Vassals of the Third Reich - Part 3
Professional historians insist, quite rightly, on, among other things, objectivity. However, they and the writer are human beings and no matter how the account is written, the horror of what you find in research cannot, on occasion, be conveyed objectively. Rather like watching an 'action' film, the reader/viewer can only be given an idea of what it is like to be shot, stabbed or beaten but even that attempt would be denied to a writer by the academician. There are, however, times when emotion must be allowed through, if statistics and dry facts are to fulfill their task of conveying a full meaning accurately, including the terror and pain and hopelessness of the victims of the Nazis' overwhelming bestiality.
Often involved in one and the same concentration camp would be 'labour'; mass murder; and yet one more example of what the overall climate of killing and maiming brings out in some people, not originally involved. This was the so-called 'medical experiments'. In a world where everything was permitted, it was inevitable that the sadist doctor and surgeon would be brought out into the open, and equally certain that they would find their ways into the camps in some official capacity. Once there, there would be no one to gainsay their taking some of the prisoners for their own special programmes. Not one of the 'experiments' thus conducted had any scientific value whatsoever. In a few cases the 'researcher', a doctor or professor, had dreamed up a theory and now wanted to test it on human beings, and in that light it could be said that those men were, in their own estimation, trying to benefit mankind. That they were also completely insane and should never have been allowed access even to laboratory animals, only points up the fact that their superiors were as mad as they, or else completely indifferent as to the way in which prisoners died. However, the majority of the 'experimenters' were simply sadistic monsters who obtained some twisted satisfaction in inflicting pain, the more grotesque the method the better.
Of the more meaningful experiments were those on the effects of the lack of oxygen at heights; of the best methods of warming a body after immersion in freezing water; of how long a person could survive in freezing temperatures. Of the utterly monstrous and sadistic, were: injections with fatal doses of typhus and other diseases; inflicting wounds causing gas gangrene; giving people only salt water and no food; various methods of sterilization. Perhaps the most completely insane project was the murder of 115 people, 109 of them Jewish, to provide an anatomical professor with skulls to determine racial characteristics from bone structure. His proposal to Himmler, which Himmler concurred in, directing that he "be supplied with everything needed for his research work," suggested that "after the () induced death of the Jew, whose head should not be damaged, the physician will sever the head from the body and will forward it......in a hermetically sealed tin can."
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