Nazi Medical Experiments

By TD Conner

Nazism cursed the European continent and tried to dominate the world. It was a racist dogma established and enforced by ruthless bullies and brutal criminals. Before Adolf Hitler was crushed, 60 million people died.

Nazis murdered people around the clock on their treadmills-of-death after developing fast, modern ways to kill large masses of human beings quickly.

They extended their cruelties into the realm of medicine, grinning doctors -- many of them once distinguished professors with advanced degrees -- torturing thousands, including children, to death in grisly ways in filthy back rooms in the many Nazi camps or in special murder "clinics." This book discusses some of the hideous crimes against humanity they committed, all with a clear conscience and without a second thought.

There is also a section on medical "experiments" and atrocities carried out, even in the days of the 21st Century, in a developed country near you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TD Conner
• Release date: Mar 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310202834

TD Conner

TD Conner is an ex-newspaper man. He is a graduate of the University of Georgia. He lives on Wilmington Island, GA

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

"In a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners."

--Albert Camus

If we believe in absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.

--Voltaire

In the eyes of Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer of Germany, all men were not created equal.

As history shows, he despised and wanted to kill and/or enslave all those he and his henchmen called untermenschen (subhumans.)

He felt that as his Thousand-year Reich grew, prospered and subjugated its racial enemies, any subhumans--meaning specifically Jews and Gypsies--in areas conquered and colonized by Germany might later pose a threat to the well-being of the Nazi master race if allowed to reproduce.

Hitler scorned black people as well, but only small populations of blacks came under Nazi control during WWII, mostly in north Africa, where the Germans wanted the cooperation or at least the non-interference of the already anti-Semitic Arabs and the relatively few blacks living there as they battled the allies across the deserts. 

Mass executions were not staged against black people during Hitler’s reign. Modern historians speculate that had the Nazis won WWII, a different scenario may have emerged.

After Hitler came to power in 1933, anyone within the Nazi reach who had a hereditary disease, a physical or mental disability, a visible deformity of any kind, incurable alcoholics, anyone felt to be a social misfit or a vagrant--Arbeitsscheue (work-shy in Nazi jargon,) or who had a lengthy criminal record, along with Jews, as noted, Jehovah’s Witnesses, deadbeat fathers, political opponents of any kind, homosexuals, non-German and anti-Nazi intellectuals, and most clergymen, were automatically part of the designated undesirable group.

In Nazi eyes, such people were inferior and had no inherent right to live, but existed only to work for or otherwise serve the Nazi state until they were too sick or weak, or their bodies too broken to labor further, in which case it was acceptable, desirable even, to kill them.

After WWII began, in accordance with Hitler’s direct orders, people of any Slavic race or nation were added to the list of untermenschen. After Hitler’s attack on Russia began, all Soviet Commissars were scheduled for a quick death if and when they were identified as Communist political officers.

Captured Soviet prisoners of war (POW’s) were also added to the undesirable group and were routinely worked, starved, shot, gassed, and beaten to death, many of them gunned down while in the act of surrendering.

Germany had signed the Geneva Convention with the western powers prior to WWII and treated captured western military men more or less honorably in exchange for similar treatment of their captured fighters. There was no mutual POW pact between Germany and Russia.

Thus the Soviets responded in kind, cruelly treating Nazi fighters they captured, usually killing anyone they found wearing an SS uniform-- rightly seeing such men as political soldiers-- immediately upon capture.

Hitler said that once the enemies opposing him in WWII were defeated, he then planned to settle the score with his comrades-in-arms, the Japanese, a people he also considered inferior, making no mention of this to his Asian allies while the war was ongoing, however.

He also secretly despised the land and people of his other ally, Italy, and when Italian King Victor Emanuel had dictator Benito Mussolini arrested, then guided Italy over to the allied side in 1943, the Germans began imprisoning and often shooting Italian soldiers unfortunate enough to be near Nazi strong points or battle lines, reasoning that soon enough, troops no longer loyal to fascism might turn on them.

In reality by mid-1943 most Italian troops were hungry, going without pay, and very short on ammunition and fuel. Many had never accepted Mussolini’s fascist dogma and control in the first place. Now they simply wanted to go home. Many did so, however some Nazi-held areas in Italy would soon come under attack by Italian partisans.

Hitler’s master race comprised solely what the Nazis called Aryans, generally thought of as tall, blue-eyed, blonde men and women with pure ancestry going back many generations, people who could prove (or at least convince snooping Nazi background investigators) that they had no subhuman forbears and no hereditary diseases in their bloodline or blots on their family trees from undesirables. 

The Nazi leaders seemed unconcerned that they themselves, with the possible exception of Reinhard Heydrich, the Blond Beast, as he was sometimes called, did not appear to fit the cherished Aryan physical mold--and it came about that Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich’s superior, pressed by other Nazis jealous of and opposed to Heydrich’s growing power and his incessant prying into their lives, called even Heydrich’s ancestry into question, alleging he had a Jewish grandmother.

Himmler hired Heydrich, a disgraced naval officer, after Heydrich lied to him, saying he was in the naval intelligence service--he was actually in the signal corps.

Himmler had him establish the Nazi Party’s intelligence wing, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, later to become a state intelligence service after Hitler rose to power.

After joining the SS and setting up his snoop agency, Heydrich then immediately began spying on other prominent Nazis, as noted, upon whom he kept detailed files, including Himmler himself, who had a mistress, Hedwig Bunny Potthast, and illegitimate children with her.

Soon the charges about Heydrich’s ancestry arose.

Hitler heard Himmler and the group of anti-Heydrich complainers out, then angrily sent them away.

He called Heydrich in and told him Himmler and the others, including Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, the long-established state intelligence service, and some of the Nazi gauleiters (the Party’s district chiefs) were scheming against him.

Hitler liked it when his underlings squabbled. He admired Heydrich’s extreme cruelty, ruthlessness, and desire to kill non-Nazis. He told Heydrich that someday he might make a good Fuhrer himself. Heydrich went away smiling.

He kept his post as head of the Sicherheitsdienst and later headed the death camp murder system he had helped design and brought into being, and he remained German proconsul of the fiefdom assigned to him after Hitler carved up Czechoslovakia, Heydrich’s vassal state re-named by the conquerors the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia.

In fact, many of the Nazi higher-ups, including Hitler, Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Robert Ley were dark-haired, short and squatty, and not all of them had blue eyes, though Hitler himself did.

Hermann Goering was a pudgy blowhard, a morphine addict, art thief, and medically-certified lunatic, who enjoyed wearing women’s clothing and thick-caked makeup, including toenail polish.

Rudolf Hess, the deputy Fuhrer, also had debilitating mental problems (though in fact he was taller than many of the other Nazi grandees and he did have blue eyes.) Robert Ley, the Reich’s labor chieftain, was a chronic alcoholic and given to excessive masturbation, as his allied captors discovered after WWII and recorded.

Heinrich Himmler was a hate-filled but innocuous-looking physical weakling with very poor eyesight, a mild, hesitant voice, a nervous, distant, manner about him, and a testy digestive system. 

Dark-haired Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s dwarfish minister of enlightenment, walked with a pronounced limp, though this was not due to a deformity, but a bungled medical procedure on his left leg done when he was young. Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi philosopher, like Hitler, was a foreigner, though both of them did ultimately acquire German citizenship.

Rosenberg, born a Russian national, albeit to a family of German background, was a pompous, stuffy martinet who ultimately fell from Hitler’s favor and had his power drastically curbed by other Nazi underlings, who mocked him behind his back. (Even Hitler poked fun at him.)

Goebbels and Hitler had, by Nazi standards, questionable ancestry.

The short, hobbling Goebbels’ mother had relatives from the Netherlands who had lived in Java.

His enemies (within the Party) occasionally said he had Javanese (meaning Negro) blood. Fellow Nazis nicknamed him Wotan’s Mickey Mouse. He was also scornfully called The Scheming Dwarf.

Hitler, an Austrian, didn’t know for sure who his paternal grandfather was and was never fully certain he had no Jewish family roots, though he vehemently denied it if and when the subject came up. (It seldom did after Hitler attained power.)

Heydrich, also nicknamed The Hangman, though being reassured by Hitler, lived uneasily with the thought that those who accused him may have been right-- he might have had a Jewish ancestor, though nothing was ever proven, either that he did or did not.

Of course the Nazis banned people with hereditary diseases or deformities of any kind, along with the designated inferior races from being part of their vaunted Aryan group.

As the time Hitler planned to begin WWII approached, he decided to get a leg up on his schemes to eliminate all undesirables, starting with anyone so designated within his reach, meaning Germany, Austria, and what had been Czechoslovakia at the time, the latter two nations taken over and controlled by the Nazis without warfare before 1939, Slovakia given independence on paper by the Nazis, but remaining a puppet nation, Heydrich, as noted, ultimately ruling over the area hived off from Slovakia, known today as the Czech Republic.

Hitler claimed all alleged inferior people then under his control were a burden on the Nazi state, labeling them useless eaters, which became a Nazi catchphrase.                         

This resulted in the Aktion T-4 program of euthanasia, which was actually the first mass murder campaign launched by Hitler.

In Nazi bureaucrat-ese, T-4’s high-blown cover name was: The Reich Committee for Scientific Research of Hereditary and Severe Constitutional Diseases.

T-4 brought production-line death to thousands of German citizens, most of them small children, and became the proving ground for the techniques the Nazi death-dealers later carried out in their far-flung network of camps where the bulk of the Nazi medical experiments and executions by doctors took place.

As such, the T-4 murder program will be discussed herein since it involved organ harvesting and sales, along with collecting bones and body parts, and Nazi testing of various kill-substances and methods, along with starvation techniques, freezing experiments and death due to shooting, beatings, and gas.

Pro-Nazi doctors all over Germany submitted the names of people felt to be candidates for T-4.

About half the physicians in the Fatherland got on the Nazi bandwagon not long before and shortly after Hitler came to power, joining the Nazi medical associations or voicing their adherence to Nazi claptrap.

Jewish doctors would gradually have their licenses revoked or not renewed, told they could not treat non-Jewish patients, denied hospital tenure, be forced out of practice, sent to concentration camps, killed outright, or encouraged to emigrate while that was still allowed prior to WWII.

The T-4 victims whose names were on the lists were rounded up by SS hunters and sent to six special Nazi murder centers and gassed, shot, starved, or killed by injections. Starvation was the tactic first used against most of the smaller children and infants the SS brought in.

Other Nazi-run clinics also were used to murder T-4 victims by injection, gas, and starvation, however only the six designated centers ultimately had gas chambers built on their premises by the regime, though mobile gas vans were also used at some of the murder centers as well, and starvation, freezing and shooting deaths took place at the locales without gas chambers. See below.

The question arises: how could educated men, physicians, many of whom were distinguished college professors with multiple advanced degrees, be drawn into a low, gutter hate/murder scheme as laid out by Nazi ideology, all of it developed and proclaimed by Hitler, a high school dropout who bragged that he had educated himself via racist penny-pamphlets and lurid magazines he picked up in Vienna’s all-night coffee houses during the time he was a tramp and a vagrant?

History has withheld the answer, unless it somehow lies at least partly in the fact that most Germans were outraged by what was proclaimed repeatedly by Hitler to be the Dolchstoss, their stab-in-the-back defeat in WWI, an idea heavily propagandized by years of Nazi media lies. 

Hitler’s often-shouted but badly-skewed rationale was that powerful Jews operating in secret in the halls of power in Germany, along with Bolsheviks controlled by them had toppled the Kaiser, whereupon a civilian government run by real socialists and Hitler’s sworn enemies, members of the Social Democrat Party, stepped in and sold Germany out to the allies even while her men in the field were still fighting, and that no allied soldier had set foot on German soil during the war, ideas repeatedly offered as proof of Jewish/Bolshevik treachery.

Closer to reality was the fact that the Royal Navy’s wartime blockade of Germany worked, cutting off supplies, food, and fuel, which led to vast public discontent and anger about continuing the war. Nothing came from the east, either, with Vladimir Lenin in control of Russia after 1917 and the brand-new USSR flat on its back after an exhaustive role in WWI, followed by the start of a bloody civil war between Reds and whites.

The Imperial Navy never attempted in any serious way to break the English blockade nor did the Army’s chieftains try to commandeer supplies from the defeated Bolsheviks in Russia. They doubtless knew that there was little to obtain by the end of 1917 and that German troops were needed to fight on the Western Front quickly, rather than to be used searching for supplies in war-ravaged Russia.

                      PRUSSIANS BLAMED

People became more war-weary and demoralized on the German home front as the war dragged on due to increasing hunger, lack of medicine, fuel, clothing and shoes, inflation, low wages and wage-freezes, the never-ending war and the increasing cost of it, and last but not least, strong and growing doses of British-generated propaganda from the west and, later, Communist propaganda produced within Germany, both sources loudly blaming the German militarist hierarchy, the Prussians for the sorry condition of civilian life in Germany.

Several general strikes by German workers, including munitions workers, later said to be Communist-controlled by Hitler, also helped hasten the German surrender. With victory, the allies also forced the Germans to admit to responsibility for causing the war-- war guilt, as it came to be known, a sore point with all Germans, a situation despised and exacerbated endlessly by Hitler as he rose to power.

While it is true that no allied soldier set foot in Germany during WWI, the Imperial Army had engaged in retreats, drawing closer to the German border by the end of the war and the front line German soldiers were eating cats and dogs and running very low on ammunition just before the surrender.

It was the Americans’ refusal to negotiate peace with a government operating under Kaiser Wilhelm which set in motion his ouster and the installation of a civilian, socialist-oriented panel of politicians who ultimately signed the defeat papers drawn up by the allies.

As history reveals, Hitler and his Nazi Party played on this general discontent stemming from the defeat from about 1920 on, slowly gaining strength as a horrible inflation aggravated by the requirement to pay war reparations to the allied victors ravaged the German economy during much of the 1920’s, white-hot rage at the allies and their demanded reparations payments then dominating German politics in the time leading up to the Great Depression, with Hitler angrily and endlessly accusing the Jews and Bolsheviks via his speeches before mass audiences and in the Nazi newspapers.

People realized drastic changes were coming when Hitler rose to power in 1933: now the Nazis are in charge whether we like it or not, and it would be best for our careers and families if we fall into line behind them.

However, the educated people who took Hitler’s bait and became higher-ups within his system of government must have known or suspected that they were risking all by following Hitler’s orders to enable or commit mass

murder--their places in (normal) society, their families, whatever worldly goods they had amassed, in many cases their lives-- everything.

And as we will see, many of them committed suicide when organized, official Nazism was finally cast into the rubbish bin of history.

They knew what was coming after the 1945 defeat, thus when fate overtook them, many of them followed their Fuhrer into the abyss.

There are still Nazis around, but now, in most countries, they have gone back to being seen merely as part of a rightwing fringe.

In the 21st Century, numerous tales and accounts have surfaced saying Hitler escaped--to Spain, Argentina, or some anti-Semitic Arab nation.

However, purveyors of these stories offer no proof unless obviously doctored or photoshopped images are to be accepted.

Hitler was near death by the end of April 1945, his body palsied and poisoned by years of poisonous drug injections, his sense of balance gone, unable to sleep, his vision failing, his voice a hoarse croak, the victim of migraines and serious digestive problems. He repeatedly told people he dreaded being captured by the Russians, who were just down the street from and closing in on his bunker at that time, their bombs and shells exploding in his courtyard.

He certainly must have strongly suspected that the survivors of his crimes, relatives and descendants of the people he had murdered wholesale, and governments-to-come (along with the rulers of the allied nations then fighting Germany) would seek out and find him had he been still alive when WWII ended, and by April 29 1945, everyone, including Hitler, knew that would be in just a few hours.

He said: I don’t want to be displayed naked in a cage, and also: I don’t want to become an attraction at the Moscow Zoo.

He had earlier turned down several chances to leave Berlin, one opportunity offered by Goering, who passed through with a caravan of stolen goods and works of art packed into cars and trucks en route to Berchtesgaden.

The rotund Reichsleiter urged Hitler to go with him but his offer was declined. There was another exit offered by Nazi test pilot Hanna Reitsch, who had access to a small plane and said she could fly her Fuhrer out of Berlin as it was about to fall to the Russians. Hitler rejected this idea, too.

A few days later, he dictated his Political Testament to a young secretary, and angrily dismissed Goering and Truer Heinrich Himmler (Loyal Heinrich,) as Hitler sometimes called the wispy, bespectacled, soft-spoken mass killer.

Goering sent Hitler a message saying he reached Berchtesgaden and seeking to assume the duties of Fuhrer in the event Hitler himself could no longer govern, and radio news reports indicated Himmler, deluding himself by thinking there might be a place for him in a postwar German government, was trying to negotiate peace with the western allies.

Hitler, in a rage, named Goebbels as his successor and discussed one last time with Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, the Nazi physician on duty in his bunker, about how to crunch down on his cyanide capsule while simultaneously shooting himself in the right temple.

He knew of escape routes away from his embattled bunker and even recommended some of them to underlings.

He turned down offers to join some of the several escape groups leaving his underground bunker via different routes to avoid the encroaching Russian soldiers.

                          BURNED IN A PIT

He and his wife retired to his sitting room on the afternoon of April 30, where she bit into her cyanide capsule and he used his own capsule and his Walther pistol to kill himself.

Eyewitnesses saw the Fuhrer slumped forward on his couch with a hole in his temple. They took his and his wife’s body to the Chancellery courtyard and burned them in a pit.

That would seem to be where Hitler’s life story ended, not in some picturesque country manor in Entre dos Rios.

                    *              *              *

When WWII began in 1939, the Nazis planned for a quick victory. Poland, with its weak, outmoded military force, was rapidly subjugated, continental Europe neutralized, and finally in 1941 Hitler’s long-sought goal of invading and rapidly subjugating Communist Russia began at last after many delays, which greatly angered the dictator.

Hitler claimed to have read a certain amount of history, but as noted, he had no real education of any kind. In doing his research and having his time of study as he called it during his years as a tramp in Vienna, he must have glossed over or avoided looking deeply into the grim fate which befell Napoleon in Russia likewise Charles XII of Sweden, each of whom boldly tangled with the Russians on their own soil and ended up second best.

He was sternly warned against going to war with either Russia or the United States by his Harvard-educated friend Ernst Putzi Hanfstangl in the late 1920’s when Hitler indicated that the east (by which he meant Russia) would supply the German war machine during the next conflict.

Hitler often loudly repeated that he had little respect for either the US or Russia as military powers.

Working in tandem and with the UK, they would later grind much of Germany down into mounds of dust and rubble.

By December 1941, roughly five months after Hitler’s undeclared war on Russia was launched, German battlefield losses were staggering, the Nazi war aims unachieved, Hitler’s armies gripped by sub-zero Russian winter weather, and soon enough the Germans would begin their long retreat across the steppes and through the trackless forests and mud-sloughs of the USSR.

However, that frozen December of 1941, they did manage to hold part of their forward line, staving off some of the first, early powerful Soviet counterattacks, failing to attain their stated military objectives.

Hitler and some of his paladins could see that finding reserves to replace the multiple thousands of dead and wounded men from the Russian campaign--many of the badly injured being incapable of ever fighting again--was not going to be easy, and just holding onto the holes in the snow his soldiers had dug across the steppes and were clinging to with frostbitten fingers--gloves and warm clothing were not supplied that bitter winter of 1941-42--was going to be a major problem.

Reducing both battlefield losses and soaring attrition due to the sub-freezing Russian weather became paramount to the Nazis, as did restoring men wounded in the fighting to their battle stations as soon as possible, hopefully after shorter rather than longer recovery periods.

Russian losses in wounded, dead, and captured were far greater at the outset than those of the Germans, but the Soviets had vast ready reserves in place and millions more men and women capable of being trained for military service, along with newly-arriving shiploads of weapons and material aid from the western allies, and good supplies of fuel from the many Soviet refineries and pipelines, assets the Germans did not have.

They also had a vibrant, pressure-free supply line at their rear since they operated in their own country, while the Germans were at the end of a thousand-mile long supply line which ran across Nazi-occupied, but still hostile territory thick with vengeful guerrillas supplied by air, these partisan forces growing with each Nazi advance and atrocity.

By early 1942 recruiting standards had been altered and foreign men from all over conquered Europe were eagerly signed up (for the SS formations) to fight Bolshevism alongside the now-freezing, hungry, and much-demoralized Landser (German soldiers) still huddling in snow-pits along the endless front in icy Russia.

In June 1941, when his surprise attack on Russia began, Hitler repeatedly exulted that the Soviets would easily be defeated inside five or six weeks.

He said he was planning a Moscow victory parade at the end of the summer.

He said of Russia: "All you have to do is kick in the door and the whole rotten structure (Ed.: Communism) will collapse."

By December, with his armies broken and freezing in the Russian snow-holes, and as trains arrived hourly in Germany with many thousands of badly wounded and severely frostbitten men to fill German hospitals, and with trained reserves, weapons, and fuel in short supply, Hitler was one of the first to realize that Germany likely had lost the war and that something had to be done to both stave off outright rapid defeat and somehow re-start the Nazi momentum of the previous summer if possible.

Later, after finding that no plan, no army, and no weapon he had could defeat the Soviets, Hitler would mutter under his breath to an underling: The god of war has crossed over to the other side.

This urgent need felt by Hitler, soon also understood by most other top Nazis as well, to quickly rehabilitate injured fighting men and curb attrition due to harsh weather and disease was what triggered and accelerated the Nazi medical experiments, along with Hitler‘s longstanding orders to improve and protect his master race while keeping so-called subhumans at bay and under control, and to find ways to stop or curb their reproduction so as to eliminate future threats to Nazism from them.

By 1942, the tools, personnel, and facilities for such experiments were in place. T-4 euthanasia doctors manned their kill centers and other Nazi doctors, SS officers most of them, were already assigned as staff to the existing and rapidly-expanding concentration camps.

These were people who had thrown all ideals, feelings of honor, pride, compassion, and respect for humanity to the four winds, along with their Hippocratic Oath-taking, or had made it secondary to their Nazi ideas of a master race.

By 1942, gas chambers and crematoria were either newly finished or being built at breakneck speed at camps and murder centers all over Germany and Poland, locations which soon filled to overflowing with Jews, Russian and Polish POW’s, Czech, Russian, and Polish civilians, Gypsies, political enemies of Nazism from Germany and other nations, and people found publicly criticizing, fighting or sabotaging the Germans or their interests in occupied foreign countries.

These were people who in Nazi jargon possessed lives unworthy of living, all of them bountiful human material for the vicious, emotionless, death-dealing Nazi doctors who now began committing their unspeakable crimes in earnest and on a large, organized scale--keeping records of their criminality (not all of which have been recovered,) even establishing disgraceful museums filled with brains, skulls, cured skin, and skeletons

Reviews for Nazi Medical Experiments

[dawnie818 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Did not get past the claim that Obama was equal to Nazi murderers. Lost all credibility after such an asinine claim.