Authors: Edwin Black
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (64 page)
Certainly, many concentration camp trustees,
capos
and block elders curried favor by demonstrating heightened brutality toward the inmates under their authority. But many used their trusted positions to subtly connive and cajole the 55, in small ways helping others survive. For example, Austrian journalist Eugen Kogon worked as a clerk in Buchenwald’s hospital under the notorious Dr. Erwin Ding-Schuler. It was Ding-Schuler who in 1941 wrote in his diary, “Since tests on animals are not of sufficient value, tests on human beings must be carried out.” When testifying against Katzen-Ellenbogen, Kogon explained to prosecutors that it was not necessary to be merciless even when working for the most depraved doctors. “I worked in exactly the opposite way,” he said. “I made Major Dr. Ding-Schuler a tool of the prisoners and all this only in a positive manner from the beginning to the end…. That’s the difference.” Kogon went on to write numerous articles and books on the inhumanity of concentration camps such as Buchenwald.
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Camp medical men did more than just withhold treatment. Many actively participated in the murder process itself. Katzen-Ellenbogen was publicly accused of finishing off a thousand men with injections. The fact that thousands were killed by an instantly-acting injection-20cc of phenol-was amply proved. But there were no witnesses to corroborate that Katzen-Ellenbogen was among the medics who wielded the hypodermics. He never directly denied being involved in injections, although he asserted he was unaware of Schiedlausky’s mass injection campaign in Block 61. When the subject of injections was brought up in court, Katzen-Ellenbogen nonchalantly testified that the allegation against him was just that-an allegation in the newspapers that could not be proved.
45
However, Katzen-Ellenbogen’s guilt-ridden colleague, camp doctor Schiedlausky, did admit his involvement in the injections as well as the other medical atrocities that took place in Block 61. Katzen-Ellenbogen denied claims that he exercised a “sinister influence” over Schiedlausky that could have made a difference. Prosecutors charged, “You could have stopped it, is that correct?”
46
With typical insouciance, Katzen-Ellenbogen replied, “Not that I could stop it, but that I would do my best, and I think that I would have succeeded to persuade Schiedlausky not to burn his fingers.” Prosecutors shot back, “Well, isn’t it a fact, doctor, that you [previously] testified that you would have had enough influence that his extermination of prisoners in Block 61 would never have happened?” Katzen-Ellenbogen admitted, “Yes, I said it before. It is the same thing I just said.”
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Q: Well, then, you certainly were able to exercise a considerable power over Schiedlausky, is that not correct?
A: I wouldn’t use the word “power.” Influence, yes.
Q: Well, was there any other man in Buchenwald that could exercise that same influence over Schiedlausky?
A: Probably not, because Schiedlausky was a very secretive man, who, for instance, didn’t say anything to anybody, even his colleagues …. Due to the fact that he was a patient of mine-I have a certain influence of psychoanalysis which is exercised over a patient.”
48
But ghastly science continued in Block 61. Heinous surgical procedures involving eye color and corneas were among the experiments performed by Nazi eugenicists operating in concentration camps. At Auschwitz, chemicals were injected into the eyes of children to observe color changes. At Buchenwald, trachoma was among the eye diseases investigated.
49
Katzen-Ellenbogen claimed that he did not participate in the deliberate infections, painful experiments and euthanasia at Buchenwald, only pure research. One Nazi doctor, Werner Greunuss, received life imprisonment for his activities at Buchenwald. While admitting that he assisted Greunuss, Katzen-Ellenbogen explained, “I conducted with him scientific research about vision, and the experiments were made by [prisoner medical assistants] Novak and Sitte on rabbits.” He added, “I worked on literature, particularly as my doctor thesis was in this region. Dr. Greunuss was able to read all my work which was then in German, and furnish me books from Jena University Library.”
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Nothing further was proved about Katzen-Ellenbogen’s involvement with eye research.
Katzen-Ellenbogen did engage in other experimental medical activity, however. He regularly applied his skills as an accomplished hypnotist, including posthypnotic suggestions. There were the bedwetters, for example. In a hell where Katzen-Ellenbogen regularly ignored the severest diseases, injuries and afflictions, the doctor took an inexplicably keen interest in
enuresis,
or bedwetting. Many young boys, gripped by fright and mis-treatment, urinated uncontrollably at night. These boys were brought to the doctor, who placed them under hypnotic suggestion to cure their problem. But prisoners openly accused Katzen-Ellenbogen of using his hypnotic skills to extract information and confessions for the SS and Gestapo. Katzen-Ellenbogen was proud of his work. In one case, a young man between eighteen and twenty years old was brought in at 4 P.M. on a Sunday afternoon; he was placed under a trance in the presence of other SS doctors. On this point, Katzen-Ellenbogen in open court denied that he “was hypnotizing people in order to extort confession of political prisoners and deliver them to the Gestapo.” Yet he was never able to explain why he rendered service for bedwetters when he denied medical attention to so many others who were dying.
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Eugenics was always an undercurrent at Buchenwald. One block was known as the
Ahnenforschung
barrack, or ancestral research barrack. It was worked by a small detachment known as Kommando 22a, mainly Czech prisoners, researching and assembling family trees of SS officers. SS officers were required to document pure Aryan heredity. In addition, the SS Race and Settlement Office was systematically sweeping through Poland looking for
Volksdeutsche,
that is, persons of any German ancestry. When this agency discovered Polish children eugenically certified to have Aryan blood, the youngsters were kidnapped and raised in designated Nazi environments. This program was called “Germanization.” As a skilled and doctrinaire eugenicist, Katzen-Ellenbogen was assigned to perform eugenic examinations of Polish prisoners, seeking those fit for Germanization. Eugenic certification saved them from extermination.
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In describing Katzen-Ellenbogen’s duties, one Buchenwald medical colleague, Dr. Horn, said, “The first one, he was consulting psychiatrist. That is, later on they were Germanizing Poles. For that reason you had to examine the Poles somatically and psychically and since later on the SS used us for this delicate mission, I used Katzen-Ellenbogen to write the psychiatric reports. It was a pretty difficult job to talk about the intelligence of a Polish farm worker who didn’t even speak German and Katzen-Ellenbogen speaks some sort of Slavic Esperanto very well and in all the cases that he wrote for me, and there were at least 60 cases which he did, he recommended that for every one of them that they should be Germanized, so none of them were hanged.”
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To protect those fit for Germanization, Katzen-Ellenbogen engaged in all manner of medical charades. “So I manufactured all kinds of new forms of insanity and made false reports about their condition,” he recalled. “As the invalids were not sent out at that time, they were probably saved from being gassed at one of the extermination camps. In many cases, similar cases, particularly when Rogge, one of the SS Doctors, was making selections for the transport, I trained them to throw a fit, epileptic fit, and I don’t think that so many epileptics were ever in one place at one time as in Buchenwald.” Katzen-Ellenbogen did not save others in a similar fashion, just the fifry or so Polish prisoners he eugenically certified as possessing Aryan qualities, in spite of their mental or intellectual conditions.
54
Katzen-Ellenbogen was an expert at faking symptoms. While on the witness stand at his trial, he was asked if someone could be trained to feign symptoms. He bragged, “To throw a fit? With training, he could do it. I myself, for instance, could give a wonderful performance in that respect.” Asked if a specialist could be fooled, Katzen-Ellenbogen rejoined, “To fool [SS] Dr. Rogge [who was making selections], yes. But not a real specialist.” Asked again, Katzen-Ellenbogen repeated, “Not a real specialist.”
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Katzen-Ellenbogen was very sure of himself. When called to testify against other doctors in the so-called “Doctors Trial” at Nuremberg, his usual brashness was more than evident. When a prosecutor asked when he had joined the Nazi Party, Katzen-Ellenbogen snapped back, “When I was in America, I never asked a nigger
whether
he had syphilis, only
when
he got syphilis.” Later he explained, “That’s about the same [as the] question he put to me. “
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By any measure, the forgotten story of Katzen-Ellenbogen, an expert American eugenicist in Buchenwald, is one that stands alone. Kogon recalled it this way for prosecutors: “Katzen-Ellenbogen’s power in the Little Camp was an entirely extraordinary one. An extraordinarily large one, it should be. He was the man who was feared by the prisoners in the little camp as ‘the man in the background.’ He had under his command the block doctors … and his influence upon them was considerable.”
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When it came time to bring Katzen-Ellenbogen to justice, prosecutors found his record filled with contradictions. He saved Polish men with German blood, he let Frenchmen die before his eyes, and he sent thousands to their deaths by not exempting them from death kommandos. He was a Nazi collaborator; he was an eminent New Jersey doctor with Harvard credentials. The haze around Katzen-Ellenbogen’s record grew thicker in the postwar chaos. The witnesses were gone-either returned to their homes or incinerated-the evidence was burned, and Nazi medical cohorts were quick to support each other with glowing affidavits.
Moreover, Katzen-Ellenbogen was an expert on the fine points of American jurisprudence-the standard that applied to his trial for war crimes. His court record is riddled with procedural jousting as he corrected prosecutors on what questions they were allowed to ask, and how questions should be phrased. At one point the prosecutor asked, “So that everything else, other than what you have qualified, has been of your own personal knowledge?” The defendant replied, “Most of the things I testified to was of my own personal knowledge. Still, I did not say that everything I said is correct, because I know too well the psychology of testimony, and I think you know it too, from your point of view that every witness tells objectively spoken truth.”
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In one tense exchange, a prosecutor failed to establish the proper legal foundations for a fact; in other words he did not introduce the particulars first and then ask the defendant’s relation to it. “As a matter of fact,” the prosecutor asked, “do you not know that the treatment that was given him was this: that you had him stretched and spread-eagled out on one of those bunks?” Katzen-Ellenbogen rebutted the prosecutor’s form, “Are you testifying again yourself or are you_”
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Q: You answer my question, Doctor? … Is it not fact that you let him lay there for approximately three days without any food, any water or any treatment at all?
A: That new case that you are
testifying
about….
Q: Answer my questions, is it or is it not a fact?
A: No. If you want a case like that, I answer you no ….
Q: Did he or did he not die?
A: I am not an author of fiction, Mr. Prosecutor.
Q: Is your answer yes or no?
A: Mr. Denson [the prosecutor], you are the author. You must have known whether you killed in the fiction that patient or not? I don’t know.
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In another exchange, Prosecutor William Denson attempted to poke holes in Katzen-Ellenbogen’s stories.
Q: Is it not a fact, doctor, that they were beaten two to three hours later at Schebert’s order?
A: I couldn’t say yes or no to that. I refer once more to the well known psychology of the testimony that if a man, month after month, tells the same story, then he is lying.
Q: That is the reason you are not telling the same story?
A: Maybe so, because if everybody-I heard here so many testimonies, I am influenced. I made in Harvard experiments of students [who] wanted to kill somebody and they made a statement immediately and four weeks later. You would see the discrepancy between the first and second statement. I am not above that myself.
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When it finally came time to sum up, Katzen-Ellenbogen virtually commanded the judges to take the contradictions and inconsistencies into account. From the witness box, he reminded the judges: “It is a legal principle of all courts of all nations, the Romans as well in that time,
in dubio pre vero,
which in the English says: ‘give them the benefit of the doubt.’ That means if you are in doubt about my guilt, you have to acquit me.”
62
Then he actually invited the judges to commit a reversible error. “[But] I reverse that case,” he continued. “If you are in any doubt that I am not guilty, convict me because I would have a chance then in higher court or any other place to defend myself in a way that I perhaps didn’t do here.”
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On August 14, 1947, in a Dachau barrack set up for war crimes trials, Katzen-Ellenbogen stood, somewhat disheveled, before the military tribunal. Flanked by three shiny-helmeted MPs, his shoelaces removed to prevent suicide, bright lights above to aid the photographers, Edwin Marie Katzen-Ellenbogen awaited his judgment.
64
Without evidence of specific murders, he could not be hanged, as were other medical war criminals at Buchenwald. Instead, the tribunal used the legal theory that applied to so many Nazi conspirators. This theory was called “common design,” meaning that Katzen-Ellenbogen joined “a common design” to perpetrate the horrors of Buchenwald on the inmates. “It is clear,” concluded the tribunal, “that the accused, although an inmate, cooperated with the SS personnel managing the camp and participated in the common design.”
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