And the infamous Dr Shiro Ishii? It is believed that he went to live in Maryland, where he continued his work on bio-weapons for the American military, and died in Japan of throat cancer aged 67. Some of the chemicals agents used in the experiments were carcinogenic. It might have been poetic justice.
Germany began experimenting on human subjects from the outset of the war. Top-secret medical experimentation was under way in 1939 at Sachsenhausen, and many other concentration camps were to follow. The buildings remain, and I have found these sites to be a disturbing reminder of state-sanctioned cruelty. The first experiments included tests of poison gas against human subjects. Mustard gas and Lewisite were applied to the bodies, causing severe blistering and burning. The subjects’ wounds could be treated in different ways, in order to ascertain which approach gave the best results.
From 1942 onwards, the range of secret medical experiments diversified and greatly increased in number. At the Dachau concentration camp, inmates were deliberately infected with malaria. Once the disease had developed, the victims were used as experimental subjects and given a range of possible treatments in the hope of finding a cure. Half the subjects died. Dachau was also the focus of freezing experiments, in which prisoners were fitted with various designs of protective clothing (designed for pilots) and immersed up to the neck in iced water for prolonged periods of time. Experiments were also carried out in which prisoners were chained in the open air and left naked in sub-zero temperatures for hours on end. The results were noted down, partly to determine how rapidly people succumbed to the cold, and also to attempt different approaches to revival so that the results could be used to treat German military personnel — pilots who had been shot down in Arctic waters, for example. Auschwitz also took part in a similar series of trials in which victims were frozen, sometimes to death. This research increased with the prospect of war on the Eastern Front, and among the victims were Russian soldiers. The Nazis speculated that the severe Russian winters would give the Soviet soldiers a great genetic predisposition to survival in Arctic conditions, and the experiments were run in parallel to see if this was true. The results were communicated directly to Heinrich Himmler and specialist conferences were held, including one in 1942 entitled ‘Medical Problems Arising from Sea and Winter’ at which the results were presented in the manner of a scientific symposium.
From 1942, inmates of the Dachau concentration camp were tested for the effects of decompression. The Luftwaffe were keen to know what would happen to pilots whose aircraft were destroyed at altitude, and at what height they would parachute to earth. It was known that severe decompression sickness caused many to be incapacitated or killed, and so a hypobaric chamber was constructed that could have the air partially sucked out to simulate the air pressure at high altitudes (up to 60,000ft, about 20,000m). Bubbles of gas appeared in the blood at such low pressures, and most of the victims died in the chambers. They were then dissected so that the effects could be seen. Many were incapacitated, not killed, and they were subject to vivisection so that their bodies could be studied as the fatal lesions took their toll.
Later experiments at Dachau involved methods of using seawater as an emergency drink. Roma people were chosen for these trials and groups were given no fresh water to drink and were allowed access only to seawater. They became desperately ill as a result, and some were seen licking water from freshly mopped floors. The Roma people were selected for experiments as the Nazis felt they were an inferior race and might have a more robust response to abuse.
At Buchenwald, another of the extant concentration camps that I have visited in the course of research, the effects of poisons were the focus of human experimentation. Toxic compounds were mixed with the inmates’ food and some were shot with bullets containing poisons and were later dissected to ascertain the damage that had been done. There have been episodes since the war in which this idea has resurfaced. The most famous of these is the murder of the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov in 1978. He had a tiny hollow metal pellet shot into his leg by the Bulgarian Secret Service from a modified umbrella as he walked across Waterloo Bridge in central London. The tiny bullet contained ricin, a toxin extracted from seeds of the castor oil plant. Ricin had been patented by the US Secretary of the Army in 1952 for possible use as a weapon, and the patent description concluded that ‘the product might be used as a toxic weapon’. At first, Markov’s death was put down to food poisoning, and it was only the diligent investigations ordered by Scotland Yard that eventually led to the discovery of the tiny hollow bullet, 1/20 in (less than 2mm) in diameter, inside which the ricin had been concealed. Doubtless the assassins believed such a tiny projectile would never be found, and it is a remarkable story of detection. The use of a chemical poison hidden inside a small bullet stemmed from the ideas that originated in Nazi Germany, and it may still be used again.
Tests at Buchenwald were also done with phosphorus burns to the body. White phosphorus is a particularly inhumane weapon as it sticks to the skin and burns deep into the body. At Buchenwald concentration camp, inmates were covered with white phosphorus of the kind used in incendiary weapons and the effects were meticulously recorded.
The Nazis flourished in the era of eugenics, when the genetic nature of a race was considered an important indicator of what might be called ‘social rank’. They felt that weak genetics predisposed races to a subservient role in the global community. It was a highly fashionable belief, but was never based on sound scientific grounds. The remarkable lack of connection between the achievements of parents and children is well observed — we all know bright and highly successful individuals who come from an inauspicious background, and uninspiring people whose parents were overwhelmingly intelligent and gifted in many ways. The roots of our adult selves do not lie in such a simple understanding of genetics.
Nonetheless, to the Nazis, there was a special appeal in studies of identical twins. The main organizer of experiments with twin children was Dr Josef Mengele, who became known as the Angel of Death. He was obsessed with the idea that the physiognomy of an individual — the surface features of the face — could be correlated with their intellectual abilities. The idea had first surfaced in the pseudoscience of phrenology, in which the exterior of the head was measured, and was taken to indicate the most propitious zones of the brain that lay within. In Victorian times this was a popular topic, but it had been repeatedly disproved until it was abandoned by science. The last official application of the notion was in the 1930s, when the Belgian authorities tried to use phrenology in Rwanda to document the assumed superiority of the Tutsi tribes over the Hutus. It is still practised in some quarters; indeed the state of Michigan announced a new tax on the practitioners of phrenology as recently as 2007.
During his early years as a doctor, Josef Mengele had perceived a strong resonance between Nazism and his private beliefs on genetic superiority, and he published his doctoral thesis for the University of Munich on the subject of ‘Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups’. It was not an anti-Semitic thesis, but paralleled the Nazis’ enthusiasm for the correlation of racial disparity with innate ‘worth’. He went on to carry out surgical experiments, including stitching pairs of twins together in an attempt to create conjoined twins, and injecting them to see if the hue of their eyes could be permanently changed. He carried out experiments on about 1,500 sets of whom only 100 individuals were known to have survived.