Medical experiments

In Auschwitz, SS doctors experimented on men and women prisoners, most of them Jewish. Surgical procedures were often carried out without anesthesia on victims who suffered severe pain and did not receive post‑operative care. Many of them, permanently injured and sick, were sent to the gas chambers. The SS, Wehrmacht and some German companies commissioned the experiments, which also served the doctors themselves in the advancement of their careers.

Experiments by Josef Mengele and Carl Clauberg claimed the most victims. Horst Schumann worked on a method for mass sterilization that relied on intense exposure to X‑rays. Several SS physicians, including in particular Helmuth Vetter, Friedrich Entress, Werner Rohde, Hans König and Bruno Weber, tested on sick prisoners the tolerance and effective doses of new drugs not yet released on the market. Frequent effects on the prisoners were bloody vomiting, painful diarrhea, and circulatory problems. In cases where the prisoner died, an autopsy was carried out to search for possible changes to the internal organs as an indicator of how the drugs worked. Vetter and Entress also deliberately infected healthy prisoners with typhus in order to establish its incubation period and define the virulence of strains of bacteria at various stages of the disease.

Johann Paul Kremer conducted the research on changes to the human organism caused by starvation. He chose extremely worn‑down prisoners in various stages of starvation sickness, carried out medical interviews with them, had them photographed, and then had them killed. Shortly after death, sections of the liver, spleen, and pancreas were collected and secured as anatomical preparations.

Emil Kaschub experimented on determining the symptoms that appeared as a result of the ingestion or rubbing into the skin of various substances by German malingerers wishing to dodge service on the front lines. The victims of his research were several score Jewish men in whom he induced inflammations, suppurating sores, and abscesses that led to gangrene.