Nazi medical experiments. Horrors of war: Terrible experiments of German scientists on people (1 photo)

The medical experiments of the Nazis on people in concentration camps, even today, terrify the most resilient minds. A whole series of scientific experiments were carried out by the Nazis on prisoners during the Second World War. Typically, most experiments resulted in the prisoner's death, disfigurement, or incapacitation. The experiments were carried out not only for technological breakthroughs that were being developed to help German soldiers in combat situations, but also to create new weapons and techniques for treating wounded German soldiers. The goal was also to confirm the racial theory that the Third Reich adhered to.

Doctor Devil

January 30, 1933, Berlin. Professor Blots Clinic. An ordinary medical institution, which competing doctors sometimes call the “devil’s clinic.” Alfred Blots is not liked by his medical colleagues, but they still listen to his opinion. It is known in the scientific community that he was the first to study the effects of poisonous gases on the human genetic system. But Blots did not make the results of his research public. On January 30, Alfred Blots sent a congratulatory telegram to the new Chancellor of Germany, in which he proposed a program of new research in the field of genetics. He received the answer: “Your research is of interest to Germany. They must be continued. Adolf Gitler".

In the 20s, Alfred Blots traveled around the country giving lectures on what “eugenics” was. He considers himself the founder of a new science, his main idea is “racial purity of the nation.” Some call it the struggle for a healthy lifestyle. Blots argues that the human future can be simulated at the genetic level, in the womb, and this will happen at the end of the 20th century. They listened to him and were surprised, but no one called him “the devil doctor.”

In 1933, Hitler believed German geneticists. They promised the Fuhrer that within 20-40 years they would raise a new person, aggressive and obedient to the authorities. The conversation was about cyborgs, biological soldiers of the Third Reich. Hitler was excited about this idea. During one of Blots' lectures in Munich, a scandal broke out. When asked what the doctor proposed to do with the patients, Blots answered “sterilize or kill.” In the mid-30s, a new symbol of Germany appeared, the glass woman. After Hitler came to power, the Fuhrer actively supported the development of German medicine and biology. Funding for scientific research increased tenfold, and doctors were declared the elite. In the Nazi state, this profession was considered the most important, since its representatives were responsible for the purity of the German race. According to Blots, the world was originally divided into “healthy” and “unhealthy” peoples. This is confirmed by genetic and medical research data. The goal of eugenics is to save humanity from disease and self-destruction. According to German scientists, Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Chinese, and blacks are nations with an inadequate psyche, weak immunity, and an increased ability to transmit diseases. The salvation of the nation lies in the sterilization of some peoples and the controlled birth rate of others. In the mid-30s, on a small estate near Berlin, a secret facility was located. This is the Fuhrer's medical school, its activities are patronized by Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy. Every year, medical workers, obstetricians and doctors gathered here. You couldn’t come to school of your own free will. The students were selected by the Nazis, the party. SS doctors selected personnel who took advanced training courses at the medical school. This school trained doctors to work in concentration camps, but at first these personnel were used for the sterilization program in the second half of the 30s.

In 1937, Karl Brant became the official boss of German medicine. This man is responsible for the health of the Germans. According to the sterilization program, Karl Brant and his subordinates could use euthanasia to get rid of mentally ill people, disabled people and children with disabilities. Thus, the Third Reich got rid of “extra mouths”, because military policy does not imply the presence of social support. Brant completed his task - before the war, the German nation was cleared of psychopaths, disabled people and freaks. Then more than 100 thousand adults were killed, and gas chambers were used for the first time.

In 1947, there were 23 doctors in the dock at Nuremberg. They were tried for turning medical science into a monster that was subservient to the interests of the Third Reich. Here are a number of those terrible and bloody experiments on people that were carried out within the walls of the concentration camps:

Pressure

The German medic Hauptsturmführer SS Sigmund Rascher was too concerned about the problems that Third Reich pilots could have at an altitude of 20 kilometers. Therefore, as the chief physician at the Dachau concentration camp, he created special pressure chambers in which he placed prisoners and experimented with pressure. After this, the scientist opened the skulls of the victims and examined their brains. 200 people took part in this experiment. 80 died on the surgical table, the remaining 120 were shot. After the war, Sigmund Rascher was executed for his inhuman crimes.

Homosexuality

Homosexuals have no place on the planet. At least that's what the Nazis thought. Therefore, for this purpose, by secret decree of the SS, led by Dr. Karl Wernet, a series of hormonal experiments were carried out on homosexual prisoners. In 1943, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, having learned about the research of the Danish doctor Wernet on the “cure of homosexuality,” invites him to conduct research in the Reich at the Buchenwald base. Experiments on humans were started by Wernet in July 1944. Some of the prisoners entered into the experiment voluntarily, in the hope of being released from the camp after “healing”; the rest were forced. Capsules with a “male hormone” were sewn into the groins of gay prisoners, then the healed were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, which housed many women convicted of prostitution. The camp leadership instructed the women to approach the “healed” men and have sexual intercourse with them. History is silent about the results of such experiments.

Sterilization

Carl Clauberg was a German doctor who became famous for sterilization during World War II. From March 1941 to January 1945, the scientist tried to find a way to make millions of people infertile in the shortest possible time. Clauberg succeeded: the doctor injected prisoners of Auschwitz, Revensbrück and other concentration camps with iodine and silver nitrate. Although such injections had a lot of side effects (bleeding, pain and cancer), they successfully sterilized the person. But Clauberg’s favorite was radiation exposure: a person was invited to a special chamber with a chair, sitting on which he filled out questionnaires. And then the victim simply left, not suspecting that she would never be able to have children again. Often such exposures resulted in serious radiation burns.

It is also known that fascist doctors, on orders from the highest circles of Nazi Germany, sterilized more than four hundred thousand people.

White phosphorus

From November 1941 to January 1944, drugs that could treat white phosphorus burns were tested on the human body in Buchenwald. It is not known whether the Nazis managed to invent a panacea, but these experiments took away many of the lives of prisoners.

Poisons

The food in Buchenwald was not the best. This was especially felt from December 1943 to October 1944. At this time, the Nazis carried out experiments with poisons over the postmortem in the Bachenwald concentration camp, where approximately 250 thousand people were imprisoned. Various poisons were secretly mixed into the prisoners' food and their reactions were observed. Prisoners died after poisoning, and were also killed by concentration camp guards to perform autopsies on the body, through which the poison did not have time to spread. It is known that in the fall of 1944, prisoners were shot with bullets that contained poison, and then the gunshot wounds were examined.

In September 1944, the Germans got tired of messing around with experimental subjects. Therefore, all participants in the experiment were shot.

Malaria

These Nazi medical experiments took place from early 1942 to mid-1945, in Nazi Germany at the Dachau concentration camp. Research was carried out during which German doctors and pharmacists worked on the invention of a vaccine against the infectious disease malaria. For the experiment, physically healthy experimental subjects aged from 25 to 40 years were specially selected, and they were infected with the help of mosquitoes that carried the infection. After the prisoners were infected, they were prescribed a course of treatment with various drugs and injections, which in turn were also at the testing stage. Over one thousand people were forced to participate in the experiments. More than five hundred people died during the experiments. The German physician, SS Sturmbannführer Kurt Plötner, was responsible for the research.

Mustard gas

From the autumn of 1939 to the spring of 1945, near the city of Oranienburg in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, as well as in other camps in Germany, experiments were carried out with mustard gas. The purpose of the research was to identify the most effective methods of treating wounds after skin exposure to this type of gas. Prisoners were doused with mustard gas, which, when it reached the surface of the skin, caused severe chemical burns. Afterwards, doctors studied the wounds to determine the most effective medicine against this type of burn.

Sea water

Scientific experiments were carried out in the Dachau concentration camp, approximately from the summer to autumn of 1944. The purpose of the experiments was to identify how fresh water could be obtained from sea water, that is, one that would be suitable for human consumption. A group of prisoners was created, which included about 90 Roma. During the experiment, they did not receive food and drank only sea water. As a result, their bodies were so dehydrated that people licked the moisture from the freshly washed floor in the hope of getting at least a drop of water. The person responsible for the research was Wilhelm Beiglböck, who received fifteen years in prison at the Nuremberg doctors' trial.

Sulfanilamide

From the summer of 1942 to the autumn of 1943, research was carried out on the use of antibacterial drugs. One such drug is sulfonamide, a synthetic antimicrobial agent. People were deliberately shot in the leg and infected with anaerobic gangrene, tetanus and streptococcus bacteria. Blood circulation was stopped by applying tourniquets on both sides of the wound. Crushed glass and wood shavings were also poured into the wound. The resulting bacterial inflammation was treated with sulfonamide, as well as other drugs, to see how effective they were. The Nazi medical experiments were led by Karl Franz Gebhardt, who was on friendly terms with the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler himself.

Experiments on twins

Nazi medical experiments on children who were unlucky enough to be born twins and end up in concentration camps at the time were carried out by Nazi scientists to detect differences and similarities in the DNA structure of the twins. The doctor involved in this kind of experiment was named Joseph Mengele. According to historians, during his work Joseph killed more than four hundred thousand prisoners in gas chambers. The German scientist conducted his experiments on 1,500 pairs of twins, of which only two hundred pairs survived. Basically, all experiments on children were carried out in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

The twins were divided into groups according to age and status, and were placed in specialized barracks. The experiments were truly monstrous. Various chemicals were injected into the twins' eyes. They also tried to artificially change the color of children's eyes. It is also known that the twins were sewn together, thereby trying to recreate the phenomenon of Siamese twins. Experiments on changing eye color often ended in the death of the experimental subject, as well as infection of the retina and complete loss of vision. Joseph Mengele very often infected one of the twins, and then performed an autopsy on both children and compared the organs of the affected and normal organisms.

Frostbite

German soldiers on the Eastern Front had a hard time in winter: they had a hard time enduring the harsh Russian winters. Therefore, Sigmund Rascher conducted experiments in Dachau and Auschwitz, with the help of which he tried to find a way to quickly resuscitate military personnel after frostbite. To this end, at the very beginning of the war, the German air force conducted a series of experiments on hypothermia of the human body. The method of cooling a person was the same; the experimental subject was placed in a barrel of ice water for several hours. It is also known for sure that there was another mocking method of cooling the human body. The prisoner was simply thrown out into the cold weather, naked, and kept there for three hours. Most often, experiments were carried out on men to study ways in which fascist troops could easily endure severe frosts on the Eastern European front. It was the frosts, for which the German troops were not prepared, that caused Germany’s defeat on the Eastern Front.

A German physician and part-time Ahnenerbe employee, Sigmund Rascher, reported only to Reich Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler. In 1942, at a conference on oceanic and winter research, Rascher gave a speech from which one could learn about the results of his medical experiments in concentration camps. The research was divided into several stages. At the first stage, German scientists studied how long a person could live at a minimum temperature. The second stage was the resuscitation and rescue of a test subject who had suffered severe frostbite.

Experiments were also conducted to study how to instantly warm a person. The first method of warming up was to lower the subject into a tank of hot water. In the second case, the frozen man was settled on a naked woman, and then another one was settled on him. Women for the experiment were selected from among those held in the concentration camp. The best result was achieved in the first case.

Research results have shown that it is almost impossible to save a person exposed to frostbite in water if the back of the head is also exposed to frostbite. In this regard, special life jackets were developed that prevented the back of the head from falling into the water. This made it possible to protect the head of the person wearing the vest from frostbite of brain stem cells. These days, almost all life jackets have a similar headrest.

After the war, all these experiments carried out by the Nazis on people served as the reason for the Nuremberg Medical Tribunal, as well as the impetus for the development of the Nuremberg Code of Medical Ethics.

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The Great Patriotic War left an indelible mark on the history and destinies of people. Many lost loved ones who were killed or tortured. In the article we will look at the Nazi concentration camps and the atrocities that happened on their territories.

What is a concentration camp?

A concentration camp or concentration camp is a special place intended for the detention of persons of the following categories:

• political prisoners (opponents of the dictatorial regime);
• prisoners of war (captured soldiers and civilians).

Nazi concentration camps became notorious for their inhuman cruelty to prisoners and impossible conditions of detention. These places of detention began to appear even before Hitler came to power, and even then they were divided into women's, men's and children's. Mainly Jews and opponents of the Nazi system were kept there.

Life in the camp

Humiliation and abuse for prisoners began from the moment of transportation. People were transported in freight cars, where there was not even running water or a fenced-off latrine. Prisoners had to relieve themselves publicly, in a tank standing in the middle of the carriage.

But this was only the beginning; a lot of abuse and torture were prepared for the concentration camps of fascists who were undesirable to the Nazi regime. Torture of women and children, medical experiments, aimless exhausting work - this is not the whole list.

The conditions of detention can be judged from the prisoners’ letters: “they lived in hellish conditions, ragged, barefoot, hungry... I was constantly and severely beaten, deprived of food and water, tortured...”, “They shot me, flogged me, poisoned me with dogs, drowned me in water, beat me to death.” with sticks and starvation. They were infected with tuberculosis... suffocated by a cyclone. Poisoned with chlorine. They burned..."

The corpses were skinned and hair cut off - all this was then used in the German textile industry. The doctor Mengele became famous for his horrific experiments on prisoners, at whose hands thousands of people died. He studied mental and physical exhaustion of the body. He conducted experiments on twins, during which they received organ transplants from each other, blood transfusions, and sisters were forced to give birth to children from their own brothers. Performed sex reassignment surgery.

All fascist concentration camps became famous for such abuses; we will look at the names and conditions of detention in the main ones below.

Camp diet

Typically, the daily ration in the camp was as follows:

• bread - 130 gr;
• fat - 20 g;
• meat - 30 g;
• cereal - 120 gr;
• sugar - 27 gr.

Bread was handed out, and the rest of the products were used for cooking, which consisted of soup (issued 1 or 2 times a day) and porridge (150 - 200 grams). It should be noted that such a diet was intended only for working people. Those who, for some reason, remained unemployed received even less. Usually their portion consisted of only half a portion of bread.

List of concentration camps in different countries

Fascist concentration camps were created in the territories of Germany, allied and occupied countries. There are a lot of them, but let’s name the main ones:

• In Germany - Halle, Buchenwald, Cottbus, Dusseldorf, Schlieben, Ravensbrück, Esse, Spremberg;
• Austria - Mauthausen, Amstetten;
• France - Nancy, Reims, Mulhouse;
• Poland - Majdanek, Krasnik, Radom, Auschwitz, Przemysl;
• Lithuania - Dimitravas, Alytus, Kaunas;
• Czechoslovakia - Kunta Gora, Natra, Hlinsko;
• Estonia - Pirkul, Pärnu, Klooga;
• Belarus - Minsk, Baranovichi;
• Latvia - Salaspils.

And this is not a complete list of all concentration camps that were built by Nazi Germany in the pre-war and war years.

Salaspils

Salaspils, one might say, is the most terrible Nazi concentration camp, because in addition to prisoners of war and Jews, children were also kept there. It was located on the territory of occupied Latvia and was the central eastern camp. It was located near Riga and operated from 1941 (September) to 1944 (summer).

Children in this camp were not only kept separately from adults and exterminated en masse, but were used as blood donors for German soldiers. Every day, about half a liter of blood was taken from all children, which led to the rapid death of donors.

Salaspils was not like Auschwitz or Majdanek (extermination camps), where people were herded into gas chambers and then their corpses were burned. It was used for medical research, which killed more than 100,000 people. Salaspils was not like other Nazi concentration camps. Torture of children was a routine activity here, carried out according to a schedule with the results carefully recorded.

Experiments on children

Testimony of witnesses and results of investigations revealed the following methods of extermination of people in the Salaspils camp: beating, starvation, arsenic poisoning, injection of dangerous substances (most often to children), surgical operations without painkillers, pumping out blood (only from children), executions, torture, useless heavy labor (carrying stones from place to place), gas chambers, burying alive. In order to save ammunition, the camp charter prescribed that children should be killed only with rifle butts. The atrocities of the Nazis in the concentration camps surpassed everything that humanity had seen in modern times. Such an attitude towards people cannot be justified, because it violates all conceivable and inconceivable moral commandments.

Children did not stay with their mothers for long and were usually quickly taken away and distributed. Thus, children under six years of age were kept in a special barracks where they were infected with measles. But they did not treat it, but aggravated the disease, for example, by bathing, which is why the children died within 3-4 days. The Germans killed more than 3,000 people in one year in this way. The bodies of the dead were partly burned and partly buried on the camp grounds.

The Act of the Nuremberg Trials “on the extermination of children” provided the following numbers: during the excavation of only a fifth of the concentration camp territory, 633 bodies of children aged 5 to 9 years, arranged in layers, were discovered; an area soaked in an oily substance was also found, where the remains of unburned children’s bones (teeth, ribs, joints, etc.) were found.

Salaspils is truly the most terrible Nazi concentration camp, because the atrocities described above are not all the tortures that the prisoners were subjected to. Thus, in winter, children brought in were driven barefoot and naked to a barracks for half a kilometer, where they had to wash themselves in icy water. After this, the children were driven in the same way to the next building, where they were kept in the cold for 5-6 days. Moreover, the age of the eldest child did not even reach 12 years. Everyone who survived this procedure was also subjected to arsenic poisoning.

Infants were kept separately and given injections, from which the child died in agony within a few days. They gave us coffee and poisoned cereals. About 150 children died from experiments per day. The bodies of the dead were carried out in large baskets and burned, dumped in cesspools, or buried near the camp.

Ravensbrück

If we start listing Nazi women's concentration camps, Ravensbrück will come first. This was the only camp of this type in Germany. It could accommodate thirty thousand prisoners, but by the end of the war it was overcrowded by fifteen thousand. Mostly Russian and Polish women were detained; Jews numbered approximately 15 percent. There were no prescribed instructions regarding torture and torment; the supervisors chose the line of behavior themselves.

Arriving women were undressed, shaved, washed, given a robe and assigned a number. Race was also indicated on clothing. People turned into impersonal cattle. In small barracks (in the post-war years, 2-3 refugee families lived in them) there were approximately three hundred prisoners, who were housed on three-story bunks. When the camp was overcrowded, up to a thousand people were herded into these cells, all of whom had to sleep on the same bunks. The barracks had several toilets and a washbasin, but there were so few of them that after a few days the floors were littered with excrement. Almost all Nazi concentration camps presented this picture (the photos presented here are only a small fraction of all the horrors).

But not all women ended up in the concentration camp; a selection was made beforehand. The strong and resilient, fit for work, were left behind, and the rest were destroyed. Prisoners worked at construction sites and sewing workshops.

Gradually, Ravensbrück was equipped with a crematorium, like all Nazi concentration camps. Gas chambers (nicknamed gas chambers by prisoners) appeared towards the end of the war. Ashes from crematoria were sent to nearby fields as fertilizer.

Experiments were also carried out in Ravensbrück. In a special barracks called the “infirmary,” German scientists tested new drugs, first infecting or crippling experimental subjects. There were few survivors, but even those suffered from what they had endured until the end of their lives. Experiments were also conducted with the irradiation of women with X-rays, which caused hair loss, skin pigmentation, and death. Excisions of the genital organs were carried out, after which few survived, and even those quickly aged, and at the age of 18 they looked like old women. Similar experiments were carried out in all Nazi concentration camps; torture of women and children was the main crime of Nazi Germany against humanity.

At the time of the liberation of the concentration camp by the Allies, five thousand women remained there; the rest were killed or transported to other places of detention. The Soviet troops who arrived in April 1945 adapted the camp barracks to accommodate refugees. Ravensbrück later became a base for Soviet military units.

Nazi concentration camps: Buchenwald

Construction of the camp began in 1933, near the town of Weimar. Soon, Soviet prisoners of war began to arrive, becoming the first prisoners, and they completed the construction of the “hellish” concentration camp.

The structure of all structures was strictly thought out. Immediately behind the gate began the “Appelplat” (parallel ground), specially designed for the formation of prisoners. Its capacity was twenty thousand people. Not far from the gate there was a punishment cell for interrogations, and opposite there was an office where the camp fuehrer and the officer on duty - the camp authorities - lived. Deeper down were the barracks for prisoners. All barracks were numbered, there were 52 of them. At the same time, 43 were intended for housing, and workshops were set up in the rest.

The Nazi concentration camps left behind a terrible memory; their names still evoke fear and shock in many, but the most terrifying of them is Buchenwald. The crematorium was considered the most terrible place. People were invited there under the pretext of a medical examination. When the prisoner undressed, he was shot and the body was sent to the oven.

Only men were kept in Buchenwald. Upon arrival at the camp, they were assigned a number in German, which they had to learn within the first 24 hours. The prisoners worked at the Gustlovsky weapons factory, which was located a few kilometers from the camp.

Continuing to describe the Nazi concentration camps, let us turn to the so-called “small camp” of Buchenwald.

Small camp of Buchenwald

The “small camp” was the name given to the quarantine zone. The living conditions here were, even compared to the main camp, simply hellish. In 1944, when German troops began to retreat, prisoners from Auschwitz and the Compiegne camp were brought to this camp; they were mainly Soviet citizens, Poles and Czechs, and later Jews. There was not enough space for everyone, so some of the prisoners (six thousand people) were housed in tents. The closer 1945 got, the more prisoners were transported. Meanwhile, the “small camp” included 12 barracks measuring 40 x 50 meters. Torture in Nazi concentration camps was not only specially planned or for scientific purposes, life itself in such a place was torture. 750 people lived in the barracks; their daily ration consisted of a small piece of bread; those who were not working were no longer entitled to it.

Relations among prisoners were tough; cases of cannibalism and murder for someone else's portion of bread were documented. A common practice was to store the bodies of the dead in barracks in order to receive their rations. The dead man's clothes were divided among his cellmates, and they often fought over them. Due to such conditions, infectious diseases were common in the camp. Vaccinations only worsened the situation, since injection syringes were not changed.

Photos simply cannot convey all the inhumanity and horror of the Nazi concentration camp. The stories of witnesses are not intended for the faint of heart. In each camp, not excluding Buchenwald, there were medical groups of doctors who conducted experiments on prisoners. It should be noted that the data they obtained allowed German medicine to step far forward - no other country in the world had such a number of experimental people. Another question is whether it was worth the millions of tortured children and women, the inhuman suffering that these innocent people endured.

Prisoners were irradiated, healthy limbs were amputated, organs were removed, and they were sterilized and castrated. They tested how long a person could withstand extreme cold or heat. They were specially infected with diseases and introduced experimental drugs. Thus, an anti-typhoid vaccine was developed in Buchenwald. In addition to typhus, prisoners were infected with smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria, and paratyphoid.

Since 1939, the camp was run by Karl Koch. His wife, Ilse, was nicknamed the “Witch of Buchenwald” for her love of sadism and inhumane abuse of prisoners. They feared her more than her husband (Karl Koch) and Nazi doctors. She was later nicknamed "Frau Lampshaded". The woman owed this nickname to the fact that she made various decorative things from the skin of killed prisoners, in particular, lampshades, which she was very proud of. Most of all, she liked to use the skin of Russian prisoners with tattoos on their backs and chests, as well as the skin of gypsies. Things made of such material seemed to her the most elegant.

The liberation of Buchenwald took place on April 11, 1945, at the hands of the prisoners themselves. Having learned about the approach of the allied troops, they disarmed the guards, captured the camp leadership and controlled the camp for two days until American soldiers approached.

Auschwitz (Auschwitz-Birkenau)

When listing Nazi concentration camps, it is impossible to ignore Auschwitz. It was one of the largest concentration camps, in which, according to various sources, from one and a half to four million people died. The exact details of the dead remain unclear. The victims were mainly Jewish prisoners of war, who were exterminated immediately upon arrival in gas chambers.

The concentration camp complex itself was called Auschwitz-Birkenau and was located on the outskirts of the Polish city of Auschwitz, whose name became a household name. The following words were engraved above the camp gate: “Work sets you free.”

This huge complex, built in 1940, consisted of three camps:

• Auschwitz I or the main camp - the administration was located here;
• Auschwitz II or "Birkenau" - was called a death camp;
• Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz.

Initially, the camp was small and intended for political prisoners. But gradually more and more prisoners arrived at the camp, 70% of whom were destroyed immediately. Many tortures in Nazi concentration camps were borrowed from Auschwitz. Thus, the first gas chamber began to function in 1941. The gas used was Cyclone B. The terrible invention was first tested on Soviet and Polish prisoners totaling about nine hundred people.

Auschwitz II began its operation on March 1, 1942. Its territory included four crematoria and two gas chambers. In the same year, medical experiments on sterilization and castration began on women and men.

Small camps gradually formed around Birkenau, where prisoners working in factories and mines were kept. One of these camps gradually grew and became known as Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz. Approximately ten thousand prisoners were held here.

Like any Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz was well guarded. Contacts with the outside world were prohibited, the territory was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and guard posts were set up around the camp at a distance of a kilometer.

Five crematoria operated continuously on the territory of Auschwitz, which, according to experts, had a monthly capacity of approximately 270 thousand corpses.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. By that time, approximately seven thousand prisoners remained alive. Such a small number of survivors is due to the fact that about a year earlier, mass murders in gas chambers (gas chambers) began in the concentration camp.

Since 1947, a museum and memorial complex dedicated to the memory of all those who died at the hands of Nazi Germany began to function on the territory of the former concentration camp.

Conclusion

During the entire war, according to statistics, approximately four and a half million Soviet citizens were captured. These were mostly civilians from the occupied territories. It’s hard to even imagine what these people went through. But it was not only the bullying of the Nazis in the concentration camps that they were destined to endure. Thanks to Stalin, after their liberation, returning home, they received the stigma of “traitors.” The Gulag awaited them at home, and their families were subjected to serious repression. One captivity gave way to another for them. In fear for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, they changed their last names and tried in every possible way to hide their experiences.

Until recently, information about the fate of prisoners after release was not advertised and kept silent. But people who have experienced this simply should not be forgotten.

Nazi Germany, in addition to starting World War II, is also notorious for its concentration camps, as well as the horrors that happened there. The horror of the Nazi camp system consisted not only of terror and arbitrariness, but also of the colossal experiments on people that were carried out there. Scientific research was carried out on a grand scale, and its goals were so varied that it would take a long time to even name them.

In German concentration camps, scientific hypotheses were tested and various biomedical technologies were tested on living “human material”. Wartime dictated its priorities, so doctors were primarily interested in the practical application of scientific theories. For example, the possibility of maintaining people’s working capacity under conditions of excessive stress, blood transfusions with different Rh factors were studied, and new drugs were tested.

Among these monstrous experiments are pressure tests, experiments on hypothermia, the development of a vaccine against typhus, experiments with malaria, gas, sea water, poisons, sulfanilamide, sterilization experiments and many others.

In 1941, experiments were carried out with hypothermia. They were led by Dr. Rascher under the direct supervision of Himmler. The experiments were carried out in two stages. At the first stage, they found out what temperature a person could withstand and for how long, and the second stage was to determine ways to restore the human body after frostbite. To conduct such experiments, prisoners were taken out in winter without clothes for the whole night or placed in ice water. Hypothermia trials were conducted exclusively on men to simulate the conditions experienced by German soldiers on the Eastern Front, as the Nazis were ill-prepared for winter. For example, in one of the first experiments, prisoners were lowered into a container of water, the temperature of which ranged from 2 to 12 degrees, wearing pilot suits. At the same time, they were put on life jackets, which kept them afloat. As a result of the experiment, Rascher found that attempts to bring a person caught in ice water back to life are practically zero if the cerebellum was overcooled. This was the reason for the development of a special vest with a headrest that covered the back of the head and prevented the back of the head from plunging into the water.

The same Dr. Rascher in 1942 began conducting experiments on prisoners using pressure changes. Thus, doctors tried to establish how much air pressure a person could withstand and for how long. To conduct the experiment, a special pressure chamber was used, in which the pressure was regulated. There were 25 people in it at the same time. The purpose of these experiments was to help pilots and skydivers at high altitudes. According to one of the doctor's reports, the experiment was carried out on a 37-year-old Jew who was in good physical shape. Half an hour after the start of the experiment, he died.

200 prisoners took part in the experiment, 80 of them died, the rest were simply killed.

The Nazis also made large-scale preparations for the use of bacteriological agents. The emphasis was mainly on fast-moving diseases, plague, anthrax, typhus, that is, diseases that in a short time could cause mass infections and death of the enemy.

The Third Reich had large reserves of typhus bacteria. In the event of their mass use, it was necessary to develop a vaccine to disinfect the Germans. On behalf of the government, Dr. Paul began developing a vaccine against typhus. The first to experience the effects of vaccines were the prisoners of Buchenwald. In 1942, 26 Roma, who had previously been vaccinated, were infected with typhus there. As a result, 6 people died from progression of the disease. This result did not satisfy the management, since the mortality rate was high. Therefore, research was continued in 1943. And the next year, the improved vaccine was again tested on humans. But this time the victims of vaccination were prisoners of the Natzweiler camp. Dr. Chrétien conducted the experiments. 80 gypsies were selected for the experiment. They were infected with typhus in two ways: by injection and by airborne droplets. Of the total number of test subjects, only 6 people became infected, but even such a small number were not provided with any medical care. In 1944, all 80 people who were involved in the experiment either died from the disease or were shot by concentration camp guards.

In addition, other cruel experiments were carried out on prisoners in the same Buchenwald. So, in 1943-1944, experiments with incendiary mixtures were carried out there. Their goal was to solve problems associated with bomb explosions, when soldiers received phosphorus burns. Mostly Russian prisoners were used for these experiments.

Experiments with the genitals were also carried out here in order to identify the causes of homosexuality. They involved not only homosexuals, but also men of traditional orientation. One of the experiments was genital transplantation.

Also in Buchenwald, experiments were carried out to infect prisoners with yellow fever, diphtheria, smallpox, and also used poisonous substances. For example, to study the effect of poisons on the human body, they were added to the food of prisoners. As a result, some of the victims died, and some were immediately shot for autopsies. In 1944, all participants in this experiment were shot using poison bullets.

A series of experiments were also carried out at the Dachau concentration camp. Thus, back in 1942, some prisoners aged 20 to 45 were infected with malaria. In total, 1,200 people were infected. Permission to conduct the experiment was obtained by the leader, Dr. Pletner, directly from Himmler. The victims were bitten by malarial mosquitoes, and, in addition, they were also infused with sporozoans, which were taken from mosquitoes. Quinine, antipyrine, pyramidon, and also a special drug called “2516-Bering” were used for treatment. As a result, approximately 40 people died from malaria, about 400 died from complications of the disease, and another number died from excessive doses of medication.

Here, in Dachau, in 1944, experiments were carried out to convert sea water into drinking water. For the experiments, 90 gypsies were used, who were completely deprived of food and forced to drink only sea water.

No less terrible experiments were carried out at the Auschwitz concentration camp. So, in particular, throughout the entire period of the war, sterilization experiments were carried out there, the purpose of which was to identify a quick and effective way to sterilize a large number of people without much time and physical effort. During the experiment, thousands of people were sterilized. The procedure was carried out using surgery, x-rays and various medications. At first, injections with iodine or silver nitrate were used, but this method had a large number of side effects. Therefore, irradiation was more preferable. Scientists have found that a certain amount of X-rays can prevent the human body from producing eggs and sperm. During the experiments, a large number of prisoners received radiation burns.

The experiments with twins conducted by Dr. Mengele in the Auschwitz concentration camp were particularly cruel. Before the war, he worked on genetics, so twins were especially “interesting” to him.

Mengele personally sorted the “human material”: the most interesting, in his opinion, were sent to experiments, the less hardy to labor, and the rest to the gas chamber.

The experiment involved 1,500 pairs of twins, of which only 200 survived. Mengele conducted experiments on changing eye color by injecting chemicals, which resulted in complete or temporary blindness. He also attempted to "create Siamese twins" by sewing twins together. In addition, he experimented with infecting one of the twins with an infection, after which he performed autopsies on both to compare the affected organs.

When Soviet troops approached Auschwitz, the doctor managed to escape to Latin America.

There were also experiments in another German concentration camp - Ravensbrück. The experiments used women who were injected with bacteria of tetanus, staphylococcus, and gas gangrene. The purpose of the experiments was to determine the effectiveness of sulfonamide drugs.

The prisoners were given incisions, where shards of glass or metal were placed, and then bacteria were planted. After infection, the subjects were carefully monitored, recording changes in temperature and other signs of infection. In addition, experiments in transplantology and traumatology were conducted here. Women were deliberately mutilated, and to make it more convenient to monitor the healing process, sections of the body were cut out to the bone. Moreover, their limbs were often amputated, which were then taken to a neighboring camp and sewn on to other prisoners.

Not only did the Nazis abuse prisoners of concentration camps, but they also conducted experiments on “true Aryans.” Thus, a large burial was recently discovered, which was initially mistaken for Scythian remains. However, it was later established that there were German soldiers in the grave. The discovery horrified archaeologists: some of the bodies were decapitated, others had their shinbones sawn apart, and others had holes along the spine. It was also found that during life people were exposed to chemicals, and incisions were clearly visible in many skulls. As it later turned out, these were victims of experiments by the Ahnenerbe, a secret organization of the Third Reich that was engaged in the creation of a superman.

Since it was immediately obvious that such experiments would involve a large number of casualties, Himmler took responsibility for all deaths. He did not consider all these horrors to be murder, because, according to him, concentration camp prisoners are not people.

The twin phenomenon has long been seen as having vital implications for the study of genetics and behavior, as well as a wide range of other fields such as inherited diseases, the genetics of obesity, the genetic basis of common diseases, and many others.

But in the background of all the most ordinary modern studies of twins there will always be the shadow of a cruel Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele, who conducted the most perverted and savage experiments on twins for the glory of the science of the Third Reich.

Mengele worked in a Polish concentration camp Auschwitz (Auschwitz), built in 1940 and which also carried out experiments on homosexuals, the disabled, the mentally handicapped, gypsies and prisoners of war. During his time at Auschwitz, Mengele experimented on more than 1,500 pairs of twins, of whom only about 300 survived.

Mengele was obsessed with twins, he considered them the key to the salvation of the Aryan race and dreamed of blue-eyed, blonde women giving birth to several of the same blue-eyed and blond-haired babies at a time. Every time a new batch of prisoners arrived at the concentration camp, Mengele, with burning eyes, carefully looked for twins among them and, having found them, sent them to a special barracks, where the twins were classified according to their age and gender.

Many of these twins, who went through all the circles of hell in this barracks, were no more than 5-6 years old. At first it seemed that there might be salvation for them here, since they were fed well here, compared to other barracks, and they did not kill (immediately).

In addition, Mengele often appeared here to examine certain twins and brought with him sweets that he treated to the children. For the children, exhausted by the road, hunger and hardships, he seemed like a kind and caring uncle who joked with them and even played.

A pair of twin girls from Auschwitz

Twin children also did not have their heads shaved and were often allowed to keep their own clothes. They were also not sent to forced labor, were not beaten, and were even allowed to go outside to take a walk. At first, they were also not particularly tortured, mainly limited to blood tests.

However, all this was just a facade to keep the children in a calm and as natural state as possible for the time being for the sake of the purity of the experiments. Real horrors awaited the children in the future.

The experiments involved injecting various chemicals into the twins' eyes to see if it was possible to change eye color. These experiments often resulted in severe pain, eye infection, and temporary or permanent blindness.

Attempts have also been made to "sew" twins together to artificially create conjoined twins.

Mengele also used the method of infecting one of the twins with infections and then dissecting both experimental subjects in order to examine and compare the affected organs. There are facts that Mengele injected children with certain substances, the nature of which was never determined, which had many side effects, from loss of consciousness to severe pain or instant death. Only one of the twins received these substances.

Sometimes the twins were kept apart from each other and one of them was subjected to physical or mental torture, while the state of the other twin at these moments was carefully observed and the slightest signs of anxiety were recorded. This was done to study the mysterious psychic connection between twins, about which there have always been many tales.

The twins were given a complete blood transfusion from one to the other, and surgery was performed without anesthesia to castrate or sterilize (one twin was operated on, and the other was left as a control sample).

If, during fatal experiments on two twins, one somehow survived, he was still killed, since he was no longer valuable alive.

A lot of information about Mengele's cruel experiments is known only from those about 300 surviving twins. For example, in an interview with journalists, Vera Kriegel, who was kept in a barracks with her twin sister, said that one day she was brought to an office where there were jars with the eyes of children taken out along the entire wall.

"I looked at this wall of human eyes. They were different colors - blue, green, brown. These eyes looked at me like a collection of butterflies, and I fell to the floor in shock."

Kriegel and her sister were subjected to the following experiments - the sisters were kept in two wooden boxes and given painful injections into their eyes to change their color. Kriegel also said that in parallel with them, an experiment was done on another pair of twins and they were infected with the terrible Noma disease (water cancer), from which their faces and genitals were covered with painful boils.

Eva Moses Core

Another girl who survived Eva Moses Core was held in Auschwitz with her twin sister Miriam from the age of 10 from 1944 to 1945, until they were liberated by Soviet soldiers. All the girls' siblings (parents, aunts, uncles, cousins) were killed immediately when they were brought to the concentration camp, and the girls were separated from them.

“When the door of our cow car opened, I heard the SS soldiers shouting “Schnell! Schnell!" and they started throwing us outside. My mother grabbed Miriam and me by the hand, she always tried to protect us because we were the smallest in the family. People came out very quickly and then I noticed that my father and my two older sisters gone.

Then it was our turn and the soldier shouted “Twins! Twins!” He stopped to look at us. Miriam and I were very similar to each other, it was immediately noticeable. “Are they twins?” the soldier asked my mother. “Is this good?” asked my mother. The soldier nodded his head affirmatively. “They are twins,” my mother said then.

After this, an SS guard took Miriam and me away from our mother without any warning or explanation. We screamed very loudly as they carried us away. I remember looking back and seeing my mother's arms stretched out towards us in desperation."

Eva Moses Core told a lot about the experiments in the barracks. She talked about gypsy twins who were sewn together back to back and their organs and blood vessels were connected to each other. After which they screamed in agony without stopping until their screams were silenced by gangrene and death three days later.

Kor also recalls a strange experiment that lasted 6 days and during which the sisters just had to sit without clothes for 8 hours. After which they were examined and something was written down. But they also had to go through more terrible experiments, during which they were given incomprehensible painful injections. At the same time, the despair and fear of the girls seemed to cause great pleasure in Mengele.

“One day we were taken to a laboratory, which I call the blood laboratory. They took a lot of blood from my left arm and gave me several injections in my right arm. Some of them were very dangerous, although we did not know all the names and still don’t know them today.

After one of these injections I felt very ill and had a very high fever. My arms and legs were very swollen and there were red spots all over my body. Maybe it was typhus, I don't know. No one ever told us what they were doing to us.

I received a total of five injections then. I was shaking a lot due to the high temperature. In the morning Mengele and Dr. Konig and three other doctors came. They looked at my fever and Mengele said, chuckling, “It’s a pity she’s so young. She only has two weeks to live.” "

Incredibly, Eva and Miriam managed to live to see the day when the Soviet Army liberated the prisoners of Auschwitz. Kor says she was too young at the time to fully understand what was being done to them. But years later, Kor founded the CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors) program and with its help began searching for other surviving twins from the Auschwitz barracks.

Eva Morses Kor managed to locate 122 couples who lived in ten countries and four continents, and then, through many negotiations and great efforts, all these surviving twins managed to meet in Jerusalem in February 1985.

"We talked to many of them and I learned that there were many other experiments. For example, twins who were over 16 years old were used in cross-gender blood transfusion. This is when the blood of a man is transfused into a woman and vice versa. They did not check of course, whether this blood was compatible and most of these twins died.

There are twins with the same experience in Australia, Stephanie and Annette Heller, and there is Judith Malik from Israel, who had a brother, Sullivan. Judith revealed that she was used in this experiment with her brother. She remembered that she was lying on the table during the experiment, and her brother was lying next to him and his body was quickly cooling down. He died. She survived, but then she had a lot of health problems."

Eva Moses Core and Miriam Moses

Because of the experiments in the Mengele barracks, Eva Moses Cor Miriam's sister was left with kidney problems for the rest of her life. Mengele conducted experiments on kidneys with twins, partly because he himself had suffered from kidney problems since the age of 16. He was deeply interested in understanding how the kidneys worked and how to treat kidney problems.

Miriam had problems with the growth of her kidneys, and after the birth of her children, her kidney problem became even more complicated and none of the antibiotics helped her. Eva eventually donated one of her own kidneys to save her sister in 1987, but Miriam died of kidney complications in 1993, and doctors are still not sure what substances were injected into her to cause all these complications. .

It still remains a mystery what exactly results Mengele wanted to achieve with the twins and whether he succeeded in any of his plans. Most of the drugs and substances he administered to the twins remained unknown.

When Soviet soldiers liberated the death camp, Mengele managed to escape and take refuge, but was soon captured by American soldiers. Unfortunately, he was not identified as a Nazi there and managed to escape again.

He left Europe and hid in Argentina in 1949, where he went to great lengths to remain undetected for decades before finally drowning at a resort in Brazil in 1979. Very little is known about what This is what Mengele was doing during these decades in exile and because of this there is a lot of speculation and rumors of varying degrees of veracity.

Mengele (third from right) in the 1970s somewhere in South America

One conspiracy theory is that Mengele never stopped being obsessed with the twins even after fleeing to South America. Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa wrote about this in his book “Mengele: Angel of Death in South America”.

After spending years researching Mengele's activities in the region, the historian discovered that residents of the town of Cándido Godoy, Brazil, claimed that Mengele visited their town several times during the 1960s as a veterinarian and then offered various medical services to local women.

Soon after these visits, there was a real surge in twin births in the city and many of them had blond hair and blue eyes. It is likely that in this city, which became Mengele's new laboratory, he finally succeeded in fulfilling his dreams of a mass birth of blue-eyed Aryan twins.

Twins Candida-Godoi

The Great Patriotic War left an indelible mark on the history and destinies of people. Many lost loved ones who were killed or tortured. In the article we will look at the Nazi concentration camps and the atrocities that happened on their territories.

What is a concentration camp?

A concentration camp or concentration camp is a special place intended for the detention of persons of the following categories:

• political prisoners (opponents of the dictatorial regime);
• prisoners of war (captured soldiers and civilians).

Nazi concentration camps became notorious for their inhuman cruelty to prisoners and impossible conditions of detention. These places of detention began to appear even before Hitler came to power, and even then they were divided into women's, men's and children's. Mainly Jews and opponents of the Nazi system were kept there.

Life in the camp

Humiliation and abuse for prisoners began from the moment of transportation. People were transported in freight cars, where there was not even running water or a fenced-off latrine. Prisoners had to relieve themselves publicly, in a tank standing in the middle of the carriage.

But this was only the beginning; a lot of abuse and torture were prepared for the concentration camps of fascists who were undesirable to the Nazi regime. Torture of women and children, medical experiments, aimless exhausting work - this is not the whole list.

The conditions of detention can be judged from the prisoners’ letters: “they lived in hellish conditions, ragged, barefoot, hungry... I was constantly and severely beaten, deprived of food and water, tortured...”, “They shot me, flogged me, poisoned me with dogs, drowned me in water, beat me to death.” with sticks and starvation. They were infected with tuberculosis... suffocated by a cyclone. Poisoned with chlorine. They burned..."

The corpses were skinned and hair cut off - all this was then used in the German textile industry. The doctor Mengele became famous for his horrific experiments on prisoners, at whose hands thousands of people died. He studied mental and physical exhaustion of the body. He conducted experiments on twins, during which they received organ transplants from each other, blood transfusions, and sisters were forced to give birth to children from their own brothers. Performed sex reassignment surgery.

All fascist concentration camps became famous for such abuses; we will look at the names and conditions of detention in the main ones below.

Camp diet

Typically, the daily ration in the camp was as follows:

• bread - 130 gr;
• fat - 20 g;
• meat - 30 g;
• cereal - 120 gr;
• sugar - 27 gr.

Bread was handed out, and the rest of the products were used for cooking, which consisted of soup (issued 1 or 2 times a day) and porridge (150 - 200 grams). It should be noted that such a diet was intended only for working people. Those who, for some reason, remained unemployed received even less. Usually their portion consisted of only half a portion of bread.

List of concentration camps in different countries

Fascist concentration camps were created in the territories of Germany, allied and occupied countries. There are a lot of them, but let’s name the main ones:

• In Germany - Halle, Buchenwald, Cottbus, Dusseldorf, Schlieben, Ravensbrück, Esse, Spremberg;
• Austria - Mauthausen, Amstetten;
• France - Nancy, Reims, Mulhouse;
• Poland - Majdanek, Krasnik, Radom, Auschwitz, Przemysl;
• Lithuania - Dimitravas, Alytus, Kaunas;
• Czechoslovakia - Kunta Gora, Natra, Hlinsko;
• Estonia - Pirkul, Pärnu, Klooga;
• Belarus - Minsk, Baranovichi;
• Latvia - Salaspils.

And this is not a complete list of all concentration camps that were built by Nazi Germany in the pre-war and war years.

Salaspils

Salaspils, one might say, is the most terrible Nazi concentration camp, because in addition to prisoners of war and Jews, children were also kept there. It was located on the territory of occupied Latvia and was the central eastern camp. It was located near Riga and operated from 1941 (September) to 1944 (summer).

Children in this camp were not only kept separately from adults and exterminated en masse, but were used as blood donors for German soldiers. Every day, about half a liter of blood was taken from all children, which led to the rapid death of donors.

Salaspils was not like Auschwitz or Majdanek (extermination camps), where people were herded into gas chambers and then their corpses were burned. It was used for medical research, which killed more than 100,000 people. Salaspils was not like other Nazi concentration camps. Torture of children was a routine activity here, carried out according to a schedule with the results carefully recorded.

Experiments on children

Testimony of witnesses and results of investigations revealed the following methods of extermination of people in the Salaspils camp: beating, starvation, arsenic poisoning, injection of dangerous substances (most often to children), surgical operations without painkillers, pumping out blood (only from children), executions, torture, useless heavy labor (carrying stones from place to place), gas chambers, burying alive. In order to save ammunition, the camp charter prescribed that children should be killed only with rifle butts. The atrocities of the Nazis in the concentration camps surpassed everything that humanity had seen in modern times. Such an attitude towards people cannot be justified, because it violates all conceivable and inconceivable moral commandments.

Children did not stay with their mothers for long and were usually quickly taken away and distributed. Thus, children under six years of age were kept in a special barracks where they were infected with measles. But they did not treat it, but aggravated the disease, for example, by bathing, which is why the children died within 3-4 days. The Germans killed more than 3,000 people in one year in this way. The bodies of the dead were partly burned and partly buried on the camp grounds.

The Act of the Nuremberg Trials “on the extermination of children” provided the following numbers: during the excavation of only a fifth of the concentration camp territory, 633 bodies of children aged 5 to 9 years, arranged in layers, were discovered; an area soaked in an oily substance was also found, where the remains of unburned children’s bones (teeth, ribs, joints, etc.) were found.

Salaspils is truly the most terrible Nazi concentration camp, because the atrocities described above are not all the tortures that the prisoners were subjected to. Thus, in winter, children brought in were driven barefoot and naked to a barracks for half a kilometer, where they had to wash themselves in icy water. After this, the children were driven in the same way to the next building, where they were kept in the cold for 5-6 days. Moreover, the age of the eldest child did not even reach 12 years. Everyone who survived this procedure was also subjected to arsenic poisoning.

Infants were kept separately and given injections, from which the child died in agony within a few days. They gave us coffee and poisoned cereals. About 150 children died from experiments per day. The bodies of the dead were carried out in large baskets and burned, dumped in cesspools, or buried near the camp.

Ravensbrück

If we start listing Nazi women's concentration camps, Ravensbrück will come first. This was the only camp of this type in Germany. It could accommodate thirty thousand prisoners, but by the end of the war it was overcrowded by fifteen thousand. Mostly Russian and Polish women were detained; Jews numbered approximately 15 percent. There were no prescribed instructions regarding torture and torment; the supervisors chose the line of behavior themselves.

Arriving women were undressed, shaved, washed, given a robe and assigned a number. Race was also indicated on clothing. People turned into impersonal cattle. In small barracks (in the post-war years, 2-3 refugee families lived in them) there were approximately three hundred prisoners, who were housed on three-story bunks. When the camp was overcrowded, up to a thousand people were herded into these cells, all of whom had to sleep on the same bunks. The barracks had several toilets and a washbasin, but there were so few of them that after a few days the floors were littered with excrement. Almost all Nazi concentration camps presented this picture (the photos presented here are only a small fraction of all the horrors).

But not all women ended up in the concentration camp; a selection was made beforehand. The strong and resilient, fit for work, were left behind, and the rest were destroyed. Prisoners worked at construction sites and sewing workshops.

Gradually, Ravensbrück was equipped with a crematorium, like all Nazi concentration camps. Gas chambers (nicknamed gas chambers by prisoners) appeared towards the end of the war. Ashes from crematoria were sent to nearby fields as fertilizer.

Experiments were also carried out in Ravensbrück. In a special barracks called the “infirmary,” German scientists tested new drugs, first infecting or crippling experimental subjects. There were few survivors, but even those suffered from what they had endured until the end of their lives. Experiments were also conducted with the irradiation of women with X-rays, which caused hair loss, skin pigmentation, and death. Excisions of the genital organs were carried out, after which few survived, and even those quickly aged, and at the age of 18 they looked like old women. Similar experiments were carried out in all Nazi concentration camps; torture of women and children was the main crime of Nazi Germany against humanity.

At the time of the liberation of the concentration camp by the Allies, five thousand women remained there; the rest were killed or transported to other places of detention. The Soviet troops who arrived in April 1945 adapted the camp barracks to accommodate refugees. Ravensbrück later became a base for Soviet military units.

Nazi concentration camps: Buchenwald

Construction of the camp began in 1933, near the town of Weimar. Soon, Soviet prisoners of war began to arrive, becoming the first prisoners, and they completed the construction of the “hellish” concentration camp.

The structure of all structures was strictly thought out. Immediately behind the gate began the “Appelplat” (parallel ground), specially designed for the formation of prisoners. Its capacity was twenty thousand people. Not far from the gate there was a punishment cell for interrogations, and opposite there was an office where the camp fuehrer and the officer on duty - the camp authorities - lived. Deeper down were the barracks for prisoners. All barracks were numbered, there were 52 of them. At the same time, 43 were intended for housing, and workshops were set up in the rest.

The Nazi concentration camps left behind a terrible memory; their names still evoke fear and shock in many, but the most terrifying of them is Buchenwald. The crematorium was considered the most terrible place. People were invited there under the pretext of a medical examination. When the prisoner undressed, he was shot and the body was sent to the oven.

Only men were kept in Buchenwald. Upon arrival at the camp, they were assigned a number in German, which they had to learn within the first 24 hours. The prisoners worked at the Gustlovsky weapons factory, which was located a few kilometers from the camp.

Continuing to describe the Nazi concentration camps, let us turn to the so-called “small camp” of Buchenwald.

Small camp of Buchenwald

The “small camp” was the name given to the quarantine zone. The living conditions here were, even compared to the main camp, simply hellish. In 1944, when German troops began to retreat, prisoners from Auschwitz and the Compiegne camp were brought to this camp; they were mainly Soviet citizens, Poles and Czechs, and later Jews. There was not enough space for everyone, so some of the prisoners (six thousand people) were housed in tents. The closer 1945 got, the more prisoners were transported. Meanwhile, the “small camp” included 12 barracks measuring 40 x 50 meters. Torture in Nazi concentration camps was not only specially planned or for scientific purposes, life itself in such a place was torture. 750 people lived in the barracks; their daily ration consisted of a small piece of bread; those who were not working were no longer entitled to it.

Relations among prisoners were tough; cases of cannibalism and murder for someone else's portion of bread were documented. A common practice was to store the bodies of the dead in barracks in order to receive their rations. The dead man's clothes were divided among his cellmates, and they often fought over them. Due to such conditions, infectious diseases were common in the camp. Vaccinations only worsened the situation, since injection syringes were not changed.

Photos simply cannot convey all the inhumanity and horror of the Nazi concentration camp. The stories of witnesses are not intended for the faint of heart. In each camp, not excluding Buchenwald, there were medical groups of doctors who conducted experiments on prisoners. It should be noted that the data they obtained allowed German medicine to step far forward - no other country in the world had such a number of experimental people. Another question is whether it was worth the millions of tortured children and women, the inhuman suffering that these innocent people endured.

Prisoners were irradiated, healthy limbs were amputated, organs were removed, and they were sterilized and castrated. They tested how long a person could withstand extreme cold or heat. They were specially infected with diseases and introduced experimental drugs. Thus, an anti-typhoid vaccine was developed in Buchenwald. In addition to typhus, prisoners were infected with smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria, and paratyphoid.

Since 1939, the camp was run by Karl Koch. His wife, Ilse, was nicknamed the “Witch of Buchenwald” for her love of sadism and inhumane abuse of prisoners. They feared her more than her husband (Karl Koch) and Nazi doctors. She was later nicknamed "Frau Lampshaded". The woman owed this nickname to the fact that she made various decorative things from the skin of killed prisoners, in particular, lampshades, which she was very proud of. Most of all, she liked to use the skin of Russian prisoners with tattoos on their backs and chests, as well as the skin of gypsies. Things made of such material seemed to her the most elegant.

The liberation of Buchenwald took place on April 11, 1945, at the hands of the prisoners themselves. Having learned about the approach of the allied troops, they disarmed the guards, captured the camp leadership and controlled the camp for two days until American soldiers approached.

Auschwitz (Auschwitz-Birkenau)

When listing Nazi concentration camps, it is impossible to ignore Auschwitz. It was one of the largest concentration camps, in which, according to various sources, from one and a half to four million people died. The exact details of the dead remain unclear. The victims were mainly Jewish prisoners of war, who were exterminated immediately upon arrival in gas chambers.

The concentration camp complex itself was called Auschwitz-Birkenau and was located on the outskirts of the Polish city of Auschwitz, whose name became a household name. The following words were engraved above the camp gate: “Work sets you free.”

This huge complex, built in 1940, consisted of three camps:

• Auschwitz I or the main camp - the administration was located here;
• Auschwitz II or "Birkenau" - was called a death camp;
• Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz.

Initially, the camp was small and intended for political prisoners. But gradually more and more prisoners arrived at the camp, 70% of whom were destroyed immediately. Many tortures in Nazi concentration camps were borrowed from Auschwitz. Thus, the first gas chamber began to function in 1941. The gas used was Cyclone B. The terrible invention was first tested on Soviet and Polish prisoners totaling about nine hundred people.

Auschwitz II began its operation on March 1, 1942. Its territory included four crematoria and two gas chambers. In the same year, medical experiments on sterilization and castration began on women and men.

Small camps gradually formed around Birkenau, where prisoners working in factories and mines were kept. One of these camps gradually grew and became known as Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz. Approximately ten thousand prisoners were held here.

Like any Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz was well guarded. Contacts with the outside world were prohibited, the territory was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and guard posts were set up around the camp at a distance of a kilometer.

Five crematoria operated continuously on the territory of Auschwitz, which, according to experts, had a monthly capacity of approximately 270 thousand corpses.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. By that time, approximately seven thousand prisoners remained alive. Such a small number of survivors is due to the fact that about a year earlier, mass murders in gas chambers (gas chambers) began in the concentration camp.

Since 1947, a museum and memorial complex dedicated to the memory of all those who died at the hands of Nazi Germany began to function on the territory of the former concentration camp.

Conclusion

During the entire war, according to statistics, approximately four and a half million Soviet citizens were captured. These were mostly civilians from the occupied territories. It’s hard to even imagine what these people went through. But it was not only the bullying of the Nazis in the concentration camps that they were destined to endure. Thanks to Stalin, after their liberation, returning home, they received the stigma of “traitors.” The Gulag awaited them at home, and their families were subjected to serious repression. One captivity gave way to another for them. In fear for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, they changed their last names and tried in every possible way to hide their experiences.

Until recently, information about the fate of prisoners after release was not advertised and kept silent. But people who have experienced this simply should not be forgotten.