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Horst Schumann

MEDICAL CRIMES AT KL AUSCHWITZ

MEDICAL CRIMES AT KL AUSCHWITZ

Horst Schumann

The following physician, who was also entrusted with the development of a method for mass sterilisation, was doctor of medicine, lieutenant of Luftwaffe, SS-Sturmbannführer Horst Schumann. Prior to that he had been the head of the institution for “incurable” in Grafeneck Castle in Württemberg and in Sonnenstein, where people with disabilities or suffering from psychological conditions were murdered in accordance with the provisions of the T4 action. The practice was defined as elimination of “life unworthy of living”.

 

He was also a member of the special “medical commission” conducting selection of the weak and sick inmates for gas chambers in concentration camps, including Auschwitz. 

Portrait of a middle-aged man. Dressed in a suit, a tie and a shirt. Gazing to the left side. There is a pin in the lapel of the jacket.

Source: A-BSMA

Horst Schumann (1906–1983)

Doctor of medicine, member of the NSDAP, lieutenant of Luftwaffe, and member of Allgemeine SS. From August 1939 he was the head of the Grafeneck euthanasia facility in Württemberg, and later, from December 1940, of the Euthanasia Centre in Sonnenstein near Pirna. He arrived at KL Auschwitz for the first time in July 1941, to select the chronically ill and disabled inmates as part of Action 14f13, being the continuation of the T4, in course of which ill and disabled people were murdered. During that selection, he sentenced 575 inmates to death, on the pretext of going to a sanatorium in Dresden. They were killed with carbon monoxide in the baths of the Euthanasia Centre in Sonnenstein. He arrived at Auschwitz for the second time in late 1942, to develop a cheap and quick method of sterilisation. After the war, he lived in West Germany until 1951. Threatened with arrest, he escaped to Japan. In 1955 he settled in Sudan, from where he fled to Nigeria in 1959. In 1960 he lived in Ghana, where he was arrested in 1966 in the wake of mounting global public opinion pressure and was extradited to West Germany. On 23 September 1970 he was tried by the jury in Frankfurt on the Main. However, due to the poor condition of the defendant, the proceedings against Schumann were terminated in April 1971.

Schumann, also, conducted his experiments in the wooden Barrack No. 30 in the Women’s Camp (BIa) in Birkenau. The method he proposed required the use of x-rays. The x-ray sterilisation station, prepared especially for Schumann, was equipped with two Siemens units that were wired to the control room, isolated behind sheets of lead, from where Schumann fired the devices.


Groups of several dozens of Jewish inmates were brought to the barrack from time to time, to have the men’s testicles and the women’s ovaries irradiated with x-rays. The effect of irradiation were numerous burns, mostly of the lower abdomen and the groin, but also of the buttocks. After several days, they turned into hard-to-heal centres of purulent inflammation. However, for Schumann the crucial issue was to find an optimum dose resulting in complete infertility, which is why he experimented with various doses of radiation delivered at different intervals.

 

The inmates were sent to work nearly immediately after the irradiation, even though they had severe burns, could hardly move, and were generally weakened. In the second stage of the experiment, usually after several weeks, some people subjected to the experiments were surgically castrated (on one or both sides) to have their irradiated reproductive organs examined in laboratories and to obtain material for comparative histology. Many of the inmates subjected to irradiation died from the complications or in the selections conducted in the camp, as they were recognised as unfit for work and sent to death in the gas chambers. 


Horst Schumann was also obliged to present the results of his research. However, he did it in a more extensive form than Clauberg, as he wrote an article “On the impact of x-rays on human reproductive glands”. In April 1944. he sent it officially to Himmler, recognising the results of the x-ray sterilisation experiment unsatisfactory, and suggesting castration as the most efficient method for conducting mass sterilisation. 

Source: A-BSMA, neg. 132/2.

A letter from the deputy head of the II Section of Führer’s Chancellery to SS Reichsführer, reporting on Horst Schumann’s experiments. 


TRANSLATION:


Berlin, April 29, 1944

Chancellery of the Führer

NSDAP

Secret State Business!

 

To

Reichsführer SS and Commander

Of the German Police

Heinrich Himmler

Registry no: IIa/Kt.

B e r l i n SW 11

Prinz-Albrecht Str. 9

 

Dear Mr. Reichsführer!

On the recommendation of Reich Chancellery Director Bouhler, I am enclosing a work by Dr. Horst Schumann on the effects of X-rays on the human reproductive glands.

 

At some point, he asked Herr Oberführer Brack for permission to carry out this work and for support in the form of the appropriate material being placed at his disposal in Auschwitz concentration camp.

 

I draw your attention to the second part of the work submitted to you, in which evidence is provided that the castration of men in the proposed way is rather to be ruled out or requires efforts that are not worth making. Surgical castration, which – as I have learned – takes only 6–7 minutes, is far more reliable in the light of the results obtained, and quicker to perform than castration with the use of X-rays.

 

I will be able to send you the next part of this work in the nearest

future.

Heil Hitler!

(illegible signature)

Enclosure.

1940/44 (date illegible)

In December 1944, during the evacuation of the camp, Schumann’s x-ray installation was disassembled and transported away from Auschwitz, while Stanisław Ślezak, the inmate who assembled and operated it, was considered to be too far involved in the crime and therefore transferred to the camp in Mauthausen, where he was executed. 

An excerpt from the testimony of a former inmate, Jakob Skurnik, a Polish Jew and a victim of the experiments of H. Schumann, delivered in February 1945 to the Soviet Commission in the liberated camp:

In December 1942, the leader of my block announced that all men aged 18 to 30 were not going to work on the following day. Instead, as per the delivered list, they were supposed to go for an obligatory x-ray. (…) On that day, when a group of 60 people were escorted to Block No. 31, they began to run us through x-ray machines in pairs. Prior to that, we were fully undressed. There was a level board installed in the machine, which was hitched up to the level of your sexual organs, and you needed to put your scrotum on it. Later they irradiated you with a large electric lamp, while you were standing, holding your hands on the small of your back. 

The procedure took from 5 to 7 minute per person. I felt no pain during the irradiation.

 

After we were all x-rayed, or – as the physicians called it – after sterilisation, we were sent to the work we did prior to that. (…) Eight months later, after the sterilisation, everyone who was subjected to it, was sent to the Auschwitz branch, to Block No. 28 – the camp’s hospital ‘Oświęcim’, (…) Where everyone was individually interrogated by a German physician in the rank of a captain (I don’t know his family name), dressed in an pilot uniform. (…) During the interrogation, the captain asked me if I often had erections, whether I had wet dreams, and also a lot of other questions, which I don’t remember. (…) After the interrogation and the experiment, myself and others were sent to the surgical ward of the hospital, to Block No. 21. 


Two days later, myself and my colleague Szlemowicz were taken to the operating theatre. (…) I was laid on one table and Szlemowicz on the other; I had an injection into my loins, and the operation started. (…) My surgery (castration) was conducted by Dr Dering, and Szlemowicz’s by Grabczyński. On that day, the whole group – eight people – had the left testicles removed, and later we were all hospitalised in Room No. 4, and had the surgery wound treated for 14 days. When we were healed, I was discharged to the camp and sent to work in Block No. 7a, the bricklayer school. Six months after the first surgery, I and the others had the second one performed, that is I had my other testicle removed. The second surgery was conducted on me by Dr Grabczyński.

Source: Jakub Skurnik, A-BSMA, Inne Zespoły, 1/1, Vol. 2, pp. 68-74.

Three men in white coats standing around the operating table. They are talking. A smiling nurse next to them.

Source: A-BSMA

Horst Schumann and Carl Clauberg. A photograph taken during the experiments. 

Victims of Clauberg’s and Schumann’s experiments, who managed to survive Auschwitz, were fully aware of their permanent mutilation.