The 27th of May 1942 was a Wednesday, and Reinhard Heydrich, the Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and a principal architect of the Holocaust, was traveling through Prague in his convertible Mercedes. Czechoslovak paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš lay in wait. When they struck, Heydrich was mortally wounded. That same day, Heinrich Himmler sent his personal physician, Karl Gebhardt, to Prague to take charge of the wounded man’s care.
Hitler’s own doctor, Theodor Morell, suggested treating Heydrich with the new antibacterial drugs known as sulfonamides. Gebhardt declined the suggestion, believing that Heydrich would recover. Despite a fever, Heydrich’s condition seemed to improve, and Gebhardt decided to monitor the recovery alone. According to him, the intervention of several doctors could have led to harmful nervousness.
On the 3rd of June, Heydrich was able to eat his midday meal sitting up. A few hours later, he collapsed. He died the next day. Himmler accused Gebhardt of negligence for not treating Heydrich with sulfonamides, and advised him to conduct medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners to prove that he was not responsible for Heydrich’s death.
Those experiments would begin at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp on the 20th of July 1942. Among Gebhardt’s assistants during those experiments would be a 31-year-old female camp doctor named Hertha Oberheuser, a woman who had already been conducting her own cruel experiments on the camp’s inmates. Her actions at Ravensbrück, and her long attempt to escape justice afterward, would mark her as one of the most notorious female medical criminals of the Nazi era. Hertha Oberheuser, the daughter of an engineer, was born on the 15th of May 1911 in Cologne, then part of the German Empire.
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 partly finance her own studies herself, tutoring and helping in a medical practice to make ends meet. Since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scouting and youth movements had been popular in Germany.
When Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in January 1933, there were many political, social, and religious youth groups in existence. As the Nazi party gained popularity in the early 1930s, it wanted 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, and 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.
” Hertha Oberheuser joined the League of German Girls in 1935. Her activities involved providing medical assistance to female participants in youth shows who were overloaded with exercise. Practicing sport, however, was not the only activity in which the 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 working 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. 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 her way 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 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 the 1st of September 1939, and by the end of 1942 the female inmate population of Ravensbrück had grown to about 10,000. In January 1945, the camp held more than 50,000 prisoners, mostly women. At Ravensbrück, Oberheuser first worked under the site physicians Walter Sonntag and Gerhard Schiedlowsky, who performed experiments on the camp’s female inmates.
They extracted healthy teeth without the use of anesthetic, and their preferred method of killing was by injecting petrol and phenol directly into the prisoners’ veins. They also experimented with the prostitutes interned in 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. The sulfonamide experiments at Ravensbrück began on the 20th of July 1942.
Oberheuser and Dr. Fritz Fischer assisted Gebhardt. Believing it could help in treating wounded 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 the 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 these 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, a Polish teacher who was 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 for their questions. The injection she 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 she had a high temperature to add to her suffering. 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, Schiedlowsky, and Hertha Oberheuser. Wanda described one of her encounters with Oberheuser from the days when she felt the worst. “While I was in the hospital, cruelty from Dr. Oberheuser was performed on me,” she said.
“When I was in my room I made the remark to fellow prisoners that we were operated on in very bad conditions and left here in this room and that we were not given even the possibility to recover. This remark must have been heard. The German nurse entered the room and told us to get up and dress. We answered that we could not follow her orders because we had great pains in our legs and we couldn’t walk.
Then the German nurse came with Dr. Oberheuser. Dr. Oberheuser told us to dress and come to the dressing room.
We put on our dresses and, being unable to walk, we had to hop on one leg going into the operating room. After one hop we had to rest. Dr. Oberheuser did not allow anyone to help us.
When we arrived at the operating room quite exhausted, Dr. Oberheuser appeared and told us to go back because the change of dressing would not take place that day. I could not walk, but someone, a prisoner whose name I don’t remember, helped me to come back to the room. ”
Stefa, 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 them water, 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 six 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, a German woman named Anna H.
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 Anna in the face and stomach while screaming at her: “She is gone because she was only a useless eater and we really don’t 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 the 30th of April 1945, there were about 3,500 sick women, men, and children in the camp. Justice finally caught up with Hertha Oberheuser when she was tried in the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, which began on the 9th of December 1946. She was the only female defendant at the trial. On her agenda she commented: “Being a woman didn’t stop me being a good National Socialist.
I think female National Socialists were every bit as valuable as men in keeping alive what we believe. ”
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 R.
, who recalled: “Oberheuser at first promised to dress my wounds and, smiling, went out of the ward, and we 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 Medical Army Corps noted, her post-operative care was “a little more than sadistic. ” When Oberheuser was asked if she knew that sulfonamide experiments caused considerable pain to the women, she replied: “The way they were carried out, I do not believe the patients suffered that much because they never expressed any kind of disagreement either with a treatment by Professor Gebhardt or by Dr.
Fischer. I myself never had any difficulties but always believed that they were pleased with my 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: “I killed nobody.
” She added: “It was my medical help for suffering patients in their death throes. I gave morphine, and then I got another mixture from the war doctor. I don’t 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 the 20th of August 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. The tribunal pronounced: “Herta Oberheuser, Military Tribunal One has found and adjudged you guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity as charged under the indictment here-to-fore filed against you, for your said crimes, on which you have been and now stand convicted.
Military Tribunal One sentences you, Herta Oberheuser, to imprisonment for a term of 20 years, to be served at such prison or prisons or other appropriate place of confinement as shall be determined by competent authority. The officer of the guard will remove the defendant, Herta Oberheuser. ”
In the end, Oberheuser remained in prison for less than five years. Her sentence was commuted to 10 years in January 1951, and in the end she was released for good behavior in April 1952.
She then became a family doctor in Stocksee near Kiel in West Germany. But 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 appealed to the Schleswig-Holstein administrative court, but the case attracted strong media interest, and protests 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 the 24th of January 1978, Hertha Oberheuser died in a nursing home in Bad Fallingbostel on the Lüneburg Heath. She was 66 years old.
There were no tears shed for her.
