Medical Experiments at Dachau

Among the worst atrocities committed at the infamous Dachau concentration camp were the cruel and inhumane medical experiments, using prisoners as guinea pigs, conducted by Dr. Sigmund Rascher for the benefit of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. From March 1942 until August 1942, Dr. Rascher performed high altitude experiments under the authority of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The Nazi justification for these experiments was that this was done in an effort to save the lives of German pilots.

The most disturbing picture of the medical experiments, performed by Dr. Sigmund Rascher, that I first saw in the Dachau Museum in May 1997, and the one that I can't get out of my mind, is shown in the photograph above. The prisoner looks like an American, but the caption on the photo identified him as Russian. He is wearing the parachute harness of a German Air Force pilot, which is very similar to an American pilot's parachute harness.

In 1942, the American government did similar high altitude experiments for the US Air Force. According to a book entitled "Lindbergh" by A. Scott Berg, these experiments began on September 22, 1942 when Charles Lindbergh and six of his colleagues flew to Rochester, Minnesota where they met Dr. Walter M. Boothby, a pioneer in aviation medicine, who was the chairman of the Aeromedical Unit for Research in Aviation Medicine at the Mayo Clinic. Their mission was to study the medical problems associated with high altitude flying. For the next ten days, Lindbergh himself became a human guinea pig, according to Berg's book. After the conquest of Germany, the American government confiscated the results of Dr. Rascher's tests and made use of his experiments for the US Air Force.

The two photos above were shown in the Museum exhibits when I first visited Dachau in May 1997. The subject is wearing a striped prison uniform. An autopsy was performed on the brains of the victims who died during the experiments.

Much of the information about the Dachau medical experiments comes from the testimony of Walter Neff who was a prisoner in Dachau. Neff worked as an assistant to Dr. Sigmund Rascher in the camp; after he was released from Dachau, Neff continued to work for Dr. Rascher inside the camp.

According to Neff, medical experiments were conducted on 180 to 200 prisoners. He testified during the Nuremberg Doctors Trial that 10 of these prisoners were volunteers, and that most of the other prisoners, with the exception of about 40, had been condemned to death by German courts. The other 40 subjects were Russian POWs who were brought to Dachau because they were believed to be Communist Commissars. Just before the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Adolf Hitler had issued an order that all captured Communist Commissars were to be executed.

During the course of the medical experiments, 70 to 80 prisoners died, according to Neff. This information regarding Neff's testimony comes from a book entitled "Dachau 1933 - 1945: The Official History," written by a prisoner in the camp named Paul Berben. Berben does not mention how many of the 70 to 80 prisoners that died had already been condemned to death.

At their trial, the Nazi Doctors attempted to defend these experiments by claiming that the prisoners who were forced to participate in the experiments were men who had volunteered or had been condemned to death.

At least one Jew, a former delicatessen clerk, died in the experiments, as Dr. Rascher noted in a letter to Heinrich Himmler, detailing the results of an autopsy. Dr. Rascher described the victim as a condemned criminal who had violated the laws against race mixing. According to Peter Padfield, who wrote a book entitled "Himmler," Dr. Rascher participated in his own experiments as a subject, but unlike the prisoners, he had the option of stopping the experiment at any time.

Neff worked with Dr. Rascher from the beginning of 1941. He was released from camp custody as a prisoner, on the condition that he continue working with the Doctors. Berben wrote that Neff would regularly report for duty in uniform, and carried a pistol in the camp. Neff testified that he worked in the interest of the prisoners and attempted to sabotage the work of Dr. Rascher. According to Berben's book, Neff's "role in his dealings with Rascher never seems to be very clear, nor the part he played in choosing the subjects for experiments."

Neff also participated, along with other prisoners who had been released or had escaped from the camp, in the uprising in the town of Dachau a few days before the American forces arrived.

According to Peter Padfield, "After the high-altitude experiments had been completed the previous spring, the Luftwaffe had requested another series of experiments to throw light on the problems of reviving aircrew shot down over the sea."

Padfield wrote that the formal proposal came from Generalfeldmarschall Milch in a letter to Karl Wolff dated 20 May 1942. After Himmler gave his approval, these new experiments began in August 1942. The subject was immersed in a chamber of ice cold water, dressed in a full flying outfit complete with a lifejacket. It took up to an hour and a half for the subjects' temperature to fall to 29.5 degrees and body temperature continued to fall after the subjects were removed from the water.

From these experiments, it was learned that death occurred only among those subjects who were wearing lifejackets that allowed the back of the neck to be immersed in the water. In a report submitted on 10 September 1942, Rascher said that another major finding was that rapid rewarming in a hot bath was more effective than slow rewarming with blankets or by other means. Rewarming by animal warmth, or by the use of women's bodies, was found to be too slow. Dr. Rascher was not keen on using women to warm up the subjects, but Himmler insisted on testing this method, according to Padfield's book.

Another experiment was done to test rewarming of subjects exposed to dry cold. In a letter 17 February 1943, Dr. Rascher wrote:

Up to the present I have carried out intense chilling experiments on thirty human beings by leaving them outside naked from nine to fourteen hours, thereby reducing their body temperature to 27-29 degrees. After an interval which was supposed to correspond to a period of transport lasting one hour, I placed these experimental subjects in a hot bath. In all experiments to date all subjects were successfully rewarmed within another hour despite the fact that their hands and feet were partly frozen white .... No fatalities occurred as a result of extraordinarily rapid method of rewarming.....

The following quote is from Berben's book:

The most terrible experiment at which Neff was present was one carried out on two Russian officers. They were taken from the Bunker and plunged naked into a tank [of freezing water] at about 4 p.m., and they held out for almost five hours. Rascher had leveled his revolver at Neff and a young Polish aide who tried to give the two wretches chloroform. Dr. Romberg considered the whole episode as described by Neff during the trial to be improbable; in his view, the subject of such experiments is stiff and incapable of making a movement or uttering a word after 10 or 20 minutes, whereas, according to Neff, the two officers were still talking to one another during the third hour and bade each other farewell.

Dr. Hans Wolfgang Romberg, who is mentioned in the quote above, was put on trial at Nuremberg in the Doctors Trial which started on December 9, 1946 and ended on August 20, 1947. Dr. Romberg was acquitted, as were Dr. Siegfried Ruff and Dr. August Weltz who were also involved in the Luftwaffe experiments at Dachau.

Dr. Rudolf Brandt, who selected the victims for the Luftwaffe experiments, and Dr. Wolfram Sievers, who observed the experiments, were also put on trial at Nuremberg in the Doctors trial. They were both convicted, but not for anything they did during the experiments at Dachau. Brandt and Sievers were both hanged on June 2, 1948.

Dr. Rascher was given his assignment to do the Luftwaffe experiments by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler after Frau Nini Rascher, who was a very good friend of Himmler, recommended him. Nini Rascher was older than her husband, as was Frau Himmler and both were past child-bearing age when Dr. Rascher claimed that his wife had borne two children. When Himmler learned that the children were actually orphans that Dr. Rascher had illegally adopted, he had Dr. Rascher arrested and imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Captain Sigismund Payne Best, a British spy who had been arrested in an alleged British plot to assassinate Hitler on November 8, 1939, was a prisoner at Buchenwald at the same time that Dr. Rascher was there.

In a book entitled "The Venlo Incident," Captain Sigismund Payne Best wrote the following regarding a conversation he had with Dr. Rascher while both were prisoners at Buchenwald:

Almost at our first meeting he told me that he belonged to Himmler's personal staff, and that it was he who planned and supervised the construction of the gas chambers and was responsible for the use of prisoners as guinea pigs in medical research. Obviously he saw nothing wrong in this and considered it merely a matter of expediency. As regards the gas chambers, he said that Himmler, a very kind-hearted man, was most anxious that prisoners should be exterminated in a manner which caused them the least anxiety and suffering. . . .

Captain Payne Best was brought to Dachau on April 9, 1945 and imprisoned in the bunker; on April 21, 1945, Payne Best was moved to a barrack building which had formerly been used as a brothel. Dr. Rascher was transferred to Dachau around the same time as Payne Best and was also imprisoned in the bunker.

On April 26, 1945, the day that the prisoners in the Zellenbau (bunker) were evacuated from the camp and marched in the direction of the South Tyrol, Dr. Sigmund Rascher was murdered, according to Barbara Distel, the director of the Dachau Museum.

In a book entitled "Das Ahnenerbe der SS 1933-1945. Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches," published in Stuttgart in 1974, the author, Michael H. Kater, quoted documents from preliminary German court proceedings concerning the death of Rascher, dated 17 September 1963, which stated that Dr. Sigmund Rascher was shot in the Dachau bunker in Cell No. 73 by SS-Hauptscharführer Theodor Bongartz.

In his opening statement for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Doctors Trial on December 9, 1946, General Telford Taylor said the following:

There were many co-conspirators who are not in the dock. Among the planners and leaders of this plot were Conti and Grawitz, and Hippke whose whereabouts is unknown. Among the actual executioners, Dr. Ding is dead and Rascher is thought to be dead. There were many others.

Taylor was referring to the Doctors who were involved as "co-conspirators" in the Nazi "plot" to do experiments, but were not on trial for one reason or another. The defendants in the Doctors Trial were accused of committing crimes under the guise of scientific research. The "executioners" were the Doctors who did the actual experiments, including Dr. Rascher. Curiously, it was not known for certain by the American prosecutors, whether Dr. Sigmund Rascher was alive or dead, 18 months after his alleged demise, even though his execution had been ordered by Himmler and carried out by Bongartz, the man in charge of the crematorium where the bodies were disposed of. The execution had taken place, not at the usual place at the execution wall in the woods, but in the bunker in the presence of witnesses who would have heard the shot fired in Cell #73 and seen the brains spattered on the wall of the cell.

Theodor Bongartz, who allegedly executed Dr. Rascher, died on May 15, 1945 in an American POW camp at Heilbronn-Böckingen, according to author Hellmut G. Haasis, who wrote a book entitled "Den Hitler jag' ich in die Luft: Der Attentäter Georg Elser, Eine Biografie" published in Berlin in 1999. Haasis wrote that Bongartz had the rank of SS-Oberscharführer. Bongartz was in charge of the crematorium at Dachau; he is also credited with the murder of Georg Elser around the time that an Allied bomb hit Dachau on April 9, 1945. Elser had been arrested as a suspect in the alleged British plot to kill Hitler on November 8, 1938.

According to Haasis, Bongartz was captured while wearing a Wehrmacht uniform and he died of natural causes in the POW camp before it became known that he was an SS man on the staff of the Dachau concentration camp.

According to an article written by L. Alexander, entitled "Miscellaneous Aviation Medical Matters," SHAEF 1945, subtitled "The Treatment of Shock from Prolonged Exposure to Cold," SHAEF 1945, Dr. Sigmund Rascher and his wife were both executed on the direct orders of Heinrich Himmler.

The following information was obtained from the staff at the Dachau Museum on 11 July 2006:

Sigmund Rascher's wife, Nini Rascher, was imprisoned in a jail in Munich at first. After attacking a female warder, she was brought to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. There she once again attacked a female warder and was shot a few days before the camp's liberation.

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Medical Experiments done by Dr. Klaus Karl Schilling

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This page was last updated on September 6, 2008