SITTING IN THEIR ORDERLY offices in Berlin, SS racial experts were greatly troubled by the extraordinary cultural richness of the Soviet Union. Surrounded by neatly arranged card indexes and carefully alphabetized file folders, they had never grasped before the unruly complexity of the world. They had never understood that a nation such as the Soviet Union could be so vast, so complicated, so chaotic, or that human beings could be so diverse, so exotic, so difficult to pigeonhole. More than eighty different ethnic groups resided in the country—from the Belorussians to the Moldavians, the Ossetians to the Chuvash, the Kazakhs to the Mongols, the Tungus to the Dargins, the Chechens to the Kabardas, the Mordvins to the Mansi, the Nenets to the Koryaks.1 And this posed serious questions for the racial specialists of RuSHA. Who among all of these peoples was Aryan? And exactly who was Jewish? Each day seemed to bring new doubts.
German racial scholars, after all, had still not devised a way of identifying members of the supposed Jewish race. In their scientific papers, they struggled in vain to define the physical characteristics of Jews. More often than not, they had fallen back on old anti-Semitic stereotypes. They talked about the short stature of Jews; about their flat breasts and rounded backs and weak muscles; their large, fleshy ears and hooked noses and yellowish skin; about the way they shuffled when they walked and the way they mumbled when they talked; and their great susceptibility to schizophrenia, manic depression, and morphine addiction.2 But in reality, German racial experts could not separate the fictional Jewish race from its fictional Aryan counterpart. Indeed, one famous anthropological study conducted among German schoolchildren had revealed that 11.17 percent of Jewish children possessed fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes.3 Nazi researchers lacked a biological equivalent of the yellow Star of David.4 Nothing offered itself, and this failure deeply troubled racial scholars in the SS.
Already, the uncertainty was stirring up confusion where Himmler least wanted to see it—in the minds of the SS killing squads. Just six months after the Russian campaign began, one of the Einsatzgruppen leaders, Otto Ohlendorf, had thrown up his hands in the Crimea, unable to determine what to do with two local groups—the Krimchaks and the Karaites.5 Reputedly, the Krimchaks descended from Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition, but they closely resembled their Muslim neighbors, the Tatars. They spoke a variant of Tatar, lived in Tatar-style houses, married into Tatar families, and followed many Muslim customs. Their women, for example, wore veils in public.6 The second group, the Karaites, equally confounded the SS. They were a Turkish people who spoke a Turkish language, but they practiced Judaism devoutly.7 Was either truly Jewish?
This conundrum seems to have sparked great anxiety in the SS headquarters in Berlin. Hitler had frequently likened the Jews to a dangerous microbe that threatened the rest of humanity, and he had become increasingly incensed by the Jews of the Soviet Union. “Russia,” he had observed in one venomous conversation in July 1941, “has become a plague-centre [Pestherd] for mankind … For if only one state tolerates a Jewish family among it, this would provide the core bacillus [Bazillenherd] for a new decomposition.”8 Well aware of these views, Himmler intended to wipe out every last Jew in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union. He solicited the opinions of various self-proclaimed SS authorities on Judaism, for their views on the Krimchaks and Karaites.9 He then resolved to eradicate those belonging to the fictive Jewish race in the Crimea, and turn a blind eye to those who followed the Jewish faith. He ordered Ohlendorf and his men to liquidate the Krimchaks, who followed all manner of Muslim customs, and to spare the Karaites, who were devout Jews.10
Perhaps Himmler hoped he had seen the last of such troublesome problems. But the confusion had only just begun. As the murder squads moved eastward into the Caucasus—a borderland between East and West, Europe and Asia—the lines between ethnic groups and tribes became more and more blurred. SS troops stumbled upon villages of the Christian Ossetes, who physically resembled their Jewish neighbors, lived in villages with Jewish names, married their sons and daughters off in Jewish-style marriage ceremonies, and buried their dead in Jewish-style funerals.11 And they met Mountain Jews who rode their horses superbly, bred fine cattle, and seldom stirred anywhere without strapping on their daggers and guns—all qualities greatly admired by SS men.12
Who was who in this great ethnic bedlam? Who was Jewish and who wasn’t? All the old certainties were slipping away. At times like this, Himmler counted upon science and scholarship to show the way.
ON DECEMBER 10, 1941, Wolfram Sievers welcomed SS racial specialist Bruno Beger to his office in the Ahnenerbe headquarters in Berlin. Although most young German men had been called up to active service—patrolling the waters of the North Atlantic in U-boats, battling British tanks in the bleak desert of North Africa, or navigating across the frozen forests of the Soviet Union in Stuka dive-bombers and Messerschmitts—Sievers had managed to obtain exemptions for many of the Ahnenerbe’s young scientists and scholars. This he did largely by transforming the research organization itself. While the Ahnenerbe had long supplied scientific camouflage for Nazi racial policies and furnished blueprints for future SS farm settlements, it had, since the onset of the war, taken an increasingly active part in the wartime crimes of the SS.
These illegal activities had begun with the plundering of foreign museums, galleries, and private homes, but in recent months they had taken a far more deadly turn. With Himmler’s encouragement, a senior Ahnenerbe researcher, Dr. Sigmund Rascher, was preparing to investigate the far limits of human endurance at extremely high altitudes.13 British fighter planes had pushed German aircraft to higher and higher elevations, and the Luftwaffe command feared for the safety of its aircrews. Rascher, a medical doctor, proposed testing the problem by replicating the effects of extreme high altitude on human beings placed in a vacuum chamber. Knowing that the experiments would inflict great suffering and kill some of the subjects, he had requested the use of concentration-camp prisoners—a suggestion that Himmler readily approved. While Sievers waited for Rascher’s high-altitude trials to begin at Dachau, he began planning one of the most notorious mass murders of the Second World War.
Like many other senior SS officers, Sievers knew all about the difficulties German racial scientists were having in defining the racial characteristics of Jews. Indeed, he had long hoped that the Ahnenerbe could play a key role in solving this problem. Since 1939, one of the Ahnenerbe’s department heads, biologist Walter Greite, had been studying racial measurements that he and a team of assistants had conducted in Vienna in 1939 on some two thousand Jews anxious to emigrate from the Reich. But the project was an embarrassing fiasco.14 Greite had assigned the important and tedious task of statistically analyzing the measurements to his secretary, and had failed abjectly in coming up with anything new.15
If the Ahnenerbe intended to make any headway with this problem, it clearly needed someone more reliable and energetic to handle the Jewish file. Beger, the ambitious young Rassenkunde scholar from the Tibet expedition, must have seemed a logical choice to Sievers. In their December 10, 1941, meeting, the two men discussed Jewish research.16 Beger seems to have taken an interest in the subject. He had, after all, worked for four years for RuSHA, a deep mire of anti-Semitism where researchers had helped draft the Nuremberg race laws and continued to churn out studies to expand the Holocaust.17 Moreover, he had risen to the position of division head at RuSHA before he set off to Tibet. Since his return, he had continued working for the department in an honorary capacity.18
In the meeting with Sievers, Beger seems to have discussed going about the Jewish research in a completely different way. To study Jews thoroughly and to search for that elusive feature that would define and label Jewishness—the shape of the ears, perhaps, or the arch of the cheekbone—he would need a good reference collection of Jewish skulls, one that contained as wide a variety of “Jewishness” as possible.19 If the Ahnenerbe wanted to ensure that its findings would apply to the disparate Jewish communities of the Soviet Union, the collection would have to include a representative sample of Jewish skulls from across the nation, from the remote mountain villages of the Caucasus to the bustling streets of Murmansk in the north.
Acquiring such a collection would be difficult. Few if any universities or museums in the Reich possessed large numbers of Jewish skulls. Devout Jews had long regarded tampering with the dead as a terrible sacrilege. They looked with horror upon autopsies—which they believed mutilated the deceased—and cherished cemeteries as holy ground. As a result, few European anthropologists had dared to collect scientific specimens of Jewish skulls. The world famous Museum of Natural History in Vienna, for example, possessed only twenty-two of these crania, and had searched far and wide for others to display in a planned exhibit on “the mental and racial characteristics of the Jewish people.”20 To expand this collection, curator Josef Wastl had proposed digging in Vienna’s old Jewish cemeteries in 1939, but Austrian officials had denied permission for the dig—not out of any sense of decency, it seems, but because property developers were hungrily eyeing the land.21
So intense was Wastl’s desire to study the Jews, however, that he eventually ended up purchasing Jewish skulls by mail order from the anatomy institute of the Reich University of Posen, a new creation of the Nazis in occupied Poland.22 The director of this anatomy institute, Dr. Hermann Voss, had made a bargain with the local Gestapo. In exchange for the use of his institute’s incinerator, he received bodies of some prisoners who had been guillotined or hung. These cadavers he rendered into anatomical specimens that could be sold to interested parties. The porter at the institute later recalled how the system worked. “The heads of the transported victims were thrown into a basket like turnips, and brought in the elevator to the third floor for maceration,” he explained. “Here they were prepared and later used in our institute of anatomy, where some can still be found, or sent to various universities in Germany, or sold to the students.”23
Voss made a tidy profit from the business. He sold individual Jewish skulls for 25 reichsmarks—or $130 in today’s currency—and agreed to furnish the victim’s date and place of birth, information considered vital for many scientific studies. He also offered a small range of other similar wares. “Together with these Jew-skulls,” Voss wrote to one potential customer, “I am able to supply plaster death-masks of the individuals concerned at RM 15,—of especially typical Ostjuden [Eastern Jews]. I can also prepare for you plaster busts, so that one can see the shape of the head (before dissection) and the frequently rather unique ears. The price of these busts would be 30–35 RM but because of a scarcity of time and plaster I could not supply very many.”24
For statistical reasons, Beger needed a minimum of 120 Jewish skulls to produce significant results.25 To obtain such a large number could be costly, and there was no guarantee that he could find a broad diversity of Jews. So Beger and Sievers conferred, contemplating ways of laying hands on a large and diverse collection, and at some point in the conversation, Sievers seems to have mentioned the name of Dr. August Hirt, the German director of the anatomical institute at the new Reich University of Strassburg.26 Just two and a half weeks earlier, Sievers had dined with Hirt at the university’s official opening ceremonies, and it seems to have occurred to him that Hirt could help obtain a collection of Jewish skulls.
As fate would have it, Beger knew the anatomist well. He had met Hirt while serving in the SS in Heidelberg in 1934 and both men had worked for the RuSHA in 1937, becoming good friends.27 Beger welcomed the anatomist as a collaborator.
HIRT WAS THIRTEEN years older than Beger and was a man that many found impossible to forget. As a young teenaged soldier during the First World War, he had received a severe gunshot wound to his upper and lower jaw.28 When the injury finally mended, his face took on a fierce, scarred, rather cavernous look that tended to unsettle people. Hirt tried to compensate for this with a jocular, friendly, outgoing demeanor.29 Some people found this bluff manner charming and were greatly drawn to him.30 But others were unable to get beyond his scarred appearance.31
Despite his terrible injury—or perhaps because of it—Hirt studied medicine at university, becoming a talented anatomist. He specialized in the human nervous system, and together with a Jewish colleague, he pioneered an early form of medical imaging that permitted researchers to inject dyes into the organs of living animals and study their function under fluorescent light.32 But the long hours he sunk into his research did not stop him from getting involved in extremist politics. While he was a member of the medical faculty at the University of Heidelberg, he joined the SS, swiftly becoming its campus leader. And on the strength of his research and the strong connections he was beginning to forge to the SS, he rose to prominence in the German medical establishment.
In 1939, shortly before the German invasion of Poland, Hirt joined one of the army’s Panzer divisions as a military doctor and spent the next two years tending the wounded in a series of field hospitals. After Germany’s annexation of the long-disputed French territory of Alsace-Lorraine in 1940, he received an important new position in Strassburg. The Reich Ministry of Education had transformed the city’s four-hundred-year-old university into a new type of educational institute, the Reich University of Strassburg. Staffed with German scientists and scholars, the university was intended to be a showcase of Nazi research and pedagogy.33 It hired Hirt as the director of its anatomical institute. From the start, he paraded his authority as an SS officer, turning up at classes dressed in an SS uniform complete with a revolver slung in his holster.34
In Strassburg, Hirt began searching for war-related research projects. He believed that a dye he used in his medical-imaging research—trypaflavine—might help heal the terrible burns suffered by soldiers caught in a mustard-gas attack.35 The German army had employed mustard gas in the First World War, and many Germans feared that the Allies would one day turn the tables. Hirt wanted to test the dye treatment, claiming that he had enjoyed some success with it while assisting a pharmacist accidentally exposed to mustard gas. But the treatment had no scientific merit. Trypaflavine is in itself a toxic substance—so much so, in fact, that researchers handling the chemical today in laboratories are warned to wear “a long-sleeved laboratory coat or gown, rubber gloves, safety goggles and a face mask as a minimum standard” of safety.36
Nevertheless, Hirt proceeded.37 He exposed laboratory rats, as well as dogs and pigs, to mustard gas, then attempted to treat them. The experiments ended badly. Hirt was so careless with the poison gas that he developed serious lung lesions himself, landing in a hospital in Strassburg. Despite this failure, however, he wanted to move on to human trials. He recognized that volunteers for such research would be scarce, so he began casting around for other options. The growing SS network of concentration camps seemed to him an obvious source of expendable human beings. So while dining with Sievers in Strassburg in November 1941, he broached the matter.38
Sievers relayed the substance of this conversation to Himmler on his return to Berlin. The SS leader was greatly interested in the idea of finding an antidote for mustard-gas burns, for Hitler himself had fallen victim to a gas attack during the First World War, becoming temporarily blinded.39 So in late December 1941, Himmler agreed to furnish Hirt with “prisoners and professional criminals, who would not be given their freedom anyhow, as well as people who are scheduled to be executed.”40 And it may have been at this time that Sievers brought up the problem of the Jewish skull collection. Certainly Hirt readily agreed to assist. In all likelihood, the physician saw the endeavor as a way of building a new anatomical collection for his institute at Strassburg. Perhaps he even harbored thoughts of getting into the skull mail-order business himself. The only question that remained was where to obtain the necessary variety of Jewish skulls from the Soviet Union.
None of the three collaborators—Sievers, Beger, or Hirt—knew of any such collection in the Reich. But one of them secretly came up with a grisly alternative.41 Under a directive known as the Commissar Order, the German military was expected to execute without trial any Soviet “commissars” that it captured.42 As was so often the case in the Third Reich, the language of the order was euphemistic. By “commissars,” the army actually meant “Jews.” Nazi propagandists had skillfully portrayed Soviet political officers and officials as Jews for years, and so deeply engrained was this notion in the minds of many SS and Wehrmacht officers that they simply accepted it as fact.43 While some army officers refused to carry out the infamous order, others began executing Jewish civilians as they advanced across the Soviet Union.
So in February 1942, Hirt or Beger—or possibly both men together—wrote a proposal for a new research project. Hirt then seems to have forwarded it to Sievers:
Subject: Securing skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars for the purpose of scientific research at the Strassburg Reich University.
There exist extensive collections of skulls of almost all races and peoples (Völkern). Of the Jewish race, however, only so very few specimens of skulls stand at the disposal of science that a study of them does not permit precise conclusions. The war in the East now presents us with the opportunity to remedy this shortage. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish Bolshevik Commissars, who personify a repulsive, yet characteristic subhumanity, we have the opportunity of obtaining tangible, scientific evidence.
The actual obtaining and collecting of these skulls without difficulty could be best accomplished by a directive issued to the Wehrmacht in the future to immediately turn over alive all Jewish Bolshevik Commissars to the field M.P. [Feldpolizei]. The field M.P. [Feldpolizei] in turn is to be issued special directives to continually inform a certain office of the number and place of detention of these captured Jews and to guard them well until the arrival of a special deputy. This special deputy, commissioned with the collection of the material (a junior physician assigned to the Wehrmacht or even the Field M.P., or a medical student equipped with a car and driver), is to take a prescribed series of photographs and anthropological measurements, and is to ascertain, in so far as is possible, the origin, date of birth, and other personal data of the prisoner. Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head must not be damaged, he will separate the head from the torso and will forward it to its point of destination in a preservative fluid within a well-sealed tin container especially made for this purpose. On this basis of the photos, measurements and other data on the head and finally, the skull itself, the comparative anatomical research, research on race membership [Rassenzugehörigkeit], the pathological features of the skull form, the form and size of the brain and many other things can begin.
In accordance with its scope and tasks the new Strassburg Reich University would be the most appropriate place for the collection of and research upon these skulls thus acquired.44
Himmler read this proposal with immense interest. A month earlier, in a large villa overlooking Grosser Wannsee, the SS had sought and obtained official government approval for a policy that it had already secretly adopted and embarked upon.45 This was the Final Solution—the seizing and murdering of all Jews in the territories under German control. During the meeting at Wannsee, officials had debated at some length the problem of the Mischlinge, or “part-Jews,” and the measures to be taken against them. Himmler was keen to take action. He wanted RuSHA to racially evaluate all children of mixed marriages and their progeny for three or four generations, just as agriculturalists did when attempting to breed superior varieties of plants and animals.46 Descendants who exhibited Jewish traits could then be at least sterilized, if not murdered. For this, the SS needed a much clearer picture of the Jewish race.
Beyond all these official reasons, however, Himmler was intrigued by the idea of a Jewish skull collection. He believed that a man’s character and criminal nature could be clearly read in the assemblage of his bones and he sometimes gave little lectures on this theme to his SS entourage. While touring Poland aboard his private train in September 1939, for example, he had instructed his men to bring forth some of the “criminal specimens” from among the local Jews.47 With a stick in his hand, he would then point out certain facial features and skeletal characteristics of old men who were visibly quaking with fear. “These people,” he concluded, “were vermin.”48
So at the end of February 1942, he instructed his personal administrative officer, Dr. Rudolf Brandt, to inform Hirt that he would “place at his disposal everything he needs.”49
TWO MONTHS LATER, over the Easter holidays, Sievers attended an evening meeting with Himmler and a certain SS-Sturmbannführer Petrau.50 Over a leisurely dinner, Sievers discussed with Himmler the possibility of archaeological research in Bulgaria, and the current state of Rascher’s high-altitude experiments at Dachau. The young SS physician had embarked with great relish on the tests—killing several of his subjects—and this news and the recent proposal from Hirt had given Himmler a new idea.51 The Nazi leadership had long regarded modern medicine as a degenerate science due to the great influence of Jewish physicians.52 In its place, many prominent Nazis had embraced all manner of alternative medical treatments and drugs. During the war, Hitler had criticized German physicians for not doing enough to save the lives of soldiers at the front.53 So Himmler decided to take matters into his own hands. He instructed Sievers to found a new research organization within the Ahnenerbe to oversee medical experiments performed on concentration camp prisoners.54
Three months later, the Institute for Military Scientific Research was born. Walther Wüst, the cautious superintendent of the Ahnenerbe, assumed direct responsibility for the new institute.55 But Wüst seems to have distanced himself from its day-to-day activities. Instead, Himmler appointed Sievers to the position of director and approved the creation of two divisions—one headed by Rascher, the other by Hirt. Financing was to come directly from the Waffen-SS.
As the new division head, Hirt began rethinking plans for the Jewish skull collection. Transporting human heads all the way from the Soviet Union would be extremely troublesome. A more practical solution was to find subjects in the extensive network of German concentration camps. In this way, Beger could personally select the victims and perform a first set of racial measurements while the individuals were still alive. When this was done, camp guards could murder the subjects in a tidy manner, making sure that they did not damage any bones. Hirt then could dispatch an assistant to pick up the remains and transport them to his lab in Strassburg. There his staff could proceed to deflesh the bodies and produce skeletons suitable for a reference collection.
Although Beger insisted vociferously after the war that he knew nothing of this plan until it was too late to save the victims, he may possibly have been aware of it from the start.56 There was, after all, no obvious reason to keep secrets from him. The honorary RuSHA staff member seems to have long agreed with SS plans to eliminate the Jews. Indeed, he later advocated conducting research on the characteristics of the Jewish spirit so that even this ephemeral influence could be rubbed out of German life. As he explained in a letter to Himmler’s personal assistant, “I take the view that the complete extermination of the Jews in Europe, and beyond that, in the whole world if possible, will not mean that the spiritual elements of Jewry, which we encounter at every turn, are fully eradicated. The important role of research on racial souls stems from this fact.”57
Before Beger and Hirt could get down to work, Sievers had to tackle a number of complex logistical problems. He quickly discovered that Auschwitz would be the best place to send Beger, for the sprawling prison served as a major death camp for prisoners from the East. But Auschwitz was located in southern Poland—a long, unrefrigerated train trip away from Strassburg—and Hirt refused to work with half-decayed bodies. So Sievers set about obtaining permission to ship the selected prisoners alive from Auschwitz to a camp much nearer to Strassburg—Natzweiler. This new plan solved many logistical problems, but it created a new one. Natzweiler was one of the smallest camps in the German system, with a large cohort of prisoners who were members of the French resistance.58 It did not possess a gas chamber. So the SS leadership seems to have ordered the construction of one to accommodate Hirt’s work.59
Hirt needed additional equipment and facilities in Strassburg, too. He requested a special elevator for corpses to be built at the anatomical institute.60 He also ordered custom-made equipment for rendering in a sanitary way entire human corpses, with their hair, nails, tendons, cartilage, muscles, and other soft tissues, down to pristine skeletons.61 Museum preparators had devised several methods over the years for defleshing animal cadavers for scientific and educational collections.62 To strip soft tissue from large mammals, they sometimes buried cadavers in the ground to allow soil bacteria and chemicals to eat away the flesh, but the process could easily take more than a year and the resulting skeleton often smelled horribly, making it totally unsuitable for display indoors. It was also possible to remove flesh from cadavers by placing them into containers inhabited by colonies of dermestid beetles. But this procedure required large crawling masses of beetles, something rather at odds with the image of an antiseptic medical institute.
So Hirt chose a third and more sanitary method—that of maceration.63 The bodies would first be immersed, one by one, in a large tank filled with a substance such as lime chloride.64 This would dissolve all the soft parts. Then they would be placed in a second solution such as gasoline to remove all traces of fat. A corpse treated in this way would be flensed within a matter of weeks.65 The result would be a bleached skeleton that still contained much of its cartilage, but emitted no foul odor—an important consideration in an anatomical laboratory.
Chemical maceration required a large steel tank and a heat source, as well as special equipment for bone-degreasing, all of which had to be custom-manufactured. This would be no easy matter in wartime Germany, where most factories were dedicated to churning out munitions of one sort or another. Hirt had already ordered the equipment from the German manufacturer Bergmann und Altmann, but the company had made little progress in delivering.66 To speed matters up, Sievers handed the file over to his personal assistant Wolf-Dietrich Wolff, who began doggedly following up on the order. So deeply did Wolff fall into the spirit of the project that he soon began referring to the future victims of the project as “objects.”67
With Sievers’s immense talent for organization, the necessary preparations were rapidly forging ahead by the end of September 1942. But on October 3, Beger learned of something worrying. A typhus epidemic had broken out at Auschwitz. He immediately discussed the problem with Hirt to see what should be done, then wrote to Sievers. “It is, of course, very important to establish if this is true before the ordered racial examinations and recordings are done,” he declared, “because otherwise there is a risk that typhus will be brought back into the Reich. Prof. Hirt specifically pointed this out to me.”68
Beger’s information proved correct. In an effort to stamp out the plague, the Auschwitz authorities began marching off all infected prisoners to the gas chambers.69 In addition, they prohibited prisoners from traveling outside the camp boundaries, even when requisitioned as slave labor for various work projects.70 It would be impossible under this ban for Hirt and Beger to convey their subjects from Auschwitz to Natzweiler. So the two men were forced to put their plans for the Jewish Skeleton Collection on hold for the next eight months.
THE DELAY MUST have been a particular frustration for Beger. In August 1942, as the Wehrmacht began advancing toward the mountains of the Caucasus, Himmler had issued orders for two detailed scientific studies of the Middle East.71 He had directed Walther Wüst to prepare a team of eight researchers, including a racial anthropologist, to conduct archaeological, racial, and other studies in Iran.72 And he had commanded biologist Ernst Schäfer, the leader of the Tibet expedition, to head a military and scientific mission to the Caucasus known as Special Command K.73 Schäfer in turn had promptly named his old colleague, Bruno Beger, as the deputy leader of the mission and placed him in charge of the “racial exploration of the Caucasian tribes.”74
Schäfer had spent most of the war at Himmler’s beck and call. Apart from a brief and nearly fatal stint as a soldier on the Finnish front in 1941, he had spent the war in offices and hotel rooms—advising the SS leader on the design of winter uniforms for German troops serving in Poland, testing new varieties of grain for the Eastern settlements, and lecturing in occupied Europe as a kind of official poster boy for science in the Third Reich.75 He had felt trapped behind a desk, but in early 1942 he saw an opportunity to escape.76 As the German army advanced toward the oil fields of Maikop, he proposed leading a scientific survey to the Caucasus so that the region’s natural resources could be suitably exploited after the war. In the late summer of 1942, Himmler ordered him to organize a military and scientific mission to the area.
Schäfer grandly sketched out his requirements. He wanted a team consisting of dozens of scientists—from geophysicists, geologists, geographers, and paleontologists to plant geneticists, livestock experts, zoologists, entomologists, parasitologists, and herpetologists. He also requested page after page of equipment—tropical uniforms, mountain troops uniforms, leather jackets, Lederhosen, klepper jackets, fur vests, pullovers, bathing suits, hiking shoes, Africa boots, helmets, seventy two-man tents, two fifty-man tents, skis, Hindenburg lamps, snow glasses, sunglasses, ice axes, five gramophones with records, ten travel typewriters, and mosquito nets.77 On and on it went. He had, it seems, quite forgotten there was a war going on and that the German military was stretched to the limit, battling Stalin’s massive forces in the Soviet Union; occupying much of Europe and a vast swath of the Soviet republics; defending Europe from an Allied invasion; combating local partisans and resistance groups; waging war against British forces in North Africa; and searching out and destroying enemy ships in the Atlantic and in European waters.
Himmler’s personal administrative officer, Rudolf Brandt, soon brought Schäfer crashing back down to earth. “I have already let him know, through SS-Obersturmführer Meine,” explained Brandt in a letter to Sievers, “that at the moment his plan for an expedition in the Caucasus area, as he imagines it, is out of the question. Dr. Schäfer is to be ready only for a military assignment in the realm of this current operation. Here and there he will surely be able to conduct some scientific work in his area of interest while completing the assignment, but in no case is this his main goal.”78 In aid of this plan, the SS leadership agreed to supply Schäfer with a small group of researchers and ninety-seven SS men armed with pistols, machine guns, and grenades.79
Schäfer told American interrogators in 1946 that the purpose of this special command was to “win over to the German cause the tribes in the Caucasus Mountains.”80 But little evidence of such an assignment exists in the surviving documents. What can be said without a doubt, however, is that racial research lay close to the heart of the operation.81 Beger and a handpicked team of Rassenkunde experts planned to conduct extensive studies of the native tribes of the Caucasus in order “to facilitate a racial diagnosis of the population.”82 They seemed particularly anxious to “diagnose” the Mountain Jews, one of the tribal groups likely to confuse SS killing squads.83 During questioning in 1970, Schäfer suggested that the fate of this group—their liquidation or survival—would depend on Beger’s team and on their conclusions. “At the time,” Schäfer confessed, “it was known that the Jewish people were to be annihilated.”84
The Mountain Jews, or Dag Chufut, lived mainly in the northern and eastern Caucasus. They had by all accounts resided in the rugged region for twenty-five hundred years and were descendants of several waves of Jewish immigrants—including captives whom Nebuchadrezzar bestowed upon the tribal leaders of the Caucasus, and refugees who fled from the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.85 They spoke a Persian dialect, which they had once written in Hebrew characters, and they kept their ancient Judaic beliefs alive. While the rulers of many other lands forbade Jews from owning land, the potentates of the Caucasus were more tolerant. They permitted the Mountain Jews to farm. In the nineteenth century, before Soviet collectivization, these Jewish families reaped wheat, corn, and rice crops from mountain fields others thought unarable, and tended vineyards that were famous. They observed nature closely, rode well, and cared for their guns lovingly. By 1942, they numbered about thirty thousand people.86
But the lines between the Mountain Jews and many of their neighbors were very fuzzy. The young men often purchased wives in marriage from surrounding Muslim families and insisted that their new spouses dress in modest Islamic fashion. Young and old wore talismans and amulets, believed in demons and black magic, and celebrated agricultural festivals—all customs borrowed from others. The local Muslims returned the favor. Neighboring tribes proudly boasted of Jewish ancestors and took pains to preserve ancient Hebrew bibles in their families. Several tribes in the region—the Tats, Kumyks, Avars, and Tabassarans, to name a few—clearly descended from mixed Jewish and Muslim ancestry.87
BEGER’S ASSIGNMENT WAS to neatly pigeonhole all these tribes in a way the SS leadership could understand.88 To do this, he began assembling a team of racial specialists.89 He immediately chose two veteran colleagues from RuSHA—Dr. Hans Fleischhacker and Dr. Heinrich Rübel. Fleischhacker had taken a keen interest in Jewish peoples, and was writing a thesis on Jewish skin color.90 His comrade, Rübel, had studied Rassenkunde at the University of Cologne.91 After the invasion of Poland, the SS sent both men to Litzmannstadt.92 As Eignungsprüfer, or “aptitude testers,” there, they performed racial measurements on ethnic German residents, assessing whether they were “racially valuable”—and therefore worthy to be sent as colonists to the German territories in the East—or whether they should be relegated to starvation, slavery, and extermination.93 So adept did both men prove at this work that their superiors recruited them to train and develop educational programs for other aptitude testers.94
In addition to the RuSHA specialists, Beger managed to obtain two other qualified scientists for his team. Dr. Rudolf Trojan had studied under the prominent German anthropologist Dr. Theodor Mollison, whose most famous pupil was Dr. Josef Mengele, the physician who conducted the infamous twins research at Auschwitz and who came to be known as the “Angel of Death.”95 Under Mollison’s guidance, Trojan had taken up racial blood studies and conducted racial research on ancient skeletons. Rounding out Beger’s core team was Dr. Hans Endres.96 A scholar with many interests, Endres had studied philosophy, psychology, education, and psychiatry in addition to anthropology. Beger had recruited him to study the racial psychology of the Caucasus tribes.97
Throughout the fall of 1942, as the team waited for its orders to depart, Beger drew up a detailed research plan. He proposed taking the team on an inspection trip through the Caucasus soon after their arrival. As they journeyed from one village to the next, the racial specialists could take the lay of the land and calculate the minimum number of men and women they would need to measure in each ethnic group.98 Then the team would get down to work in a mobile examination facility—a large field tent that could be divided into four separate sections, including a room for disrobing.99
Almost certainly, the team planned on using trickery and deception to obtain the cooperation of their subjects. RuSHA racial examiners were accustomed to donning white laboratory coats and masquerading as physicians conducting medical examinations.100 They had discovered over the years that subjects were far more willing to undress—and less inclined to make a scene—when they thought they were receiving medical attention. Moreover, Beger had already practiced a similar form of duplicity in Tibet.101
Beger’s racial specialists proposed conducting a wide battery of tests and measurements. As a matter of form, they intended on describing the exact hue of their subjects’ hair, skin, and eyes; performing an assortment of racial measurements; and snipping hair samples for later study. They also planned to photograph and film particularly interesting individuals, for German racial experts claimed that Jews moved differently from others, dragging their feet along the ground.102 The team’s sculptor would “produce casts of the head or the whole body of representative types or entire families of each ethnic group and each race.”103 In addition, Endres would conduct a series of “racial intelligence examinations,” employing games, colored glass beads, crayons, watercolors, and a variety of testing machines.104
Beger also planned to put the Special Command K doctor to work, conducting studies on racial anatomy, racial physiology, and racial hygiene.105 To carry out his duties, the physician requested three tattooing needles on his equipment list.106 His reason for this request is unclear, but shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union, one RuSHA scientist, SS-Obersturmbannführer Walter Scholtz, proposed sending racial examiners into Russian prisoner-of-war camps in order to test the inmates, divide them into racial categories, and tattoo each prisoner’s ear with a letter—rather as ranchers do with cattle—as a permanent visible record of the classification.107 An “E,” for example, would indicate a prisoner who was supposedly of Nordic blood and who would be sent to one of the new German colonies. An “R” would mark someone who purportedly exhibited a balanced mixture of European races and who was therefore suitable to join the workforce in European Russia. An “A” would identify a prisoner who was Asian or a mixture of Asian and Middle Eastern ancestry. Scholtz proposed that these individuals be “extinguished.”108
Beger labored over Special Command K for months in Munich, consulting with his fellow racial specialists and preparing as best he could for all the unknowns that the Caucasus would present. But the order to depart did not arrive. Indeed, Oktoberfest came and went and the great chestnut trees in the Munich streets lost their leaves. Families opened their Advent calendars and lit candles on their Christmas trees, but Beger and Schäfer and their teams were still waiting. The order from Himmler that they were all expecting, indeed anxiously anticipating, did not arrive. Nor did it appear as the new year approached: 1943.
The reasons were becoming increasingly obvious. Something had gone badly wrong on the eastern front. Hitler’s plan to drive south and east through the Caucasus to capture the rich oil fields of Baku and safeguard the pipeline to Batumi had stalled, due to a stunning military catastrophe at Stalingrad. Hitler had vowed to destroy the city, ordering his troops to slaughter every male resident and deport every female.109 But his staggering indecisiveness and his refusal to recognize the realities of the campaign had left some 200,000 German troops badly undersupplied. On November 22, 1942, Soviet forces had completely surrounded Germany’s Sixth Army, cutting off its remaining supply lines. In the dreaded cold of the Russian winter, German soldiers starved and perished in great numbers. “We’re completely alone,” wrote one of the desperate troops, “without help from the outside. Hitler has left us in the lurch.”110 As the temperatures plunged lower and lower and the winds howled ever louder, Hitler sat grim-faced over the dinner table at Wolfschanze. The little man who once sat discreetly in the corner, jotting notes, had vanished. Hitler wanted no record preserved of the gloom settling over many of his military guests.
On February 2, 1943, Germany’s Sixth Army surrendered. Nearly 100,000 German and Romanian soldiers lay dead in the gray streets of Stalingrad and the white fields of the countryside.111 Another 113,000 were captured by the Soviets. Three days later, Himmler wrote to Schäfer, postponing Special Command K. It would be totally impossible, he explained, to start the mission within the next few months due to the military situation.112