Authors: Edwin Black
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (63 page)
Buchenwald functioned for two purposes: to inflict cruelty on the Nazis’ enemies and to systematically work its inmates to death in service of the Reich-in that order. In the hierarchy of hell, Buchenwald was considered among the worst of Nazi labor camps. Hundreds to thousands of people died within its confines each week from beatings, disease, starvation, exhaustion or execution.
21
Cruel and painful medical experiments were conducted at Buchenwald, especially in Block 46, known for its frosted windows and restricted access. Nazi doctors deliberately infected prisoners with typhus, converting their bodies into so many living test tubes, kept alive only as convenient hosts for the virus. Doctors then carefully observed the progress of the disease in order to help evaluate potential vaccines. Some six hundred men died from such infections. In addition, Russian POWs were deliberately burned with phosphorus to observe their reactions to drugs.
As
part of the Reich’s program to develop mass sterilization techniques, fifteen men were castrated to observe the effects. Two died from the operation. Experimental Section V employed gland implants and synthetic hormones on homosexuals to reverse their sex drive; the SS officers delighted in joking about the men. Those who survived these heinous tests, or otherwise outlived their usefulness, were often murdered with injections of phenol.
22
Horrible punishments were everyday occurrences. Many were hung from their wrists with their hands tied behind their backs, thus painfully tearing arms from their sockets. Weakened inmates who did not die quickly enough were bludgeoned with a large blood-encrusted club. Russian POWs were systematically shot in the back of the neck through a small hole as they stood at the height-measuring wall.
23
Large electric lifts continuously shuttled corpses to waiting crematoria, which operated ten hours a day and produced prodigious heaps of white ash. Death was an hourly event at Buchenwald-ultimately more than 50,000 perished. More French died than any other national group. But before the victims were burned, they performed additional service to the Reich. Pathologists in Block 2 dissected some 35,000 corpses so their body parts could be studied and then stored in various jars on shelves. Tattooed prisoners were especially prized. In Block 2, their skins were stripped off, tanned and stretched into lampshades and other memorabilia.
24
Nuremberg Trial judges denounced “conditions so ghastly that they defy description. The proof is overwhelming that in the administration of the concentration camps the German war machine, and first and foremost the SS, resorted to practices which would shame the most primitive race of savage barbarians. All the instincts of human decency which distinguished men from beasts were forgotten, and the law of the jungle took command. If there is such a thing as a crime against humanity, here we have it repeated a million times over.”
25
In assessing Buchenwald just after liberation, a British Parliamentary delegation declared, “We have endeavored to write with restraint and objectivity, and to avoid obtruding personal reactions or emotional comments. We would conclude, however, by stating … that such camps as this mark the lowest point of degradation to which humanity has yet descended. The memory of what we saw and heard at Buchenwald will haunt us ineffaceably for many years.“
26
Most new arrivals at Buchenwald were instantly shocked by the camp’s brutality and the physical cruelty heaped upon them by the guards. Upon initial entry, it was common for new prisoners to run a two-hundred-meter gauntlet of guards, who viciously beat them with clubs and truncheons as they passed. But Katzen-Ellenbogen seemed fascinated. Recalling his first moments in the camp, he said, “I was really amazed about the efficiency and quickness about everything that happened there.” He added, “We were treated not badly there…. “ Katzen-Ellenbogen was in fact privileged from the moment he entered the camp. While other prisoners at that time were forced into tattered zebra-stripe uniforms, the doctor was permitted to wear civilian attire, including a three-piece suit and tie. But he complained that the shirt with its button-down collar was too small, and the trousers too long. His warm furry hat and medical armband gave him a distinctive look as he toured the barracks.
27
Early on, Buchenwald administrators learned through the prisoner grapevine of Katzen-Ellenbogen’s helpfulness to the Gestapo in France. He quickly became a trusted prisoner to the camp’s medical staff as well as its SS officers, especially chief camp doctor Gerhard Schiedlausky. Katzen-Ellenbogen announced to everyone that he was an American doctor from New Jersey, and a skilled hypnotist to boot. None of this failed to impress the camp administrators, who often referred to him by the name Dr. K. Ellenbogen. One senior Nazi medic dared Katzen-Ellenbogen to demonstrate his skill as a hypnotist. A test subject was brought over, and within five minutes Katzen-Ellenbogen successfully placed him in a trance.
28
Thereafter, Katzen-Ellenbogen was assigned to the hospital at the Little Camp, which functioned as the segregated new prisoner intake unit. Unlike the other inmates who slept sixteen-deep on stark wooden shelves and were fed starvation rations, Katzen-Ellenbogen enjoyed a private room with a real bed that he shared with only one other block trustee. He ate plenty of vegetables and even meat purchased through black market sources in Weimar. From time to time he cooked his own meals, an almost unimaginable prisoner luxury. The doctor was able to count SS and Gestapo officers among his friends even as fellow prisoners detested him and despised their Nazi taskmasters. He was widely believed to be a Gestapo spy.
29
One day in mid-1944, the camp doctor, Schiedlausky, summoned Katzen-Ellenbogen to the SS hospital. “You’re a hypnotizer,” said Schiedlausky with distress, “You’re a psychotherapist. Save me.” In the midst of the human depravity he oversaw, Schiedlausky had become unable to sleep. Self-administered drugs were no help. Katzen-Ellenbogen replied, “I can help you only, Doctor, if you will forget that I am a prisoner and you are the SS doctor.” Schiedlausky collegially replied, “Naturally.”
30
As Katzen-Ellenbogen analyzed Schiedlausky’s dreams, he concluded that the SS doctor’s mind was troubled by a great burden. “Unless you are willing to tell me what it is,” Katzen-Ellenbogen told him, “no further treatment would be of value.” Schiedlausky answered, “You’re right, but I can’t tell you.” At one point Katzen-Ellenbogen came upon Schiedlausky weeping uncontrollably and consoled the man. Katzen-Ellenbogen continued to treat Schiedlausky, whose mental state deteriorated. Soon Katzen-Ellenbogen was exercising great influence over the camp doctor.
31
Schiedlausky was so impressed with Katzen-Ellenbogen that he asked him to treat other SS men unable to sleep because of their murderous deeds. Even though Katzen-Ellenbogen was a prisoner, the Nazis opened up to him. For example, a bloodthirsty Austrian-born SS lieutenant named Dumbock admitted to Katzen-Ellenbogen that he was haunted-day and night-by the ghosts of at least forty men he had personally beaten to death. As though confessing to a priest, Dumbock admitted that sometimes when he caught someone stealing vegetables from the garden, he just “[couldn’t] control himself.” It would typically begin as an urge to only slap the prisoner, but then Dumback would begin jumping on the man’s body until his ribs caved in. Katzen-Ellenbogen helped Dumbock realize why he could not sleep: the killings. “That’s it exactly,” Dumback agreed. Dumback was so grateful that he granted Katzen-Ellenbogen special privileges-ironically, to the vegetables in the garden.
32
Katzen-Ellenbogen proudly remembered that the SS men “trusted me as a doctor very much.”
33
Back at the Little Camp, Katzen-Ellenbogen administered cruel medicine. He forced Frenchmen to exercise in the frigid outdoors without their scarves and often without their shirts-this to “cure” infected throats. He smuggled in needed medicines through the SS medics but then sold them for money or favors. Such extortions allowed him to deposit some 50,000 francs into a camp bank account. He also cached large quantities of Danish food, medicines and cigarettes in his bedroom, mainly pilfered from the Danish Red Cross packets turned over by the sick and injured.
34
Denying medical treatment was an entrenched eugenic practice at the state institutions Katzen-Ellenbogen was familiar with, from Danvers in Massachusetts to Skillman and Vineland in New Jersey. In those institutions, eugenic psychiatrists felt that medical care only kept alive those whom nature intended to die off. Katzen-Ellenbogen applied the same principles in Buchenwald.
Katzen-Ellenbogen capriciously decided who entered the hospital. Another camp doctor confirmed in court, “It depended on Katzen-Ellenbogen whether a certain person would be admitted into the little hospital … or in the main hospital.” A Czech doctor added, “If he [Katzen-Ellenbogen] found a man with appendicitis or pneumonia and said, ‘I will not send you to the hospital,’ then the man would not get through because he, Dr. Katzen-Ellenbogen, was the only medical liaison [in the Little Camp].”
35
Katzen-Ellenbogen himself casually admitted at his trial, “We selected…. Let’s say there were 35 [needing hospitalization, and I was told] there are only 17 free [beds]. Which 17 should have preference for immediate hospitalization?” He held the power of life and death over those who desperately needed his help, and he sadistically exercised this power every day.
36
In 1944, for instance, two French arrivals-a Protestant minister named Roux and a doctor named Rodochi-suffered greatly during the horrific railroad trip to Buchenwald. Upon entering the Little Camp, compatriots asked that Roux and Rodochi be admitted to the hospital. Katzen-Ellenbogen refused the first day. Even as they became weaker, he continued his refusals for two more days. On the fourth day, the two died during roll call, having never been seen by any doctor.
37
After the war, a French physician internee identified as Denis told investigators that many men died who might have recovered had they been admitted to the hospital. But when French prisoners approached, Katzen-Ellenbogen often chased them away, slapped and punched them, or simply “beat them with any instrument handy.” Other inmates who were physicians would sometimes complain that Katzen-Ellenbogen stocked the necessary medicines, but that the Little Camp doctor would snarl that they were in Buchenwald to “die like dogs-not to be cured.”
38
At his trial, prosecutors demanded answers
PROSECUTOR: Isn’t it also a fact, doctor, that many a prisoner died while he was waiting his turn to be examined there at the dispensary?
KATZEN-ELLENBOGEN : … When patients arrived he [a medical staffer] went always outside and looked who was the most ill and needs immediate attention or in a dangerous condition, to get them there first.
Q: Just answer the question please.
A: … • If you want me to answer the question
yes
or
no,
then I will have to answer
no.
Q: All right then your answer is: at no time did any prisoner die while waiting his turn to be examined in the dispensary.
A: You say those questions [as though] with a revolver with “hands up.” It is impossible to answer whether yes or no.
Q : You were there were you not?
A: I was there.
Q: You know whether a man is living or dead, don’t you?
A: Yes.
Q: All right. Did any man die while he was awaiting his turn in that line?
A: Sure he did.
Q: I though you said a moment ago that he didn’t.
A: Yes, that is what I said-that is “a revolver,” a little
so----yes,
but not while he was awaiting his turn [and]
because
of waiting, but because he was in a condition that a few minutes later while they brought him in he was dead.
Q: Just listen to my questions please, Doctor. I did not ask you
because
he was waiting in that line?
A: I know. That is what I said:
yes.
39
Failure to be hospitalized also bestowed a death sentence because it often facilitated assignment to the fatal work details at the nearby Dora works. At Dora, slave laborers were systematically worked to death tunneling into a mountain, constructing the secret German V-2 missile facilities. Dora’s death rate was among the highest of any of the thousands of labor camps and subcamps in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. Many of Dora’s victims were shuttled in from Buchenwald. Transports regularly delivered thousands of prisoners at a time, and some twenty thousand of them died in backbreaking labor. In fact, for the Nazi campaign known as Extermination by Labor, Dora was a convenient final destination to extract a prisoner’s final ergs of energy.
40
The weakened inmates whom Katzen-Ellenbogen callously refused to exempt from Dora work transports were essentially sentenced to death. In one typical transport of 1,000 to 1,200 French workers whom Katzen-Ellenbogen reviewed, only 97 came back alive. Indeed, the
Dora Kommando,
or work detail, was known everywhere as a “death kommando.” One Frenchman, when condemned to duty at Dora, turned to Katzen-Ellenbogen and declared,
“Caesar, morituri te satutant.”
(“We who are about to die salute you.”) Katzen-Ellenbogen recalled jocundly that the man “still had a sense of humor.”
41
At his trial Katzen-Ellenbogen was asked by prosecutors, “The personnel in the Medical Department … certainly knew that Dora was a death commando, isn’t that so?” Katzen-Ellenbogen replied, “I should guess so.”
42
Prisoners reported that Katzen-Ellenbogen actually encouraged unsuspecting French inmates to volunteer for “death details.” In one instance, a Frenchman discovered the ruse and warned comrades to remove their names from the volunteer roster. Katzen-Ellenbogen reported the Frenchman who spread the warning and the prisoner was brutally punished.
43