THERE WAS NO MISTAKING the tense atmosphere in Himmler’s field headquarters in the late summer of 1943. A string of recent military and political disasters had sent the German high command reeling, and it was impossible to keep all the bad news from the German public. Allied troops had crushed the Wehrmacht in North Africa in May and then promptly turned their attention to Italy. Under the cloak of foul weather, the British army had landed tanks and heavy artillery along the southeastern coast of Sicily on July 10, while American forces had succeeded, against stiff resistance, fighting their way onto the island’s southwestern beaches. Less than two weeks later, the Allies had captured the Sicilian capital and were plotting their route west and north.
The news had badly rattled the confidence of the Italians and precipitated a coup d’état in Rome. The Italian king had ordered Benito Mussolini to step down as prime minister on July 25, curtly informing him that one of his most prominent critics, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, would be replacing him. Then the king arranged for Mussolini to be put under house arrest on the Mediterranean island of Ponza. The abrupt shift in leadership had sown much uncertainty in Germany on the eve of the Allied invasion of Italy. Moreover, the crisis had raised serious doubts in the minds of ordinary Germans about the stability of the Nazi regime. As one secret Security Service report noted, the idea that a similar coup d’état could take place in Germany “can be heard constantly.”1
All this was cause enough for concern to Himmler, but a further disaster had followed. In late July, the British Bomber Command had launched a major offensive on Hamburg. Dubbed Operation Gomorrah, the attack was intended to lay waste to Hamburg, residential districts and all, crushing the German will to resist. The British had discovered a technique for confusing German radar—releasing strips of aluminum from their planes that acted as decoys—and their bombers had begun slipping more easily past German defenses. So over a period of seven days beginning July 24, 1943, British planes brought a terrible apocalypse to Hamburg, unlike anything German civilians had previously seen. On July 28, for example, British high-explosive and incendiary bombs ignited a mammoth firestorm in the city. The flames towered more than a mile in the air and spread across eight square miles, whipping up hurricane-force winds that dismantled roofs, uprooted trees, and flung human beings through the air. Operation Gomorrah killed an estimated thirty thousand people. It left another one million homeless, fleeing in horror into the German countryside.2
A day after the Hamburg firestorm, on July 29, 1943, Himmler ordered the immediate evacuation of the Ahnenerbe—with its extensive library, archives, museum casts, and trove of documents—from Berlin.3 Sievers had already picked out a modest refuge in the German countryside for the staff.4 It was a small group, for many researchers had been called up to military service, while others had opted to go their own way. The Institute for Inner Asian Studies and Expeditions, headed by Ernst Schäfer, for example, had already begun moving from Munich to a castle in the Austrian countryside.5 And Walter Wüst, the head of the Ahnenerbe, intended to stay in Munich; he had been appointed rector of the university there. This had left Sievers with just thirty or so people to worry about.
After careful deliberation, he dispatched the Ahnenerbe’s prized library to safekeeping in a castle in Ulm. Then he moved the Ahnenerbe’s much-depleted staff and documents into a derelict seventeenth-century building known as the Steinhaus or Stone House, in the tiny village of Waischenfeld.6 And it was there in the quiet German countryside that he secretly signed the papers for and orchestrated some of the Ahnenerbe’s most terrible war crimes.
WAISCHENFELD IS SITUATED in the northern Bavarian countryside, just a short drive away from the city of Bayreuth, home of the famous Wagner Festival. But in the summer of 1943, the village was a remote backwater that lacked both a rail connection and good roads to the outside world.7 It possessed few cultural amenities—no theaters, libraries, symphony orchestras, museums—and little in the way of cafes or newsstands, and as such it came as something of a shock to the Ahnenerbe’s staff. Their sense of isolation was further compounded, moreover, by the wary attitude of Waischenfeld’s seven hundred residents, who had little use for the SS. During the mid-1930s, SS men stationed in the Steinhaus had bullied the villagers, attacked the local Catholic church, and beaten one local man so badly in a street fight that he later died of his injuries. After that, relations between Waischenfeld’s inhabitants and the SS were strained.
In their first few weeks in Waischenfeld, Sievers and his staff worked to convert the dusty Steinhaus into a functioning government office. The cramped, primitive conditions were a far cry from the luxurious villa in Dahlem, but Sievers managed to obtain approval to construct a barracks to house staff members. To pass the long evenings, some of the staff formed a choir and staged occasional evening entertainments of music and dance. But many of Sievers’s colleagues had trouble settling in. The Steinhaus, they complained, was cold and drafty. It was infested with mice. It lacked dependable telephone connections and was plagued with electrical problems. As Sievers’s own personal assistant confided in one letter to a friend, “It is not so easy to 1.) bring everything together under one umbrella and 2.) to up and move overnight to the country an entity that is accustomed to the city. Even the lack of a barber in town is a big stumbling-block, to say nothing of the lack of functioning, running water; a decent oven; etc.”8 It was becoming painfully obvious that few Ahnenerbe employees were really cut out for the country life that Himmler fondly envisioned for the SS.
Sievers, however, seemed to welcome the isolation. He moved his wife and children into rooms in the Steinhaus, and continued to proudly wear his SS uniform about the streets of Waischenfeld. He took pains to keep the villagers in the dark about the nature of the Ahnenerbe’s work. He refused to allow local people to enter the kitchen of the Steinhaus to deliver groceries: the food had to be left inside the guardroom. He also forbade his children to bring their friends from the village home after school. There was a reason for this mania for privacy, however. With most of the Ahnenerbe’s senior research staff serving in the thick of battle, Sievers had begun devoting more and more of his time in the small bucolic village to arranging and overseeing the Ahnenerbe’s top-secret medical experiments.
With Sievers’s gift for administration and with Wüst’s support behind the scenes, the Ahnenerbe had greatly expanded its medical research program at Dachau and Natzweiler, inflicting terrible human suffering. At Dachau, Dr. Sigmund Rascher had completed his high-altitude tests and had moved on to a new round of experiments. In search of data on how long German aviators could survive in the North Sea after parachuting from a downed aircraft, he inserted electrodes into the rectums of prisoners and then immersed them for as much as three hours in a tank filled with ice and water. As the men shuddered uncontrollably, lost consciousness, and succumbed to hypothermia, he looked on with clinical indifference, charting their rectal temperatures and failing pulses.9
Rascher then attempted to rewarm his subjects by a variety of methods—with mixed success. Several of his subjects died. In some cases, he placed the frozen men in hot baths or heated sleeping bags, or tried wrapping them in covers, but it was often a case of too little, much too late. For others, however, he obtained four women prisoners from Ravensbrück, adding intense humiliation to the pain of freezing.10 He brought a “spacious bed” into his laboratory, and laid the body of a frozen man in between two of the naked women, instructing them to nestle up as closely as possible and engage the man in sexual intercourse if they could.11 Rascher closely observed the behavior of the three, later calling these crimes of sadistic voyeurism “Experiments for rewarming of intensely chilled human beings by animal warmth.”12 He then rounded out his data by placing naked prisoners outdoors in the dead of winter for up to fourteen hours.13 He paid no heed to their screams of pain. In all, as many as 108 of Rascher’s 360 human subjects died in the various freezing experiments.14
Sievers also obtained approval for Rascher to conduct experiments on a possible styptic for staunching the gunshot wounds of soldiers. The substance in question was called Polygal. Made from beets and apple pectin, it was a gelatinous substance generally used in the manufacture of marmalade.15 A prisoner at Dachau had proposed making Polygal in tablet form, and Rascher was keen to see whether an oral dose would help coagulate the blood flowing from open wounds. To test this premise, he proposed shooting prisoners at close range. In one documented case, he asked an SS guard to climb atop a chair and shoot a “Russian Commissar” standing directly below.16 The bullet entered the unfortunate man’s right shoulder and exited near his spleen. Over the next twenty minutes, the victim “twitched convulsively,” then slumped into a chair and died.17 Rascher then had the body carried to his autopsy table, where he searched for evidence of any ruptured organs that might be “tamponed by hard blood clots.”18
Rascher’s experiments were monstrous, and he was by no means the only Ahnenerbe physician meting out great suffering. August Hirt, the physician who had helped plan the deaths of the Jewish prisoners for the skeleton collection, continued to expose camp inmates to poisonous mustard gas in order to test potential new treatments. And under Hirt’s direction, two other German physicians had joined the Ahnenerbe’s medical program. Dr. Niels Eugen Haagen, one of Germany’s leading experts on viral diseases, performed medical tests on a group of one hundred healthy prisoners at Natzweiler.19 He inoculated these victims with an experimental typhus vaccine and tested its effectiveness by exposing them to the potentially lethal disease. Meanwhile, a second physician, Dr. Werner Bickenbach, ran tests with phosgene gas, a substance used in chemical warfare. He hoped to develop an antidote.20
Bickenbach used the small gas chamber at Natzweiler for the experiments, and one survivor later recalled how they worked.21 Bickenbach, he said, injected some of the men with a mystery substance and gave others medicine to drink. He blithely assured them that no one would die and that all would receive first-rate medical treatment. Then he led them, four at a time, into the gas chamber. After instructing them where to stand, he walked toward the door, threw two small capsules onto the ground, and quickly exited. Before long, colorless phosgene gas filled the air and the men began coughing and choking. One man died immediately in the chamber. The other three were retrieved and sent to a barracks near the crematorium. Three days later, a second man from the group perished in agony. “He coughed up pink-red blood,” recalled a survivor, “and the longer it took, the more bits of lung tissue came out of his mouth. He was aware of everything the whole time, until the end. We were not allowed to drink anything—the water faucet was turned off. Eckstein died in my arms.”22 In all Bickenbach subjected 150 people to these murderous experiments. An estimated 35 to 40 died.23
Sievers made certain that the experiments ran smoothly and that researchers had everything they required. From time to time, he and Himmler paid visits to the laboratory at Dachau. These were more than formal inspections. Both men seem to have relished watching the experiments.
AS THE INHABITANTS of Waischenfeld whispered about Sievers and his secretive work, people in the small Austrian town of Mittersill worried about another group of Ahnenerbe officers lodged in the nearby castle.24 The castle of Mittersill had once been a fashionable resort for Europe’s titled and moneyed set.25 Perched on a mountain slope overlooking the scenic Pinzgau Valley, some seventy kilometers from Salzburg, the sixteenth-century castle commanded a stunning view of the Austrian countryside. It lay in some of the best hunting and fishing country in Europe and offered luxury accommodations. When Princess Juliana of the Netherlands married in 1937, she and her husband planned to spend ten days of their honeymoon at Mittersill; they ended up lingering for six weeks.
But the Anschluss had cast a heavy shadow on Mittersill. The castle’s owner had fled to America, and a mysterious fire had swept through the premises, leaving behind a good deal of smoking rubble. Nazi officials had stolen the fine furniture, rugs, and porcelain.26 Still, parts of the castle were salvageable, and in the summer of 1943, as the tide of war began turning strongly against Germany, the Ahnenerbe’s largest research department obtained a lease for the palatial dwelling and moved in. Led by Ernst Schäfer, the department consisted of nearly a dozen scientists, and was known to outsiders by the name of the Sven Hedin Reich Institute for Inner Asian Studies, after the famous Swedish explorer and Nazi sympathizer.27
Himmler had supplied the institute with everything it needed: money, plenty of gasoline vouchers, vehicles, and a dozen or so workers—concentration-camp prisoners and forced laborers from Russia. These were ethnic Germans who had been uprooted against their will and put to work in the Reich.28 While this labor force cleaned and repaired the castle, the senior researchers set about furnishing the drafty rooms. Much to Beger’s annoyance, they raided the Tibetan ethnographic collection, stirring trays of chemicals in the institute’s darkroom with small arrows that Tibetans had used for warding off ghosts, and drying their feet on rare Tibetan carpets that doubled as bathmats.29
In his office at Mittersill, Beger toiled away on the Jewish skeleton project. The maceration machine for rendering the cadavers of the murdered Jews into tidy skeletons had failed to arrive in Strassburg—quite possibly because Allied bombers destroyed the factory where it was supposed to be manufactured.30 But this setback did not stop Beger.31 He had managed to lay hands on some Jewish skulls, perhaps from a museum or a university department anxious to stow a precious collection in a safe place, or possibly from the Strassburg preparator Otto Bong, who may have begun defleshing a few of the murdered Jews by other maceration methods.32 Either way, Beger had obtained a collection of Jewish skulls, and he seems to have been working on them. His assistant Wilhelm Gabel was finishing off the head casts of the murdered prisoners.33
And although little good news made its way from the eastern front, Beger’s mind still buzzed with racial research projects. He wanted to send one of his Mittersill colleagues, Rudolf Trojan, to measure and examine Russian prisoners of war.34 He was also keen to examine the behavior of different races on the battlefield—research he believed would prove of immense importance to the Wehrmacht.35 He could not stop churning out these ideas, and day after day, he dreamed of new projects for parsing and classifying humanity.
In the mid-spring of 1944, Himmler himself chose to pay a visit to Mittersill. He arrived quite suddenly on May 12, without giving any advance warning.36 Ernst Schäfer’s second wife, Ursula, was sitting in her family’s private apartment, chatting with her mother, when the SS leader suddenly walked in through the door. She was shocked to see one of the most powerful men in the Reich cross the room. Attentive as he often was to social pleasantries, he kissed her mother’s hand, but he offered no such gallantry to Ursula Schäfer. Himmler had already conducted his own silent racial test on her. He thought her too Slavic in appearance, with her high, broad cheekbones.37
When Schäfer arrived to greet Himmler, the two men headed off on a tour of the castle. Himmler seemed pleased by what he saw, remarking with genuine interest on the institute’s racial work.38 Later in the evening, Schäfer accompanied Himmler on a stroll along the castle walls at Mittersill. Himmler gazed down contentedly at the quiet Austrian town below. Although it was still early in the evening, most of the lights in the houses below were out—a good sign, in Himmler’s view, that the townspeople were busy conceiving more sons for the Reich.39 Soon after this, Himmler left.
Schäfer later told his wife that he thought the SS chief had paid them a visit in order to size up Mittersill as a possible hiding place for the end of the war. Tucked away in the Austrian Alps, the castle must have seemed an appealing lair.
IN THE EARLY morning of June 6, 1944, Allied troops slid into the cold waters off the Normandy coast, ducking heavy enemy fire. The German military had prepared for months for just such an invasion in Normandy, planting deadly underwater mines and an assortment of treacherous metal obstacles in the shallow waters. Along the shore, the Germans had installed a ribbon of pillboxes and machine-gun nests, intent on annihilating Allied troops as they waded through the shallows. The Normandy beaches were terrible death traps, and some of the German infantry divisions stationed nearby knew exactly how to use them. But despite their heavy and very precise fire, American, British, and Canadian forces managed to clamber to shore, and by eleven in the morning, a few German defenders were spotted abandoning their posts and surrendering to American troops.40 That evening, the heaviest fighting was over on the shores of Normandy, and the Allied armies had established their beachheads.
Over the next three months, Allied troops liberated much of France, rapidly advancing toward the green valleys of Alsace. Unable to stop them, the SS evacuated the concentration camp at Natzweiler, marching the feeble survivors eastward toward Dachau. In Strassburg, August Hirt paced anxiously across the floor of his office. He was a worried man. His assistant Otto Bong had yet to finish making casts of the prisoners killed for the Jewish Skeleton Collection. Worse still, he had failed to deflesh most of their corpses, and the Allied forces were now heading toward Strassburg. For Hirt, this posed a great dilemma. He was keen to complete his work on the skeleton collection. But he knew that if the Americans or the French found readily identifiable corpses, he risked arrest for war crimes. What was he to do?
Unable to see his way clear, he took up the matter with Sievers, who referred the problem to Himmler’s personal administrative officer on September 4, 1944. Should the collection be preserved? Or should Hirt render the bodies virtually unidentifiable by removing all the soft tissue? Or would Himmler prefer more drastic action—the complete destruction of the bodies?41 Himmler and his staff seem to have dithered over the problem, but in mid-October, a certain SS-Hauptsturmführer Berg issued orders to destroy all the bodies “if Strassburg should be endangered because of the military situation.”42 To soften the blow, Sievers assured Hirt that it was only a temporary setback. He and his team would be able to repeat the study, Sievers promised, if they were permitted “to work and research peacefully.”43
Thus mollified, Hirt instructed his assistants to dissect the remaining cadavers, place them in coffins, and consign them to the incinerator, just as the corpses used in anatomy lessons were. But before he released the bodies to his assistants, he committed a final indignity. He pried loose the mouths of the dead prisoners and pocketed their gold teeth.44 Then he prepared to flee eastward to the German city of Tubingen, just across the Rhine. A few days later, on October 21, Sievers notified Himmler’s staff that Hirt had complied with the orders, completely destroying the Jewish Skeleton Collection.45
French troops liberated Strassburg a month later, and it was not long after this that French authorities learned that a scientific institute at the Reich University of Strassburg had been in constant contact with the Natzweiler concentration camp. Investigators quickly descended upon Hirt’s anatomy institute, combing the offices and laboratories for evidence of war crimes. In one of the labs, they discovered sixteen cadavers of young and relatively healthy-looking men and women floating naked in containers filled with an alcohol solution. They also found remains from another seventy bodies, including fifty-four glass microscope slides containing human testicular tissue.46
Suspecting the worst, the investigators fished the bodies from the tanks, one by one, examining them carefully for clues to their identities. Someone had cut off a patch of skin from the left arms of fifteen of the bodies. But along the arm of one male, a tattooed concentration-camp number could be clearly seen.
IN EARLY JANUARY 1945, French and British journalists began filing the first newspaper stories on Hirt’s atrocities at Natzweiler. Sievers was stunned to read their reports. For weeks, he had tried keeping up the old appearances at Waischenfeld, sitting in his office, reading official letters and dictating replies to his secretary as if everything were under control. But the charade had become increasingly difficult to maintain.47 Telephone calls from the outside world had tapered off noticeably, and the courier brought fewer letters to the office in Waischenfeld. Food was growing scarce, and soon there would be no fuel left for the vehicles. The Ahnenerbe’s connection to the world was growing more tenuous by the day. Sievers hated it. He had pinned everything on Himmler and Hitler and their seemingly boundless power, and he was beginning to see just how foolish he had been.
The Reich’s foreign affairs ministry proposed fighting the ugly stories coming out of Natzweiler, hoping even then to paste together the tattered facade of Nazi respectability.48 It requested a statement from Hirt that would somehow explain away the evidence of the atrocity, and Sievers dutifully relayed the request to the anatomist, who was safely lodged, along with many of his former university colleagues, in Tubingen. There was talk of resurrecting the Reich University of Strassburg just as soon as military conditions permitted, and the administration had appointed Hirt as its new dean of medicine, the former dean having been captured. As a result, Hirt was keeping busy, searching for accommodations for the exiled faculty, but he still hoped to resume the experiments at the earliest opportunity.
Sievers believed that the newspaper reports of Hirt’s work were mere propaganda, based solely on rumors and suspicion. Hirt, after all, had informed him that all material evidence of the skeleton collection was destroyed.49 So he encouraged Hirt to pen a strong denial. The anatomist followed the advice, for he feared that an international scandal would damage his scientific reputation in Germany and abroad.50 In his statement, he described an article in the Daily Mail disparagingly as a “typical atrocity story.”51 The corpses discovered in the anatomical institute, he declared, were simply bodies used to teach medical students the practice of dissection. They had been obtained from the same legal sources that French anatomists had previously used to obtain cadavers. He also observed that he had conducted only animal experiments at Natzweiler, and he completely denied any involvement in Rassenkunde studies. “I do not know anything about racial research and have never received such an order,” he stated. “The only thing which has to do with race in my institute is the large anthropological collection of skulls which was built prior to the First World War.”52
Sievers thought Hirt’s blatant lies were “excellent.”53 But the experience seems to have instilled in the official a new sense of caution. He ordered the staff at Mittersill to destroy all correspondence, photographs, and other materials related to “the matter Auschwitz/Prof. Dr. Hirt Strassburg.”54 He then began burning boxes of incriminating documents in the courtyard of the Steinhaus itself.55