The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (42 page)
Authors: Arthur Allen
In the final days
, the SS ordered the 8,000 Jews in the camp to assemble in the parade ground, but thankfully the Communists created a disturbance that distracted the guards, and the Nazis were able to collect only about 2,000 of them. Those Jews, among the last people transported out of Buchenwald, starved to death on a rail siding outside the Dachau concentration camp.
As the Americans approached
Buchenwald in early April, Ding sent Kogon out of the camp to communicate with the Allied troops and offer the camp’s capitulation. To do this, he had Kogon nailed into a vaccine crate and loaded on a truck that carried him to Ding’s house in Weimar, where the Nazi’s family uncrated him. Then he wrote a letter, with the forged signature of an American officer, warning the Buchenwald commandant not to ship any more prisoners out of the camp. His action helped keep the 21,000 remaining inmates of Buchenwald from being sent on death marches.
On April 11, a crowd
of prisoners trotted through the potholed streets of the camp to Block 50, where they entered the basement and cleared away the pile of coal used to cook the vaccine rabbits. Underneath it were more than 100 rifles and a machine gun, with boxes of bullets and grenades, homemade Molotov cocktails, knives, and 20 pistols. Many of the weapons had been recovered from the rubble of the Gustloff works and secretly hidden there. SS men were fleeing into the woods. Some were captured and shot or beaten to death.
Ryszard Fleck remembered
it as a happy moment. “A prisoner showed up on the balcony of the Hygiene Institute holding a picture of Hitler that he took from Ding’s office, in a glass frame, and he threw it down. The sound of the breaking glass was accompanied by the cheers of the prisoners who were gathered downstairs. He did the same with pictures of Goering and Goebbels.”
A few hours later, a column of the U.S. Third Army entered the camp. The young soldiers couldn’t believe what they saw.
“
When I walked into
that gate I saw before me the walking dead,” said Leon Bass, an African-American GI from Philadelphia who was 19 years old that day. “I saw human beings that had been beaten, starved, tortured. They had been denied everything that would make anyone’s life liveable. They had skeletal faces and deepset eyes. Their skulls had been shaven and they were holding onto one another just to keep from falling.” He entered a barracks and was hit by the stench of death and human waste, the smell of burning flesh from fires outside, and felt the stares of dying inmates. He began giving his food out as fast as he could, though later he was told that many inmates died of overeating in those first few days. “In ignorance,” he said, “you do the wrong thing.”
The Communists put up
banners and held a huge parade of freedom. But in the Little Camp people were still dying, and a few of the more perspicacious observers, such as the writer Meyer Levin, realized quickly that “there were two Buchenwalds, the upper and the lower, separated by a high barbed wire fence; and the upper camp meant possible life, and the lower camp was death. In the upper area . . . the prisoners bore a human resemblance, they had strength enough to walk around. The lower camp received the transports from Auschwitz, and sent out transports to places like Ohrdruf; it was from this well of uttermost misery that the about-to-die tottered forth to replace the dead.” Here, wrote Levin, were survivors who had “passed through sieve after sieve of death.” Some six million had fallen through. The survivors “were like a bit of cinder adhering to the mesh.”
A
bout a week
after the U.S. military liberated Buchenwald, after Eisenhower and Patton and Edward R. Murrow and many Jeeps full of journalists had toured the camp, had seen the piles of corpses and Ilse Koch’s collection of shrunken heads and lampshades, had walked the yards and barracks full of skeletal survivors, watched prisoners die after eating too much of the rich food shoved at them by horrified GIs, had toured the gruesome typhus station, Erwin Schuler turned himself in to American intelligence officers at his home in Weimar, where he had returned to the side of his pregnant wife and two young children.
Only a few months earlier
, he’d gotten the long-awaited news: a municipal judge in Leipzig had officially changed his name. “My oldest daughter is just getting ready to enter school,” he wrote a friend, “and I am so happy to spare her, especially as a young girl, the burden of the name ‘Ding.’” He was no longer Ding or Ding-Schuler, except in the miles of evidence and testimony that echoed with his name for years to come.
Just as he won his
new name, though, Schuler developed a hyphenated personality. On the one hand, he was a senior representative of the master race, a doctor with powers of life and death over thousands. On the other, he was intermittently aware that the war was lost. There were ways to pretend, to Kogon and some of the other inmates, and perhaps to himself, that he was playing a double game, that his true allegiance was with the good, the causes of science and progress represented by the inmates whose lives he controlled, inmates whom he treated respectfully most of the time, but occasionally threatened to kill. In his correspondence with Mrugowsky and other SS officers in 1945, we see efforts, in writing at least, to improve conditions at the camp—to provide drinkable water and reasonable sewage disposal and even a tubercular ward.
Dr. Ding, in white coat, and colleagues, in front of Block 50. (Courtesy of Gedekstätte Buchenwald. Copyright Dienst voor de Oorlogsslachtoffers, Brussels.)
Ding-Schuler had
made a Faustian bargain to become an SS doctor, and there, under the missing shade of the burned-out Goethe oak, he watched the deal go up in smoke. “He had joined the SS to make a rapid career, though his medical knowledge was weak,” said Kogon. “He wanted to become known within the medical world, to be attached to a university, to aggrandize his personal reputation, yet at the same time he would sacrifice anyone if his career was in play.” In Block 50, he felt as if he were in his playroom with grown-up toys, talking to real scientists in the refuge he had built for them in a concentration camp. When he tired of that, he would stroll down the barbed wire to see Dietzsch in Block 46, and “they would converse like a couple of criminals.”
Ding-Schuler had believed, or hoped, that his title would bring him fame, wealth, success, and power that he would never have achieved as a clever but impatient bastard child from a small town; and there were days sitting with gleaming boots upon his desk and authoritative volumes on the shelf, when he could pretend he had achieved something, pretend, at least, that he was a Roman overlord with Greek intellectuals at his beck and call. He wanted what the scientists had, but there was no longer any way to get it. The experience with the radiologist Kreuzfuchs had not been the only time when his own ignorance sparked a fit of rage. He was not a free man. At a whim, he could extinguish their lives the way a smoker squashes a cigarette butt. Perhaps he recognized that, despite this, the scientists were free men, free souls in pursuit of truth.
If citizen Schuler
was expecting clemency from the Americans, he would be quickly disappointed. Schuler had repented by saving Yeo-Thomas and helping Kogon prevent the liquidation of Buchenwald, he thought. But this meant next to nothing to his captors, who were interested in his crimes, not the extenuating circumstances or his internal struggle. Two months after his arrest, Schuler tried to commit suicide at the Freising internment camp north of Munich. At 2 a.m. on a Saturday in June he took sleeping pills, morphine, and codeine and tried to slit his wrists with a razor blade. The blade was blunt, so he resorted to a pair of scissors, but in the meantime the drugs made him drowsy, and he passed out. Ding-Schuler told interrogators he no longer wanted to live, “because of what happened in the course of recent years, and the unbearable nature of my situation.”
It may have been
coincidental, but Ding-Schler’s erstwhile associate Dr. Waldemar Hoven had been brought in chains to Freising that day. Ding-Schuler thought Hoven was dead; instead, he would testify against him. Ding-Schuler felt anguish over his family, who were in Russian-held territory. “
My wife is alone
with my two children, with no support since the loss of all my property,” he told interrogators. “A third should have been born in May, but I don’t know what my wife’s situation is.”
After the war
, the British spy Yeo-Thomas returned to Germany with a U.S. intelligence officer to track down the Nazis who’d killed and tormented his men. He also tried to find Schuler, writing to his superior officers that he was confident the latter would be an excellent witness in the war crimes trials. But he was too late. In August, Schuler succeeded in hanging himself from the window bars of his cell. In a suicide note, he asked the interrogators to tell his wife he died of a heart attack, and to let Yeo-Thomas and Kogon know they were released from their responsibilities to him, “but to take care of my wife.” He hoped she would remarry.
But Irene
Ding-Schuler failed to escape from under her husband’s dark shadow. She died in 1948 in a Leipzig hospital—of typhus.
There were many Nazi
suicides—the good, the evil, the indifferently bad. One of Schuler’s colleagues in the Hygiene Institute, the decontamination engineer Karl Gerstein—the “spy for God” to whom no one listened—committed suicide in French custody. Eduard Wirths, the Auschwitz doctor who, despite sending thousands to their deaths at least had a guilty conscience and saved a few souls, killed himself while in the hands of the British. Ernst-Robert Grawitz, the senior SS doctor and Mrugowsky’s boss, used a tank grenade to blow himself up with his wife at their home in Berlin.
Many more tried
to escape judgment in life, and they often succeeded. Bruno Weber, Fleck’s boss at Auschwitz, went underground after the war. Following a lengthy cops-and-robbers routine, British agents captured him in 1946 at the house of a friend who’d stored his medical books, and brought him to a prison camp for war criminals at Minden, but after questioning by Polish investigators he was released.
The SS commander of Galicia
, Fritz Katzmann, who had the blood of 430,000 Jews on his hands, changed his identity and lived undisturbed until his death of natural causes in 1957, in Darmstadt.
Several hundred
Nazi war criminals were hanged in the West, and the Soviet Union and its allies executed as many as 40,000 Nazis. As the United States buckled to West German pressure during the early Cold War years, most of the others went free, and the search for the fugitives largely stopped. A series of amnesties freed nearly 800,000 former Nazis convicted of a range of crimes. By 1952, only about 1,200 were still incarcerated in Allied jails or camps.
In their declaration at Yalta
on November 1, 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had warned Germans who took part in atrocities that “they will be brought back to the scene of the crimes and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged.” Yet there often seemed to be an element of chance in the selection of suspects for war crimes trials. The International Military Tribunal tried a cross section of 24 top Nazi officials, sentencing 12 to death by hanging on October 1, 1946. As relations grew strained with the Soviet Union, the international tribunal broke up. The United States held 12 subsequent trials of German war criminals at Nuremberg. The first,
U.S.A. v. Karl Brandt et al.
, dealt with the crimes of Ding-Schuler and other medical men. It was known as the Doctors’ Trial, and it led to the so-called Nuremberg Code.
The origins of
the code, standards that refined existing ideas about ethical medicine, were obscure until recently. But files from the London War Office show that it grew out of a complex network of motives, including American medical authorities’ concern about onerous restrictions on clinical trials.
The medical war crimes
investigation began as the convergence of two efforts. One was the industrial espionage programs known as FIAT (Field Information Agency, Technical) and CIOS (Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee), whose technical experts accompanied occupying troops, gathering intelligence to exploit German science for any economic, technical, or scientific value it might bring the Western Allies. This wing of the investigation would lead to Operation Paperclip, which brought brilliant but ethically dubious scientists like Wernher von Braun to the United States in a smooth, unwholesome transition to Cold War. But as these investigations progressed, British, Canadian, and U.S. intelligence agents realized that much of the material on their hands was of scientific value only to demonstrate the depravity to which scientific men could descend.
At a May 15, 1946
, meeting at IG Farben headquarters in Germany, FIAT officials offered to share their materials with war crime investigators. They had detailed information on the typhus experiments at Buchenwald, as well as experiments with freezing, poison gas, phosphorus burns, removal of ligaments and limbs from living subjects, cancer and healthy tissue transplants, artificial insemination, sterilization, and abortion. Everyone at the meeting agreed that a medical crimes trial should be held as soon as possible. The French, whose prisoners had been cruelly abused in the concentration camps, were particularly keen to prosecute Nazi doctors.
In a July 31, 1946, consultation
at the Pasteur Institute, Allied scientists and lawyers laid out the guidelines for prosecution. British and American scientists, who had conducted many experiments in prisons and mental asylums (though nothing approaching the scale of the Nazi crimes), worried that the trial could turn the public’s stomach against human experimentation in general.
Some, such as
the British entomologist Kenneth Mellanby, who had attempted to “volunteer” conscientious objectors to test vaccines by having them injected with typhus germs in 1942 (his uncle Edward Mellanby, who headed Britain’s Medical Research Council, rejected the idea as “crazy”), even argued that Schuler’s experiments had been beneficial.
Andrew C. Ivy, an American
gastroenterologist who represented the American Medical Association and the U.S. War Department, warned that “unless appropriate care is taken, the publicity associated with the trial of the experimenters in question . . . may so stir public opinion against the use of humans in any experimental manner whatsoever that a hindrance will thereby result to the progress of science.”