The 30th of January 1933 marked the ascent of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship of Germany, setting the stage for a regime that would systematically brutalize millions. Within this dark machinery, the German medical profession became a willing cog, with nearly half of all doctors joining the Nazi party. Among them was Hertha Oberheuser, a physician whose name would become synonymous with sadistic cruelty, conducting inhuman experiments on the women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, breaking their bones with hammers and amputating limbs without anesthesia.
Born on the 15th of May 1911 in Cologne, Oberheuser was the daughter of an engineer, a background that offered little indication of the horrors she would later perpetrate. She pursued a medical degree in Bonn and Düsseldorf, financing her studies through tutoring and assisting in a medical practice. Her early life was marked by academic ambition, but her moral compass would soon be corrupted by the ideological fervor of the Nazi state.
By 1935, she had joined the League of German Girls, and in 1937, the same year she earned her doctorate, she became a member of the Nazi party.
Oberheuser’s career trajectory was driven by financial necessity and a chilling ideological alignment with the regime. After specializing in dermatology, she worked at a public health department, conducting research on live animals. However, the illness of her father created a pressing need for a better-paid position.
In December 1940, the 29-year-old doctor was dispatched to Ravensbrück, the largest concentration camp for women within Germany’s pre-war borders, where she would find the opportunity to advance her career at the cost of human life.
Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was a place of immense suffering, holding over 50,000 prisoners by January 1945. Oberheuser initially worked under site physicians who extracted healthy teeth without anesthetic and killed prisoners by injecting petrol or phenol directly into their veins. As her colleagues grew unable to stomach the conditions, Oberheuser, an ardent Nazi, eagerly took over their functions, ensuring the brutal experiments continued without interruption.
Her ambition was clear, and her methods were devoid of any semblance of medical ethics.
The catalyst for the most horrific experiments came on the 27th of May 1942, when Reinhard Heydrich, a principal architect of the Holocaust, was mortally wounded in Prague. Heinrich Himmler, blaming his personal physician Karl Gebhardt for Heydrich’s death, ordered him to conduct experiments on concentration camp prisoners to prove his competence. Gebhardt’s sulfonamide experiments began at Ravensbrück in July 1942, with Oberheuser and Fritz Fischer as his assistants, testing treatments for wounded soldiers by inflicting terrible injuries on the female inmates.
These experiments involved amputations and bone-setting procedures often performed without any anesthesia. The SS selected nearly 80 women, mostly Polish, whom they nicknamed “rabbits” because they were used as laboratory animals. The doctors used hammers to break the women’s legs, then infected the open wounds with aggressive bacteria to monitor healing.
The victims were left in agony, their bodies mutilated in the name of a twisted science that sought to save German soldiers while condemning others to a living hell.
Wanda Szmajzner, a Polish teacher and resistance courier, was one of these involuntary subjects. She survived to testify to the gruesome 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, describing how she was given no answers, injected with substances that made her vomit, and subjected to three operations. Her leg, swollen from toes to groin, oozed pus for nine months.
She recalled an encounter with Oberheuser, who forced her and other wounded women to hop on one leg to the operating room, only to dismiss them cruelly, denying them any assistance or relief.
Oberheuser’s post-operative care was a study in sadism. Survivor Stefania Łotocka remembered how Oberheuser refused water to victims, and when she did provide it, she mixed it with vinegar. Pain medication was withheld, leaving the women to endure excruciating suffering.
When questioned about her actions, Oberheuser later attempted to justify them by claiming the victims were members of the Polish underground, as if that fact somehow legitimized her torture. Her attempts at self-justification would continue long after the war, but they could not erase the testimony of those who survived her cruelty.
Beyond the experiments, Oberheuser was directly responsible for the murders of numerous women, injecting them with phenol or petroleum, a process she cynically portrayed as a humanitarian act. She was also involved in forced abortions on women who were seven or eight months pregnant, beatings of pregnant women to induce miscarriages, and the killing of newborns. Anna Hej, a German woman, sought information about her sister’s death and was met with violence, as Oberheuser hit her in the face and stomach, screaming that her sister was a useless eater.
In total, over 92,000 of the 132,000 women who passed through Ravensbrück perished. When the Red Army liberated the camp on the 30th of April 1945, only about 3,500 sick women, men, and children remained. Justice, however, was slow to catch up with Oberheuser.
She was the only female defendant at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, which began in December 1946, where she attempted to defend her actions by claiming that being a woman did not stop her from being a good National Socialist.
During the trial, Oberheuser lied about her role, claiming the women were glad when she changed their bandages. Survivors like Isabella R. recalled her smiling and promising to dress wounds, only to disappear for the day.
The testimony against her was overwhelming, revealing that her post-operative care was little more than sadistic torture. When confronted with the pain caused by the sulfonamide experiments, she claimed the patients never expressed disagreement, a blatant falsehood that contradicted the mountain of evidence from the seven Ravensbrück trials.
Asked how many people she had killed with petroleum injections, Oberheuser coldly replied, “I killed nobody,” adding that she provided medical help to suffering patients in their death throes. She claimed to have given morphine, but the mixture she used contained petroleum, taking three to five minutes to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 while the victims remained fully conscious. She killed at least five women this way, a fact she tried to obscure with lies and a pathetic appeal to her femininity, arguing that a woman could not be so brutal.
Oberheuser attempted to justify her crimes by claiming the orders came directly from Adolf Hitler and were therefore legitimate, serving the purpose of saving wounded German soldiers. Her lies, however, did not save her. On the 20th of August 1947, she was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
A survivor had called her “a beast masquerading as a human,” a description that fit perfectly the woman who had so callously destroyed so many lives.
In the end, Oberheuser served less than five years of her sentence, as it was commuted to ten years in January 1951, and she was released for good behavior in April 1952. She returned to a quiet life as a family doctor in St. Peter, West Germany, but her past caught up with her in August 1958 when a survivor recognized her.
The Minister of the Interior revoked her medical license, and her practice was shut down, though she appealed the decision.
The appeal attracted intense media interest and protests from her former victims, and the court rejected it in December 1960. Oberheuser was fined and never practiced medicine again. She died on the 24th of January 1978 in a nursing home in Lindscheid, at the age of 66.
There were no tears shed for her, only the bitter memory of the suffering she had inflicted on the innocent women of Ravensbrück.