shut down her practice, which until then had flourished.
Oberheuser then appealed to the Schleswig-Holstein administrative court, but the case attracted strong media interest, and protest by the former victims of her criminal experiments escalated even further. The court rejected the appeal in December 1960. Oberheuser was fined, and she never practiced medicine again.
On January 24, 1978, when Oberheuser died in a nursing home in Linz am Rhein, she was 66 years old. There were no tears shed for her.