ON A BRIGHT JUNE day in 1943, Sophie Boroschek stood in front of an Auschwitz barrack, waiting for someone important to appear. Like the other prisoners assembled there, she did not know who the person was or why he was important. Boroschek was thirty-three years old.1 In a previous life, she had lived in the villa of a prominent cigarette manufacturer and worked as a nurse in the Hospital of the Jewish Community in Berlin, a little-known haven for Jews.2 But in mid-May 1943, the authorities had forced her parents, Abraham and Lieschen, onto a transport bound for Auschwitz. Five days later, Boroschek boarded a freight car headed for the infamous camp. On her arrival at Auschwitz, a doctor had looked her up and down with a bored glance, then selected her for work in the camp. Since then, Boroschek had learned a great deal about survival.
That morning, she and some one hundred and fifty other prisoners had been excused from their work details and daily routines and dispatched to an area outside Block 28, a red-brick barrack officially described as an infirmary.3 It was an ominous corner of the camp. As many of the prisoners were well aware, Block 28 was an infirmary in name only. Far from caring for the seriously ill, its staff specialized in conducting gruesome medical experiments on the healthy.4
Boroschek and her fellow prisoners waited uneasily. Finally, a tall, blond, athletic-looking SS-Hauptsturmführer arrived and instructed the prisoners to undress.5 The officer was Bruno Beger. He unpacked several shiny steel instruments—various kinds of calipers and compasses.6 Some of those standing beside Boroschek blanched at the sight of the metal instruments.7 They did not know what would happen next. Beger beckoned first one prisoner, then another, forward. He stared at them intently for a minute or two, studying their faces, and ran his eyes down the length of their bodies. Silently, he arrived at some decision. Some of the prisoners he immediately dismissed, as if to say they were not worthy of his attention. Others, however, he began to measure, sliding his calipers across their heads. Then he called out the numbers tattooed upon their arms to a prisoner assistant, who carefully recorded them in pencil on a form.8 Those prisoners whose survival instincts had been stropped to razor sharpness by long months of imprisonment at Auschwitz suspected no good could come of it.
Finally, Boroschek heard her own name called. She walked over to the blond-haired man and stood in front of him. Beger stared hard at her, sizing her up. Then he reached for his calipers. Satisfied, he called out Boroschek’s number.
BEGER HAD ARRIVED in the town of Oswiecim on the morning of June 7.9 His civilian assistant, Wilhelm Gabel, had already spent a night there.10 Sturdily built at thirty-nine, Gabel worked for the Ahnenerbe as a sculptor, creating museum dioramas from the casts Beger had taken of Tibetans. He had agreed to assist Beger making casts of the Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz. Beger was also expecting another colleague, a hard-looking man of thirty with a long face, metal-rimmed spectacles, and a pair of heavy eyebrows that merged over the bridge of his nose.11 Dr. Hans Fleischhacker, an SS-Obersturmführer, was one of the officers Beger had chosen for the Caucasus research. His research specialty was Jewish skin color.
Before heading off to the camp, Beger looked for a hotel room in Oswiecim. SS officers of the day were particularly fond of the Haus der Waffen-SS, located near the railway station.12 The facility had a lovely garden for sunbathing, and its comfortable restaurant served excellent dinners of roast pork and chicken, fresh vegetables, and, according to one SS officer, “a magnificent vanilla ice cream”—luxuries unheard of in most other parts of the Reich.13 Beger checked in there.14 After stowing his bag, he set off to the camp to introduce himself to the commandant and his staff.15
SS officers generally regarded Auschwitz as a choice tour of duty. The camp was a good deal safer than a posting to the eastern front, which many saw as a death sentence, and Auschwitz offered daily opportunities to steal jewelry, watches, and other treasures from the condemned. Moreover, the rank-and-file guards shared this sense of enthusiasm for the posting. Indeed, they often competed to take part in the “actions,” the mass murders that featured so prominently in Auschwitz life.16 For this, they received a bonus—one-fifth of a liter of vodka, five cigarettes, and one hundred grams of sausage and bread.17
Beger presented his orders, and soon after, camp officials sent him off to get a vaccination against typhus, for the threat of epidemic was still present at Auschwitz.18 Then they escorted him inside the electrical fences to the men’s camp. Some of the buildings standing there were part of an old factory formerly owned by the Polish Tobacco Monopoly, while others had once served as barracks for the Polish army.19 And even in the summer of 1943, Auschwitz retained a few ironic vestiges of a happier past. Along the grounds, tidy red-brick barracks stood neatly in long rows intersected by paved streets that went nowhere, each with a pleasant sounding name, such as Cherry Street.20 But its bland appearance was an illusion. Each morning, prisoners were rousted from their beds at 4:30 and forced to don uniforms caked with dirt and sweat.21 They were ordered to stand for hours outdoors in meaningless roll calls, no matter what the weather, and then put to work for twelve hours each day. Everywhere they went, they carried a red bowl and tin spoon in the vain hope that they would receive something more substantial than the thin, watery soup dispensed from the camp kitchen. They lived in a state of constant fear. At any moment, an SS guard could haul them from a line and beat them brutally or drag them off to the gas chambers, the gallows, or one of the camp’s other execution grounds. Throughout the summer of 1943, flames literally leapt from the tall chimneys of Auschwitz’s crematoria. The stench of burning hair and scorched human flesh hung over the camp.22
Amid all this horror, Beger quickly settled down to work, selecting prisoners for the skeleton collection from among those assembled in front of Block 28. He looked for relatively healthy, robust young people who had not yet lost too much soft tissue from starvation.23 This meant selecting people in the prime of life who had arrived at Auschwitz within the last few months. He also wanted to find “as many varieties of Jewishness as possible.”24 So he chose Jewish prisoners—men, women, and children alike—from across Europe: Greece, Germany, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Norway. The majority came from the northern Greek city of Salonika, where the SS had only begun deporting Jews on March 15, 1943.
In addition to these prisoners, Beger also selected two Polish Christians and four Asians—two Uzbeks, one person of mixed Uzbek-Tadzhik ancestry, and one Chuvash. The Asians, he observed later in a letter to Schäfer, were selected “just on the side,” for the benefit of the Ahnenerbe’s new department of Inner Asian research and expeditions, headed by Schäfer.25 Beger was particularly pleased to have found them at Auschwitz. “One Uzbek, a big healthy guy, could have been Tibetan,” he exclaimed in a letter to Schäfer. “His way of speaking, his movements and his manner were simply delightful, Inner Asian.”26 In all, Beger picked 115 individuals from the prisoners assembled in front of Block 28. At least five of them were teenagers.27 The selection took just three-quarters of an hour.28
According to witnesses, camp authorities housed the selected women in Block 10, a two-story barrack whose windows were kept permanently shuttered or boarded to ensure that no one could see inside.29 The building hid laboratories, X-ray facilities, and rows of crowded wooden bunks for the subjects of Auschwitz’s grisly medical experiments. It also provided bunks for the female prisoners forced to work in a camp brothel. As one prisoner who spent a year working in Block 10 recalled later, it was a “horror place” that rivaled Dante’s Inferno.30 Many of the selected male prisoners were similarly housed. They were sent to Block 21 and Block 28.31 Both served as camp infirmaries, and the latter confined men forced to participate in experiments that damaged their livers or in tests of toxic chemicals that provided data on possible techniques malingerers might use to elude military service.32
Over the next few days, Beger proceeded with his studies, performing detailed racial measurements in a small room in one of these blocks.33 As the prisoners filed in, the sculptor Gabel stared at their faces. “When I found a Jew who was especially interesting or remarkable,” he later recalled, “Dr. Beger agreed that I should also make a cast of them.”34 In all likelihood, Gabel chose individuals who possessed one of the supposed Jewish traits—short head, fleshy lips, large ears.35 As Gabel and Beger must have realized, plaster likenesses of these individuals would be highly marketable as teaching aids in Nazi universities and as exhibits on Rassenkunde.36 Gabel took twenty casts at Auschwitz.37
Focused as Beger was on completing his work, he could not help but notice the cruel, inhuman conditions in the camp and the terrible toll they were taking on the prisoners. At one point during his stay, he happened upon SS guards dragging out a large pile of corpses from a barracks.38 The scene disturbed Beger—not, it seems, because so many Jews were dying daily at Auschwitz, but because the SS officers in the camp, the future lords of Europe, were dirtying their hands with this foul business. “I spoke with the adjutant about this,” Beger observed in a later court statement, “and mentioned I was concerned that it was specifically the SS who were involved with this. He told me that they would have had so many [prisoner] transports that they would not have been able to cope with them all.”39
After finishing with each of his subjects, Beger passed the individual on to Fleischhacker, who had finally arrived in Auschwitz and who performed the measurements again to ensure their accuracy. Beger wanted no errors. The two men seem to have worked together amicably, but on June 15, Beger departed abruptly, placing the remaining subjects in Fleischhacker’s care and returning to Munich.40 He explained after the war that he was horrified by the barbaric conditions at Auschwitz and had left in disgust at the earliest opportunity. But correspondence from the time paints a different picture of his motives. Shortly after his hasty departure, Beger informed Sievers that he had finished up early “because of the existing risk of an epidemic.”41 Moreover, his subsequent correspondence shows little trace of compassion for Auschwitz’s inmates. Indeed, when he received news a few weeks later about the death of several of the selected prisoners, he offered no comment about their plight. “Herr Gabel,” he wrote to Sievers, “is once again in Munich almost fourteen days after the examinations in Auschwitz. He cast the heads of twenty prisoners I had chosen and examined. He told me that the number of examined people has once again declined because of deaths. The head casts that he completed turned out excellently.”42
Beger’s worries about a possible epidemic at Auschwitz were well founded. By early July, typhus was spreading rapidly through the camp, greatly worrying authorities. To combat the outbreak, SS physicians began killing prisoners who turned up in the infirmary admissions area with symptoms. They injected phenol, a common disinfectant also known as carbolic acid, directly into the hearts of the ailing inmates.43 To ensure that the prisoners Beger had selected would pose no threat to the outside world when they were shipped to Natzweiler, camp authorities placed them in quarantine for two to three weeks and ordered blood tests to determine whether any were infected.44 In addition, Sievers wrote to request that the individuals be issued clean prisoner clothing.45
Only when the quarantine had ended in late July did guards at Auschwitz begin loading Beger’s subjects onto a train heading west toward Natzweiler.46 In Berlin, Sievers’s assistant dispatched a deliberately cryptic telegram to Beger, notifying him that the wheels were once again in motion. “Transport from Auschwitz 30.7. Get into contact with Hirt concerning the beginning of the work. Arrival of transport Natzweiler presumably 2.8.”47
NATZWEILER CONCENTRATION camp was a place of dark, ominous reputation. It sat on a high, forested slope of the Vosges Mountains, thirty-one miles southwest of Strassburg, the capital of Alsace.48 Before the war, skiers and hikers had flocked to the region, reveling in its solitude and pristine beauty. But in 1940, after France capitulated and Germany annexed the old border province of Alsace, the SS had arrived in the Vosges Mountains on a very different mission: to make money.49 The local cliffs gleamed with a rare red granite that greatly appealed to Nazi architects. Himmler immediately recognized the potential of the stone. He had founded an SS enterprise, the German Earth and Stone Works Ltd., which used slave laborers from concentration camps to perform the backbreaking work of quarrying rock. So Himmler ordered the construction of a concentration camp in the Vosges Mountains to house the slave laborers needed to mine the rock.
Natzweiler soon became a grim hell for prisoners. Many were forced to haul large slabs of granite up the slopes until they died from exhaustion and starvation. Others were subjected to harrowing and often lethal medical experiments. Himmler had constructed and outfitted a special laboratory at Natzweiler for August Hirt, and the anatomist had begun his monstrous mustard-gas experiments.50 He and his assistants administered drops of a liquid form of mustard gas to the arms of prisoners, or forced his victims to inhale or gulp down a venomous brew. Fifty men—one of every three subjects in his experiments—perished in agony, suffering severe burns on their skin or fatal internal injuries. Those who survived often went blind or suffered other debilitating conditions, and in the days before Natzweiler acquired its own gas chamber, officials disposed of them by shipping them to other camps, earmarked for death.
It was an appalling situation. But Himmler and Sievers greatly admired the doctor responsible for all this human suffering. Indeed, they came to see Hirt as a martyr for science, placing his own health in peril for sake of the dangerous experiments, and in the spring of 1943, when the anatomist developed intestinal problems, they arranged for him to holiday at a luxury resort at St. Lambrecht in the Austrian Alps.51 “Hirt,” observed Sievers in a letter to Himmler’s personal administrative officer, “has not spared his own health and can even be considered a victim of his own science because his research work is in such a new field that dangerous risks cannot be avoided.”52
By the beginning of August 1943, however, Hirt was sufficiently recovered to carry out the orders for the Jewish Skeleton Collection. Nearly everything was ready. The forced laborers at Natzweiler had completed construction of the gas chamber. Sievers’s assistant, Wolf-Dietrich Wolff, had obtained a bottle of a hydrogen-cyanide salts for use in murdering the selected Jewish prisoners in the chamber. This he had passed on to Hirt.53 Wolff also provided the physician with vouchers for fifty liters of gasoline so that the camp could deliver the corpses to Strassburg. All that was lacking, it seemed, was the maceration machine. Through much dexterous paper shuffling, Wolff had obtained fifteen kilograms of steel—an immensely precious commodity at the height of the war—for the manufacture of the machine. He also managed to register the equipment “as an urgent army commission.”54 The machine was now months overdue, but Hirt was hopeful that it would soon arrive.55
On Monday, August 2, a train carrying the prisoners from Auschwitz rolled into Natzweiler. A guard unlocked the door to a freight car, and the passengers climbed down stiff-legged and cramped from four days of travel. Hirt was anxious to get down to work. The original plan had called for Fleischhacker and a second Caucasus team member, Dr. Heinrich Rübel, to travel to the camp to take blood samples as well as skull X-rays for additional osteological measurements.56 But neither man could obtain a release from his other duties. So Beger, who was visiting his wife and children in a hunting lodge in Rüthnick in northeastern Germany, was forced to take their place. He departed for Strassburg on the morning of Saturday, August 7, and presented himself at the camp a day or two later.57
In a rough wooden barrack, Beger proceeded with his final studies, taking two X-rays of each of the prisoners’ skulls.58 By then, Hirt had decided to extract additional medical data from the group. As a senior SS physician, he had learned of Himmler’s keen interest in finding cheap new techniques of human sterilization that could be applied in future to many Germans of “Jewish mixed blood,” as well as to the large numbers of Jewish, Russian, and Polish forced laborers in the East.59 So medical researchers at Auschwitz and other concentration camps had already begun testing a wide range of potential sterilization procedures on human subjects, from injecting caustic substances into women’s cervixes to exposing men’s penises and scrota to dangerous levels of X-rays.60 These tests inflicted immense human suffering. So intense was the radiation, for example, that many of the victims developed severe burns along the groin and buttocks, and some died soon after. Moreover, the researchers made little effort to spare their subjects additional humiliation. To test the effectiveness of the technique, assistants collected sperm from the irradiated men by rubbing their prostate glands with pieces of wood inserted rectally. Later the men were subjected to orchiectomies, in which the researchers removed one or both testes.
Hirt had devised a new variation on this theme. He wanted to inject a foreign chemical—quite possibly the toxic dye trypaflavine—into the men’s testicles in hopes that this would lead to infertility.61 So he had male prisoners brought to him, one by one, and proceeded to give them the injection.62 His own ghoulish appearance added to the horror of the experiment, and the result was both humiliating and debilitating. As two French pathologists testified after the war, “assuming the most favorable hypothesis, that is to say that the injections were given under anesthesia, the secondary reaction of congestion and edema must have been very painful.”63
After administering the injections, Hirt wanted to wait at least eight days before testing the effect of the chemical on the men’s ability to produce sperm.64 So he permitted the male prisoners to live awhile longer. But neither he nor Beger seems to have had any further reason to keep the women alive after the racial measurements were completed. So on August 11, the killing began.65
THE COMMANDANT OF the Natzweiler camp, Josef Kramer, took personal charge of the slaughter. He was a notoriously brutal man, whom newspaper reporters later dubbed the “Beast of Belsen” after his barbarous behavior at the Bergen-Belsen camp. The son of an accountant, Kramer had joined the Nazi party in 1931 and had spent nine years working his way up through the concentration-camp system, learning to inflict misery on old Jewish men and split the skulls of Jewish women with one expert blow from his truncheon.66 At the age of thirty-six, he was a hardened killer. His deep-set eyes glowered from a stern face shaded by a heavy five o’clock shadow; his mouth pressed into a tight, hard line of determination.
Kramer waited until around nine in the evening on August 11 to begin carrying out his orders to kill the female prisoners. He and a few of his SS men gathered together some fifteen of the women Beger had selected and forced them into a small van.67 “I told these women that they had to go to the disinfection chamber and I did not tell them they were going to be asphyxiated,” Kramer recalled after his capture at the end of the war.68 They drove a short distance outside the camp fences and pulled up by the new gas chamber. The SS officers pushed the women roughly inside and ordered them to take off their clothes. By then, at least some of the women knew what was coming next, but Kramer and his men showed no pity. “Helped by a few SS,” he later remembered, “I undressed them completely and I pushed them in the gas chamber when they were completely naked.”69 Then he closed and locked the gas-chamber door. The women, he noted, “started to howl.”70
He retrieved the bottle of hydrogen-cyanide salts that Hirt had given him. He opened it up and poured its contents into a funnel located above and to the right of the chamber’s observation window, then closed the funnel. This sent the salts and a supply of water flowing down toward an opening in the chamber. As the salts mixed with the water, they formed a deadly gas that began to seep into the chamber below. The women inside pounded the door frantically, screaming and pleading to be let out. Kramer watched through the glass, taking it all in. “I lit the inside of the chamber with a switch plate near the funnel and I observed through the observation window what was going on inside of the chamber. I have seen that these women continued to breathe about half a minute and then they fell on the floor.”71
Two days later, Kramer executed the remainder of the women by the same method. He then ordered the bodies from both executions to be loaded into a small van and driven to the anatomical institute in Strassburg. Two years later, he recalled for investigators his own personal reaction to these mass murders. “I have not felt any emotion in doing these acts because I had received the order to execute these eighty inmates (sic) according to the way I have spoken to you.”72
THE VAN CARRYING the women’s bodies arrived at the anatomical institute in Strassburg at seven the next morning. Located near the old southern wall of the city, the institute was dark and quiet. Hirt had already instructed his staff to clean out the laboratory tanks they regularly used for preserving cadavers and to fill them with a solution of 50 percent alcohol. He informed them—erroneously as it turned out—that they would be receiving 120 cadavers.73 The laboratory assistant, Henri Henrypierre, a forced laborer, did not think there was anything particularly odd about this order. Strassburg’s anatomy institute regularly received shipments of dead bodies. Anatomists were in the habit of dissecting cadavers for medical research, preserving diseased or deformed human organs for teaching specimens. And students at the institute regularly dissected the dead as part of their medical training. For these purposes, Hirt had previously purchased through his SS connections the emaciated cadavers of Russian prisoners of war, who had perished of starvation and natural causes. The cost was 10 reichsmarks per cadaver.74
The new shipment from Natzweiler was not like the others, however. It consisted entirely of women, one of whom still modestly wore a brassiere.75 Henrypierre was shocked to see the condition of the women: most were young, healthy individuals under the age of thirty-two, “all of a commanding appearance,” as he told investigators after the war.76 Moreover, some of the bodies were still warm to the touch and their eyes shiny. Henrypierre guessed that they had perished no more than three hours earlier and he was certain they had not met a natural end. Some had clearly been beaten and abused. All had bled from the mouth and nose, which made Henrypierre think that they had been gassed or poisoned.
When he tried to discuss the matter with Hirt, the gaunt anatomist fixed him with a chilling look and warned that if he did not keep his mouth shut he would end up just like the women in the containers. Henrypierre was stunned. “I knew then that these people were killed for that purpose.”77 But the fact that Hirt had arranged the murder of twenty-nine females for the purposes of research did not disturb Hirt’s other assistant, Otto Bong, a German preparator that the anatomist had brought from Frankfurt. As the two men cleaned and prepared the women’s bodies, Bong told Henrypierre not to fret; the women were, he said, “only Jews.”78 Henrypierre could not stop thinking about their criminal deaths, however. He noticed that each woman had a long number tattooed on her left arm. When no one was watching, he wrote down a list of the tattooed numbers.79
Four days later, the driver from Natzweiler appeared again at the institute, bringing the corpses of a large group of men. Soon, the driver returned with a third and last shipment. Henrypierre examined the men’s bodies, once again secretly jotting down their tattooed numbers. Like the women, they were generally young and healthy, and they had been murdered in the same manner. But there was one important difference. Before the French preparator was allowed to immerse the bodies in alcohol, Bong insisted on taking tissue samples. With a scalpel in hand, he severed a testicle from each of the male cadavers.80
He placed the organs in a container and sent them on directly to Hirt’s personal laboratory.