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STUDIES OF CERVICAL CANCER

MEDICAL CRIMES AT KL AUSCHWITZ

STUDIES OF CERVICAL CANCER

The position of the chief SS doctor of the garrison (Standortarzt) in Auschwitz made it possible for Eduard Wirths to regularly investigate the activity of the physicians conducting medical experiments in Auschwitz. Moreover, Wirths became involved in individual projects on his own initiative. The first was testing on the inmates the medications delivered by pharmaceutical companies to the camp.

Since the spring of 1943 he conducted experiments together with his brother, Helmut Wirths, a gynaecologist who studied the development of cervical cancer. The two selected the inmates for experimentation from among the Jewish women in Block No. 10 in the mother camp. If they were suspected of that form of cancer, or it was identified during the examination, they amputated the cervix and sent the thus obtained material to the histological laboratory in Hamburg, where Helmut Wirths worked. In some cases, photographs were also taken in the camp’s photographic studio. After the completion of the experiment, the inmates were sent to Birkenau camp without being informed about the condition of their health.

A photo of the silhouette of a middle-aged man in a German uniform. He is looking from the side towards the camera lens. In the background there is a building and a person standing nearby with crutches.

Source: A-BSMA

Eduard Wirths (1909-1945)

Doctor of medicine, surgeon, member of the NSDAP and Allgemeine SS, as the military doctor. He entered combat in Norway and on the Russian Front. In 1942, he was transferred to the Concentration Camps Inspectorate and appointed the camp’s physician in Dachau. In September 1942 he was transferred to Auschwitz and remained the camp’s chief SS doctor (Standortarzt) until its evacuation in January 1945. He had extensive competences in the camp, which let him open invite his brother to conduct experiments on cervical cancer. Moreover, he became involved in experiment with medications on his own accord. Eduard Wirths also held the post of the chief SS doctor in the camps of Mittelbau, Bergen-Belsen, and Neuengamme. He was arrested after the end of the war, however, he never faced the court, as he committed suicide in the prison during the preparations to the process.

An excerpt from the testimony of Felicja Pleszowska, former inmate No. 29875 employed in the Experimental Block No. 10:

Dr Wirths’s experimental station opened in Block No. 10 at the same time as the station of Dr Clauberg. The experiments performed in this station aimed at explaining the development of cancer on the female sexual organs. I was assigned to that station on the first day as Operationschwester, my work was to assist on medical surgeries and give the physicians technical assistance. […] In the first days of the operation of the station, Dr Wirths’s younger brother arrived. He was employed as a gynaecologist in Hamburg, where he also conducted academic and experimental work in his profession. (…) Unlike in Clauberg’s station, inmate physicians were employed in Wirths’s. (…) Each woman underwent the procedure only once. According to my calculations, no more than 250 people were subjected to such procedures. All procedures that involved excision of a cervical specimen were performed in anaesthesia (Evipian). If a patient could not be sedated, she was not operated on. No operation ended in a fatal outcome.

Source: A-BSMA, Zeznanie Felicji Pleszowskiej, Collection: Höss Trial, Vol. 7, pp. 78–83.