Himmler’s medical underlings Grawitz and Gebhardt were more oriented to conventional experimental medicine than the Reichsführer. Grawitz was a school friend of Leonardo Conti – a founder of the Nazi Doctors League in 1929 in Berlin, and he joined the SS in November 1931 placing political activism over further academic research. On 1 July 1935 Himmler bestowed on Grawitz the august title of Reichsarzt SS. 5 Hitler then appointed Grawitz
Deputy President of the German Red Cross from January 1937 – ensuring that this key humanitarian organization was compliantly instrumentalized by the SS. One result was that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and their delegates turned a blind eye to the experiments, and prisoners of war suffered appalling abuse, some becoming experimental victims.
Another area of SS innovation was sports surgery and orthopaedics, directed by the surgeon Karl Gebhardt. The Gebhardt and Himmler families came from the Bavarian town of Landshut, and Gebhardt’s well- connected Bavarian father was the Himmlers’ family doctor. Gebhardt advanced steadily through the academic ranks at the University of Munich, running a sports camp at Hohenaschau for the League of the Child Rich, and assisting in the clinic of the celebrated master surgeon Sauerbruch. In 1932 Gebhardt gained his Habilitation qualifi cation in Munich. The Nazi takeover drew
FIRST SS EXPERIMENTS, 1939 TO 1941 53
Gebhardt to the Northern planes of Berlin-Brandenburg. Reich Physicians’ Führer Gerhard Wagner appointed Gebhardt on 1 November 1933 as Director of the rambling Red Cross sanatorium of Hohenlychen. Gebhardt joined the SS in 1935. Himmler appointed him escort surgeon in 1938. With the support of Conti and Grawitz, he became Consultant Surgeon in the SS Sanitary Service along with the rank of SS Oberführer from May 1940.
Gebhardt set about modernizing Hohenlychen as a centre of orthopaedic medicine, emulating the American model of Warm Springs, and he founded a medical institute at the Academy of Gymnastics in Berlin. In 1935 Gebhardt transferred to the University of Berlin to develop sports medicine and orthopaedics; he became full professor from 1937. 6 He established at
Hohenlychen the Reich sports sanatorium for surgery and therapy of sports accidents. 7 His prestige rose, when he took charge of medical services for
Olympic athletes at the Berlin Games of 1936. Sports were not only a way of legitimating the Nazi regime through demonstrations of German racial prowess, but an arena of applied physiology, and opportunity for orthopaedic surgeons to display their mastery of muscular traction.
Ambitious to develop Hohenlychen into a major centre of clinical research, Gebhardt conducted experimental operations on children with disabilities. In 1938 he reported to the German Society for Surgery a series of operations on thirty- fi ve children. Along with an ever- growing contingent of assistants he experimented with what he called Seidenzügel – or silk rein – operations. 8 From 1939 children underwent harsh experimental
treatments for TB. One case was of Manfred Bartke who was held immobilized in plaster from 1939 aged 8 to 1943. 9
During the war Gebhardt and Hitler’s escort surgeon Karl Brandt had orders to improve surgical services. Military surgeons wanted to settle a debate on drug or surgical treatment of war wounds, which had fl ared in the Russian campaign. They saw the experiments as ascertaining how to combat a battery of infections threatening frontline troops. These infections included hepatitis (which German researchers claimed to be an infectious rather than chronic disease), the insect- borne diseases of typhus and malaria (all widespread in North Africa and on the Eastern front), and wound infections.
The war spurred Gebhardt to develop military surgery on an experimental basis. Gebhardt inspected Waffen-SS fi eld hospitals in Russia, 10 and attained
high rank as SS-Gruppenführer and Generalleutnant in the Waffen-SS. Hohenlychen, by now serving the Waffen-SS, was just 12 kilometres from Ravensbrück concentration camp. The series of experiments went well beyond the immediate aim of testing the effi cacy of sulpha drugs in wound treatment. Gebhardt was ambitious to develop Hohenlychen into a major centre of experimental medicine with an institute of cancer research, and animal research laboratories. The Allied bombing of Berlin meant that Gebhardt gained a division of the pathology department from the city’s Virchow Hospital. 11
The SS-backed researchers – whether senior fi gures such as Gebhardt or the tyro Rascher – had immense academic ambitions, and saw the
VICTIMS AND SURVIVORS OF NAZI HUMAN EXPERIMENTS
54
concentration camp as a vast reservoir of research materials and resources. They intended to reshape military medical procedures, and ultimately the whole nature of medical science. For young concentration camp doctors like Erwin Ding, Waldemar Hoven and Herta Oberheuser, the experiments gave them a sense of dizzying opportunity, overcoming the isolation of camp routines.
The war caused a fundamental reorientation in German science towards military and racial research. At fi rst there was an expansion of German science with new Reich universities at Strassburg (from 23 November 1941) and German- conquered Posen from 1941, conceived of as vanguards of germanization. Research budgets increased, so empowering organizations like the DFG. Research institutes and clinical medicine increasingly relied on forced labour, and the use of human research subjects was consistent with coercive exploitation of human resources. Whole research papers were devised and written by prisoners, and prisoner scientists staffed research institutes at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The evacuation and dispersal of research laboratories shaped a new research landscape.