The SS Medical Corps was a formation within the SS of professional doctors who provided medical services for the SS, including experiments on and the development of different methods of murdering prisoners. Members of the SS Medical Corps also served on the front with the Waffen-SS as support personnel practicing field expedient medicine on wounded members of the SS.
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The first units of the SS Medical Corps began to appear in the 1930s. Small divisions of SS personnel designated to medical duties were known initially as the Sanitätsstaffel. [1] These formations were originally small units under the command of local SS leaders. After 1931, the SS formed a headquarters office known as Amt V, which was the central office for SS medical units. At this same time, a special SS unit was formed known as the Röntgensturmbann SS-HA, or the Hauptamt X-Ray Battalion. This formation comprised 350 full-time SS personnel who toured Germany offering X-ray diagnostics to any SS member. [2] While the Röntgensturmbann was an independent office, the local Sanitätsstaffel were under dual command of both the SS Medical Office (Amt V), and the leaders of the various SS-Sturmbann and Standarten. [3] Within each SS-Sturmbann (battalion), there existed one company of SS personnel whose duty was to serve as medical support personnel to the rest of the SS battalion. Eventually these supporting units became the SS Medical Corps.
When the Nazis came to national power in 1933, the SS was reorganized and an office of the SS Surgeon General was established. Commanded by an SS-Obergruppenführer , the SS Surgeon General was a member of the personal staff of the Reichsführer-SS , with the SS Medical Corps, as a whole, losing the status of a headquarters office. This was an important development in changing the nature of service for members of the SS Medical Corps. By 1935, the SS Medical Corps was considered an "auxiliary duty", and all members of the medical corps were also attached to regular SS formations. To denote medical corps status, the SS authorized a serpent crest to be worn on the collar patches of SS unit insignia. Because SS Medical Corps members could now serve in any branch of the SS, this expansion allowed medical professionals to join every SS office and participate in a variety of duties.
Between 1935 and 1938, the SS Medical Corps began to serve a more sinister purpose, with SS doctors assigned to concentration camps where they engaged in a variety of indescribably cruel human medical experiments. SS doctors were called upon in 1936 to assist with Germany's euthanasia program against the mentally disabled and physically handicapped in a program known confidentially as Operation T4. [5] For example, they helped develop the first methods of gassing patients using carbon monoxide from the exhaust fumes of lorries (vans). Stemming from a secret memorandum signed into effect by Hitler authorizing the killing of "useless eaters" and people considered an economic burden on German society on 9 October 1939, Operation T4 eventually evolved into the Law for Euthanasia for the Incurably Ill. [5] According to historian Götz Aly, the first commandants of the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka came out of Operation T4 and "were on its payroll." [6]
In 1938, the SS formed its own Medical Academy in Berlin to train medical personnel and physicians who would serve with the SS-VT, the forerunner of the Waffen-SS. [7] Doctors serving with the Waffen-SS were highly trained both in medical skills and combat tactics with many such doctors receiving high combat awards. During the war's progression, the Waffen-SS had a continuously developing structure for physicians which was highly complex, so sometime in August 1943, Himmler united all the medical branches of the SS and placed them under the command of Reicharzt-SS Ernst-Robert Grawitz, much like the Surgeon-General of the army. [8]
Oftentimes personnel in the medical units of the SS performed duties not typically associated with traditional medicine as their primary responsibility once the war began was nothing less than the institutionalized medical genocide of anyone considered an enemy of the Nazi regime. [9] People deemed inferior or undesirable became human guinea pigs and were exploited for scientific research by SS doctors as they conducted inhumane medical experiments at the camps. [10] [11] Human medical experiments, the most notorious of which occurred at Dachau concentration camp and Auschwitz reached their zenith during the war. Such experiments ranged from vivisections, sterilization experiments, infectious disease research, freezing experiments, as well as many other excruciating medical procedures often performed without anesthetic. [12] [13] During this period of time one of the most infamous SS doctors, Josef Mengele, served as Head Medical Officer of Auschwitz and was responsible for the daily gas chamber selections as well as brutal experiments (including those on human twins). [14]
Another function that SS doctors served was to maximize the economic utility of slave labor at the concentration camps, aiding the SS industry and the Nazi cause through the exploitation of people and resources. Along those lines in December 1942, SS- Gruppenführer Richard Glücks (Inspector of Concentration Camps) sent a directive to the camp doctors telling them that, "The best doctor in a concentration camp is that doctor who holds the work capacity among inmates at its highest possible level. He does this through surveillance and through replacing [the sick or injured] at individual work stations... Toward this end it is necessary that the camp doctors take a personal interest and appear on location at work sites." [15] [a]
In 1945, after the surrender of Germany, the SS was declared an illegal criminal organization at the Nuremberg trial. [17] SS doctors, in particular, were marked as war criminals due to the wide range of human medical experimentation which had been conducted during World War II as well as the role SS doctors had played in the gas chamber selections of the Holocaust. [18] Later charges were brought against SS intellectuals and SS physicians by the German state. [19] Many SS doctors, however, were never brought to justice with such figures as Josef Mengele escaping to Argentina while still other SS doctors returned to civilian practice in Germany under assumed names and in some cases, even their original identities. In the former East Germany for instance, Hermann Voss became a respected anatomist, while Eugen Wannenmacher obtained a post as a professor at the University of Münster and Mengele's former sponsor and mentor, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, continued operating his medical practice. [20]
The Schutzstaffel was a major paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, and later throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II.
Karl Brandt was a German physician and Schutzstaffel (SS) officer in Nazi Germany. Trained in surgery, Brandt joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and became Adolf Hitler's escort doctor in August 1934. A member of Hitler's inner circle at the Berghof, he was selected by Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler's Chancellery, to administer the Aktion T4 euthanasia program. Brandt was later appointed the Reich Commissioner of Health and Emergency Services. Accused of involvement in human experimentation and other war crimes, Brandt was indicted in late 1946 and faced trial before a U.S. military tribunal along with 22 others in the Doctors' Trial. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged on 2 June 1948.
Josef Rudolf Mengele was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician during World War II at the Russian front and then at Auschwitz during the Holocaust, where he was nicknamed the "Angel of Death". He performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp, where he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers, and was one of the doctors who administered the gas.
Aktion T4 was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia which targeted people with disabilities in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with Aktion T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death". In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing.
Reichsführer-SS was a special title and rank that existed between the years of 1925 and 1945 for the commander of the Schutzstaffel (SS). Reichsführer-SS was a title from 1925 to 1933, and from 1934 to 1945 it was the highest rank of the SS. The longest-serving and most noteworthy office holder was Heinrich Himmler.
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Joachim Mrugowsky was a Nazi bacteriologist who committed medical atrocities at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was Associate Professor, Medical Doctorate, Chief of Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS, Senior Hygienist at the Reich, SS-Physician, SS and Waffen-SS Colonel. He was found guilty of war crimes following the war in the Doctors' Trial and executed in 1948.
SS-Totenkopfverbände was a major branch of the Nazi Party's paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS) organisation. It was responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps for Nazi Germany, among similar duties. It was both the successor and expanded organisation to the SS-Wachverbände formed in 1933. While the Totenkopf was the universal cap badge of the SS, the SS-TV also wore this insignia on the right collar tab to distinguish itself from other SS formations.
Karl Franz Gebhardt was a Nazi physician and a war criminal. Gebhardt was the main coordinator of a series of medical atrocities performed on inmates of the concentration camps at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. These experiments were an attempt to defend his approach to the surgical management of grossly contaminated traumatic wounds, against the then-new innovations of antibiotic treatment of injuries acquired on the battlefield.
Ernst-Robert Grawitz was a German physician and an SS functionary during the Nazi era. Grawitz funded Nazi programs involving experimentation on inmates in Nazi concentration camps and was part of the group in charge of the murder of mentally ill and physically disabled people in the Action T4 programme. In April 1945 as the Soviet Red Army advanced on Berlin, Grawitz killed himself and his family.
Waldemar Hoven was a Nazi physician at Buchenwald concentration camp, and convicted war criminal for conducting human experiments regarding typhus which led to the deaths of many concentration camp prisoners, and as one of the organizers of the euthanasia program Aktion T4; this Nazi initiative resulted in the systematic murder of 275,000 to 300,000 disabled people. He was sentenced to death and hanged on 2 June 1948.
The SS Main Office was the central command office of the Schutzstaffel (SS) in Nazi Germany until 1940.
Richard Glücks was a high-ranking German SS functionary during the Nazi era. From November 1939 until the end of World War II, he commanded the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, later integrated into the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office as "Amt D". As a direct subordinate of Heinrich Himmler, he was responsible for the forced labour of the camp inmates and was the supervisor for the medical practices in the camps, ranging from Nazi human experimentation to the implementation of the "Final Solution", in particular the mass murder of inmates with Zyklon B gas. After Germany capitulated, Glücks committed suicide by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule.
Eduard Wirths was the chief SS doctor at the Auschwitz concentration camp from September 1942 to January 1945. Thus, Wirths had formal responsibility for everything undertaken by the nearly twenty SS doctors who worked in the medical sections of Auschwitz between 1942 and 1945.
Nazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on prisoners by Nazi Germany in its concentration camps mainly between 1942 and 1945. There were 15,754 documented victims, of various nationalities and age groups, although the true number is believed to be more extensive. Many survived, with a quarter of documented victims being killed. Survivors generally experienced severe permanent injuries.
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