Plate 14: Location of former barrack blocks (contemporary photograph)
The location of the 34 barrack blocks meant that they were separated by the camp road, the even numbered barracks to the west and the odd numbered to the east.
The original barrack blocks were demolished over forty years ago; all that remains are individually numbered concrete rectangles, filled with gravel to remind survivors, relatives of the dead and others paying their respects where the barracks once stood.
The space between blocks 3 and 5 carries a particularly brutal legacy; this was where the Nazis positioned an airtight van, which was used to reproduce the pressure conditions to be found at high altitude. SS doctors carried out medical experiments on prisoners as a way to ‘further the progress of German medical science’.59 These experiments were conducted between March and August 1942, designed to test the atmospheric pressure a German air force pilot would face when rapidly descending from a high altitude, over 36,000 feet, without any oxygen.60 Two hundred prisoners, mostly Russians, Poles, Jews and German political prisoners were selected for these criminal experiments, and 78 men were murdered as a result.61
Other medical experiments, in the form of immersion-hypothermia, were carried out between the summer of 1942 and May 1943. These experiments involved freezing, and were conducted to examine how the human body could be re-warmed after being severely chilled. Iced water and dry freezing conditions were reproduced, and the effects of these conditions tested on the prisoners. In common with the high altitude experiments, these tests were linked to the progress of the war. The iced water experiments were conducted to assist the survival of German pilots and aircrew that were ditching into cold seas, whilst the dry freezing conditions were linked to the Soviet theatre and designed to assist German soldiers who were fighting in below-freezing conditions. These tests were carried out on 280 to 300 prisoners, and around 90 of them died.62
Gypsy prisoners who arrived from Buchenwald Concentration Camp in 1944 were forced to take part in equally hideous medical experiments involving sea water.63 The sea water experiments were conducted on 44 gypsies from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany, whose ages ranged from 16 to 44; the tests were designed as part of an effort to make sea water drinkable through a process of desalinisation. The rationale behind these experiments was that if sea water could be made potable, then this could go towards saving the lives of German aircrew whom had baled out of their aircraft into the sea, and naval personnel clinging to the wreckage of sinking ships.
These experiments were conducted in the following way. 44 gypsies were divided into four groups; the first group did not receive any water, the second had to drink sea water, the third group consumed sea water which had undergone a technique called Berkatit (this merely concealed the taste of the salt but did not remove it), and the final group drank sea water which had been treated so that the salt had been removed.64 These experiments were pure torture; prisoners suffered from a range of the most painful conditions including hallucination, foaming at the mouth, diarrhoea and in the majority of instances, madness and death.65
The Dachau Concentration Camp malaria experiments were conducted over three years and involved 1,084 prisoners. The experiments were the longest running in the camp, commencing in February 1942 and ending in April 1945, and those forced to take part were from numerous nationalities, including a number of clergymen. Prisoners considered healthy (by camp standards) were deliberately infected with malaria either by blood, which was infected with the disease, or directly from mosquitoes. The motivation for conducting the malaria experiments was that it was one of the main diseases encountered by the Nazis in some of the countries they had occupied in Eastern Europe. These criminal malaria experiments led directly to the deaths of thirty prisoners. The ongoing side effects, difficulties and complications were later to cause the demise of three to four hundred prisoners who had been selected to take part.66