The Sea Water Torture - Nazi Camp Experiments

"In walks Eppinger. Pointing with his finger, he says, “You, you, and you, come with me.” They won’t be seen again. That was the Sea Water Torture Experiment we just talked about, and as you’ll see today, it was just one of many infinitely appalling experiments that happened in those camps."

- The Infographics Show

The Sea Water Torture - Nazi Camp Experiments is a video on the Infographics Show covering five horrifying experiments committed in Nazi camps during WW2, including things such as torture by thirst, surgery, injury, and even the infamous twin experiments.

Synopsis
The Nazis performed some of the most horrific experiments on concentration camp prisoners of all time. This shocking video exposes the harsh truth of Hitler's reign during WWII. Warning: This video is upsetting and talks about real war crimes committed against human beings and contains graphic images and descriptions.

Transcript
It’s a warm sunny day in August 1944. Hans Eppinger is sitting in his office jotting down some notes in a well-worn book. He pushes his spectacles farther up the bridge of his nose, exhales, and puts down his pen. Just a few feet away are a group of emaciated Romani people. They are his subjects, his human Guinea pigs. Some of them are already close to death, so dehydrated they are on all fours licking water that was just used to mop the floor. Suddenly the door to their hut opens. In walks Eppinger. Pointing with his finger, he says, “You, you, and you, come with me.” They won’t be seen again. That was the Sea Water Torture Experiment we just talked about, and as you’ll see today, it was just one of many infinitely appalling experiments that happened in those camps.

5. Thirst

Let’s finish the story we started. Eppinger was an Austrian physicist whose name among many others is written in the annals of human depravity. He was employed by the Nazis during the Second World War to conduct odious experiments on human beings at the Dachau concentration camp. Eppinger used mainly Romani people, a nomadic group sometimes referred to as “gypsies” – a term they don’t like. Back in the war, about 90 of them were chosen for the water experiments. These weren’t exactly technical. The Nazis wanted to know what would happen if you deprived someone of food and drinking water and had to survive on seawater. How long would it take to die? What would happen during the passage to death?

In the war, this could happen to one of their pilots. We know the answer thanks to a survivor of those camps named Joseph Tschofenig. He watched the experiments with his own eyes, saying later that the victims were so desperate they licked the floor and sucked on damp rags. The outcome was the people usually died. Prudence demanded that Tschofenig kept his mouth about this, with him not even showing sympathy to the victims when any German soldiers were around. He also pretended not to see anything. He later noted that he’d seen another worker in the camp take too much interest in an experiment and for that, he was sent straight to the gas chamber. The experiment was related to how humans deal with extreme low-pressure.

4. The Doctor of Death

The low-pressure experiments were conducted by a man often called a monster. This was Sigmund Rascher, an SS doctor of death whose depravity seemed to know no limits. He’d been a pilot in the Luftwaffe and that made him think about the effect of high-altitude on pilots. The problem was, as he wrote in a letter to Nazi SS boss Heinrich Himmler, it wasn’t exactly easy to get people to sign up for experiments. He wrote that he’d already tried using monkeys, but that didn’t go down too well. He needed humans, he told Himmler, stating that the experiments would likely end their life. No problem, replied Himmler. Humans he got, and during the Spring and the Summer of 1942 he rounded up a bunch of prisoners at the Dachau camp.

One by one, he told them to enter a pressure chamber. Once they were in, Rascher played around with the pressure, making it so low that it corresponded with being at a very high altitude. He would then quickly change the pressure in an attempt to see what it might be like for a German pilot parachuting from a plane without any oxygen. According to reports, the people used in these experiments were mostly Poles and Russians. Some of them died, and some of them survived. When Rascher told Himmler about this, the boss said if they survive then spare them the gas chamber. Just give them life in prison. Rascher then quickly wrote back, reminding Himmler who those people were. Some of the letters survived the war.

Here’s part of one Rascher wrote to Himmler in April 1942: “Only continuous experiments at altitudes higher than 10.5 Km resulted in death. These experiments showed that breathing stopped after about 30 minutes, while in two cases the electrocardiographically charted action of the heart continued for another 20 minutes.” He said after four minutes the people started to “wiggle” and move their head around. A minute later, they would cramp up in various parts of the body. Then their breathing would become rapid and at around 10 minutes they lost consciousness. At around the 30-minute mark, the subjects would only be taking about three slow breaths per minute. Death came soon after. He wrote this in May of the same year: “After relative recuperation from such a parachute descending test had taken place, however, before regaining consciousness, some experimental subjects were kept underwater until they died.” You can see just how little concern these people had for human life. But it gets even worse.

Rascher, likely following the orders of Luftwaffe chief surgeon Erich Hippke, experimented on people to see just how cold you could make them. These were called the “freezing experiments.” They wanted to know what would happen if a German pilot survived his fall from the sky and landed in the freezing cold ocean? How best to warm someone up who had hypothermia? In a world not eclipsed by evil, you couldn’t conduct such an experiment on humans. Rascher used people from the Dachau camp, this time putting prisoners in a tank of freezing cold water for up to three hours. Others he made stay outside in the cold weather while they were naked. Throughout their ordeal, they were monitored to see the effects the cold had on the body. One experiment was called, “Warming Up After Freezing to the Danger Point.” In a letter shown at the Nuremberg trials, Himmler gives his approval of the “warming up” experiments, signing off, “Kind Greetings, Heil Hitler!” The victims were almost frozen to death and then were warmed up, but we are not talking about being given a blanket and a steaming cup of tea.

They were immersed in hot water, sometimes boiling water. This was of course a massive shock to the system, and some people subsequently died. The warming by water was not a good way to treat people suffering from hypothermia was the conclusion, so Himmler told Rascher to go and ask fisherman who worked in the cold North Sea what they would do. Himmler reportedly said that “a fisherwoman could well take her half-frozen husband into her bed and revive him in that manner.” After that, Romani people were frozen half to death and then placed in between two warm Romani women. They had to be naked of course. The victims were monitored throughout, and if they died, autopsies were performed. You can see the actual reports.

They state if a person is immersed in water at 5 C it can usually be tolerated for an hour. When they raised the temperature to 15 C the victim could tolerate the water for four or five hours. The reports also state that even after the people were taken out of the water their temperature would continue to drop. They often died soon after, even when revival attempts were made. We now know about things such as “re-warming shock” and the “after-drop effect” and we know you should not warm a hypothermic person up using warm water, but back then the science wasn’t up to speed. The reports state that people whose body temperatures were reduced to 25 C and then warmed up to 28 C died. No number was written down as to how many died. One report just said they ALL died. They usually died anywhere between 53 and 106 minutes of cooling. But then those were the water experiments only.

During the trials, two people who said they witnessed these experiments said 80 to 90 people died. They said they saw only two people actually get through the experiment, but noted that they became “mental cases” as a result. Finally, this same doctor conducted what was called the “blood coagulation experiments.”  Basically, the Nazis wanted to know if you took a pill made from beet and Apple pectin would the blood clot after being shot, therefore possibly saving the life of a soldier. Again, in a normal world, you could never conduct this experiment on humans, but the Nazis simply used victims of the camps.

They shot them and then gave them the drug. What’s even worse, they sometimes amputated people’s limbs. This was an attempt to try and duplicate a person losing a limb on the battlefield due to a bomb. They made it as real as possible, removing the limbs sometimes without giving the victim any kind of anaesthetic. After that, they got the blood-clotting drug. In his notes, Rascher wrote, “The tests of this medicine showed no failures under most varied circumstances.” This got back to Hitler himself, who was impressed with the experiment. As for what happened to the dead, it was later revealed that Rascher had a thing for human skin, using it to make handbags, gloves, slippers, saddles, pants, and other items.

He sometimes sold these things to his colleagues, according to the book, “Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich.” Since those reports were released to the world, scientists have said that Rascher lied in them and there were many contradictions and inaccuracies. The Nazis also realized he’d lied at times. Rascher was arrested in 1944 on the order of Himmler after it was revealed he’d kidnapped three children. He was accused of scientific fraud and even murdering his assistant. He ended up being a prisoner himself at Dachau and then in 1945, he was executed by firing squad. Ok, now for something very short, but extremely terrifying.

3. Head Injury

This account of one single experiment was told by a Holocaust survivor named Martin Small, who wrote that one day he and another prisoner were working at the house of a Nazi named Dr. Wichtmann. He said the doctor took off somewhere, so he did some looking around and at one point found himself looking into a locked room by a window outside the house. In his own words, he said, “I placed my hands on the ledge and put my face to the window. I was not prepared for what was inside and at first sight, I could not find words to interpret what I was looking at…I put my hand to my mouth as if trying to muffle my own outburst. I nearly vomited. 60 years later I still cannot erase the vivid, terrible image…”

Ok, so what was he looking at? He described seeing a young boy strapped to a chair. Above him was a mechanized hammer that struck the boy over the head every few seconds. It wasn’t hard enough to break the skull, but you can only imagine what that must have felt like after say, an hour, a day, two days, more. The guy said the boy was already driven mad, not dead, but not there, either. He said that this same doctor had actually saved him from being killed by another Nazi, so he was surprised he was torturing a little boy in the worst kind of way. “I dropped to my knees in sickness and disgust, and I trembled,” he wrote. It’s hard to imagine a human doing that to another human, but of course you are about to hear something even worse. Sorry, that’s just the way it’s going to be with this show.

2. Surgery

Surgery, it’s an important thing during a time when many men are being shot to pieces on the battlefield. The best surgeons practice of course, but who do you practice on besides victims on your own side? The answer for the Nazis was prisoners at the  Ravensbrück concentration camp. Without any anaesthesia at all, people had their bones removed, their nerves pulled out, their muscles plundered, all in the name of medical experimentation. The Nazis had two reasons for this. Firstly, they wanted to know if you remove something how does it regenerate, if at all.

Secondly, they were interested in seeing how transplants worked. They didn’t seem to give a damn about making people disabled and putting them through what must have been the worst kind of pain. Just imagine being tied down and having parts of you removed… That happened to a woman two times and she survived to tell the story. Her name was Jadwiga  Kamińska, and she said as a young girl she was sent into surgery and they did something to her leg that led to crippling pain. She didn’t know exactly what they did but said after she was grievously injured and suffered from infections.

It’s hard to say how many people were mutilated like this, but research shows there were a lot of victims trying to claim compensation after the war. There are photos, too, such as the one of a Polish women named Bogumiła Babińska-Dobrowska. She’d had a bit of her leg removed. The National Institutes of Health wrote that in all there were 27,759 known victims, made up of many nationalities, with about twice as many male victims as female victims. These people suffered all manner of injuries and many died. Reports state that the victims were called “rabbits” by the Nazis, given the nature of the experiments. Some were cut deeply so it could be seen how quickly infections ensued. Sometimes the Nazis would rub dirt, cloth fibers, wood shavings, and even broken glass into the open wound. This was to accelerate the speed of infection.

The victims were then given experimental drugs to see if the infection could be dealt with. The NIH wrote, “They operated on Barbara Pietrzyk five times in 1942 alone causing left lower limb paralysis. At 16 years of age, she was the youngest of the “rabbits.” In another account, Nazi Professor Gebhardt used 24 Polish women for an experiment. He wanted to see what would happen if you cut off blood flow in a limb, so he just tied something really tight around part of the limb. The result of course was the area became necrotic. Experimental drugs were subsequently administered to the women. Nazi reports that were unearthed said in one experiment 13 people died from gangrene, while six others were taken out and shot so they couldn’t ever tell anyone about what had happened to them. There is data to back all this up, so as unbelievable as it sounds, it happened.

There are names and photographs of survivors. Another NIH report stated, “The surviving victims were permanently disabled, both physically and psychologically. Four of the surviving Polish women, Maria Broel-Plater, Jadwiga Dzido, Wladyslawa Karolewska, and Maria Kusmierczuk testified during the Doctors’ Trial and exhibited the scars on their legs.” Then there was Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger. He was partly responsible for bone graft experiments using the tibias of victims. In some cases, the tibia would be harvested and then transplanted to another victim who had also had their tibia removed. During those same experiments, they did something called a myomectomy.

That’s removing the skeletal muscle, and as you know, nerves were also taken out. Again, there are names or survivors and photographs. One such person was named Wladislawa  Karolewska. She went through six separate surgeries each involving the removal of bone, muscles, and nerves. She testified later, describing how people were slaughtered and how she was experimented on. This is what she said happened to her after she passed out from pain: “I regained my consciousness in the morning and then I noticed that my leg was in a cast from the ankle up to the knee and I felt a very strong pain in this leg and the high temperature. I noticed also that my leg was swollen from the toes up to the groin. The pain was increasing and the temperature, too, and the next day I noticed that some liquid was flowing from my leg.”

One day, she and other rabbits stood in line to be executed. A German officer asked her, “Why do you stand so in line as if you were to be executed?” She replied, “The operations are worse for us than executions and we would prefer to be executed rather than to be operated on again.” She explained in her testimony what happened after the final operation: “I stayed in the hospital six months. I was in bed. I could not stretch my legs. I could not move them. I could not walk either.” A doctor named Fischer later admitted to taking off entire limbs, saying he was just following orders. He wrote of one limb removal: “I was ordered to go to Ravensbrück and perform the operation of removal on that evening. I asked Doctors Gebhardt and Schulze to describe exactly the technique which they wished me to follow.” In a sworn affidavit, a Czech doctor named Dr. Zdenka Nedvedova-Nejedla, wrote: “High amputations were performed; for example, even whole arms with shoulder blades or legs were amputated. These operations were performed mostly on insane women who were immediately killed after the operation by a quick injection of Evipan.”

That is a kind of barbiturate that can kill in high doses. She said eleven people died or were killed during these operations, and she also stated that pain relievers weren’t administered to the victims. We know this because she wrote: “After operations, no one except SS nurses was admitted to the persons operated on, whole nights they lay without any assistance and it was not permitted to administer sedatives even against the most intensive post-operational pains.” Ok, so this is a really depressing show, but you all know the expression that history is doomed to repeat itself if we don’t study it.

We need to know the facts. You need to know that the Nazis purposefully gave people malaria. They tested mustard gas on prisoners. They gave tetanus to others, and they conducted many awful experiments to see how people could be sterilized. They even poisoned people to the point of death or actual death, and they burned people to see how bomb blasts work out for victims... but even after hearing all that, there’s one thing that sticks out.

1. Twins

These were called the Twin experiments. The Nazis were obsessed with twins, and so they captured about 1,500 sets and imprisoned them at Auschwitz. About 200 of them survived, so that’s how we know about what happened. They separated them so they could monitor what happened to each twin without them knowing  the same was happening to their sibling. Again, they did ad hoc surgeries on them, even trying to change their eye color using dyes. This was mostly the work of doctors Josef Mengele and Karin Magnussen. The latter made it clear how she thought, writing this in 1943: “This war is not just about the preservation of the German people, but is about the question, which races and peoples should live in the future on European soil… the Jew who enjoys life as a host in our country, is our enemy, even if he does not actively engage with weapons in this fight.”

But why change the eye color, which was very painful by the way…The reason was just to see if they could. One survivor said Mengele looked at her mother and saw what he said were "perfect Aryan features" and blue eyes, but her eyes were brown, which didn’t impress the doctor. His thoughts? Try and change them. Survivor Jona Laks said she saw Mengele remove one twin’s organs without giving him any anaesthetic. Others said he sometimes just killed twins by giving them injections to the heart. Mengele was obsessed with what he might have called pureblood, and so he was obsessed with twins and genetic inheritance. After all, the Nazis wanted to create a super race, partly and wrongly based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “Superman”.

He even forced people to have sex, to see what the child might look like if indeed one was born as a result of the forced encounter. A survivor later said he did this with a male dwarf and a Romani woman. Listen to this from a Jewish doctor who was a prisoner himself but had to work with Mengele. His name was Miklos Nyiszli. He said he worked on many experiments. Sometimes they’d just kill twins at the same time just to see if the autopsy revealed they were similar on the inside. He wrote, “In Auschwitz camp there are several hundred pairs of twins, and their deaths, in turn, present several hundred opportunities!” One twin who survived was named Eva Mozes Kor. She wrote that Mengele tried to make boys into girls and vice versa.

In her own words she said, he “wanted to discover a way to change girls into boys and boys into girls, many of these details I learned forty years later, such as the twin teenage boys who had some of their private parts cut off in Mengele’s quest to see if he could turn them into girls.” She also said that when kids died in the camp the doctor became very angry, but it wasn’t because he was concerned for people’s welfare. She wrote, “These deaths meant the loss of valuable guinea pigs for his medical experiments.” But perhaps the worst thing, something that sounds like a disgusting horror movie, was his experiment related to sewing people together.

Yep, you heard that right. Joseph Mengele tried to attach twins together in an attempt to make them conjoined. He used Romani children for this. It sounds so outrageous you could understand people thinking it’s not true, but again there’s evidence, although not much in this case. We have at least one piece of evidence, and again it’s from the twin Eva Mozes Kor. We’ll let her tell you in her own words what she saw: “A set of Gypsy twins was brought back from Mengele’s lab after they were sewn back-to-back. Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese twin by connecting blood vessels and organs. The twins screamed day and night until gangrene set in, and after three days they died.”