herta oberheuser experiments

"The Rabbits of Ravensbrück"

Bogumila Jasuik, one of the "rabbits" chosen for medical experimentation. "German doctors experimented on her twice in November and December 1942, making four cuts on the muscles of her thigh."  (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Over the course of WWII, the Nazis carried out horrific and unethical medical experiments on prisoners in concentration camps. 

Hitler approved of the experiments on the prisoners saying they "ought not to remain completely unaffected by the war while German soldiers are being subjected to almost unbearable strain" (Helm, 213).

The experiments can be categorized into three types; two of which were conducted at Ravensbrück:

Experiments to test military personnel survival : For example, scientists and doctors at Dachau concentration camp subjected prisoners to freezing tempatures to test hypothermia. 

Experiments to further Nazi ideologies : At Ravensbrück, "Scientists tested a number of methods in an  effort to develop an efficient and inexpensive procedure for the mass sterilization of Jews, Roma, and other groups Nazi leaders considered to be racially or genetically undesirable" (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Experiments to test drugs and treatments : "Physicians at Ravensbrück conducted experiments in bone-grafting and tested newly developed sulfa (sulfanilamide) drugs"  (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

“Persevere and help others survive!"

In early July 1942, prisoners were ordered to keep away from the operating theatre as new equipment was being installed. Within a few weeks, Karl Gebhardt, Fritz Fischer, and Herta Oberheuser,  Ravensbrück's doctors, began their experiments.

75 of the youngest and fittest women from a recent transport from Lublin, Poland were selected as "rabbits" ( called such because they were used like laboratory animals). The young women had been members of a Polish underground resistance against the Nazi Regime. They had been caught by the Gestapo, and sent to  Ravensbrück. 

Description of the aftermath of experiments from  Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm

" The Nazis had used their limbs to recreate war wounds and infected those wounds with aggressive bacteria, wood chips, and glass, trying to cause gas gangrene. They also experimented with removing and damaging nerves, muscles, and bones in the legs" (rememberravensbruck.com). 

The women stuck together to keep each other alive after their surgeries. "Krysia nursed Wanda. Friends offered food. Alfreda Prus, a quiet, gentle girl, a student at the university of Zamosc, near Lublin, threw Wanda her daily bread ration" (Helm, 218).  One secret group within the camp was dedicated to helping others. Their mission, "persevere and help others survive," was based on their oath as Girl Guides (Girl Scouts in the US).  The women risked their lives for those in the experiments  "secretly bringing them food, water, and even medications to help them survive"  (rememberravensbruck.com).

In describing Herta Oberheuser, prisoners say, "Her face is a mask, her eyes glassy. She shows no shadow of pity and leaves wounds undressed for day, so the women feel they are rotting away inside the plaster, but when at last the dressings are changed it is the worst torture of all" (Helm, 219).

On the left is an excerpt from  Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women  by Sarah Helm describing an all too familiar scene after the sulphonamide surgeries. 

By the end of October, Oberheuser rarely walked through the ward. Oberheuser and the other doctors had lost interest in the sulphonamide experiments. In November, operations of three kinds began: bone-breaking, bone grafts, and bone splinters. 

On the right is an excerpt from Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm describing bone surgeries (pg 229). 

Secret letter written in urine written by Polish rabbit Krysia Czyz

Drawing of Krysia Czyz by fellow  Ravensbrück prisoner, Grazyna Chrostowska

Rabbits, desperate to be heard, found ways to smuggle out messages and take photos of themselves to document and tell those on the outside what was happening to them. One woman, Krysia Czyz, going as far as writing a letter with her own urine.

Maria Bielicka, who had been rejected as a test subject, befriended three Czech girls while working in the bookbinding workshop. The girls worked next door and were responsible for sending clothes of executed prisoners back to their families. They devised a way to send the clothes of prisoners who were not executed and snuck letters in the clothes. Maria sent a letter to her parents who were in the Polish underground.

"These messages eventually made it to the Polish underground radio network in England, which broadcast the news of the experiments and mass murders at Ravensbrück - and warned specific camp leaders of their fate should such activities continue"   (rememberravensbruck.com).

On February 4, 1945, the young women learned the SS were coming for them in the morning.

"Overnight, as the Rabbits stayed up writing good-bye letters, the inmates came up with a plan to grab and hide the Rabbits in the predawn hours, during roll call – and right in front of the SS.  And it worked. 

The Rabbits were successfully hidden that morning – and then kept hidden for nearly three months - until liberation.  And the international group of inmates in Ravensbrück gave them food and water, protected them from the constant SS searches, and devised ways of getting them out of the camp.  Amazingly, not one of the 63 Rabbits was ever betrayed.  As one surviving “Rabbit” put it, 'You could say that the entire camp helped us, hid us, protected us.'"  (rememberravensbruck.com).

Stanisława Śledziejowska-Osiczko, "Stasia" at  Ravensbrück, April 2018

Several of the women 'rabbits' survived and were able to testify in the Medical Case. The case was one of twelve heard before an American tribunal (part of the subsequent Nuremberg Trials).

Gebhardt, Fischer, and Oberheuser were among the sixteen doctors and nurses prosecuted for their participation "in the killing of physically and mentally impaired Germans and who had performed medical experiments on people imprisoned in concentration camps. Sixteen of the defendants were found guilty. Of the sixteen, seven were sentenced to death for planning and carrying out experiments on human beings against their will" (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Oberheuser was found guilty of  " performing sulfanilamide experiments, bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration and bone transplantation experiments on humans, as well as of sterilizing prisoners" (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). 

Gebhardt was sentenced to death and executed on June 2, 1948. Fischer and Oberheuser were sentenced to prison, but they were released in 1954. Oberheuser subsequently set up a medical practice in Schleswig, Holstein.

After the trials, the Nuremberg Code was created which lists ten points that must be followed in permissble medical experiements. Although its legal force is questionable, "it remains a landmark document in medical ethics"   (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).

Dr. Herta Oberheuser

Dr. Herta Oberheuser being sentenced at trial

Jadwiga Dzido shows her leg as she testifies at Nuremberg

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After Hitler’s pal died, Nazis recreated his injuries in a sick experiment

The Polish woman had returned to Ravensbrück, 70 years after she had last seen the place. This time, she was in a wheelchair, strolled around by an attentive volunteer who called her his “auntie” and wore a Polish flag scarf with her concentration camp number emblazoned on it. They would stop periodically to take selfies with some of the young people who had gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of the camp.

Stanislawa “Stasha” Sledziejowska-Osiczko was one of the lucky ones. She had made it home.

Stasha was a member of the Ravensbrück rabbits, 72 Polish Catholic female prisoners who were subjected to a series of inhumane medical experiments by Nazi doctors at World War II’s only all-female concentration camp. The group’s name came from their treatment as medical lab rabbits — and also, because the cruel experiments often left them with injuries and deformities that meant hopping was the only way they could get around.

Their story has never been widely told, but now, a new novel called “Lilac Girls” by Martha Hall Kelly  describes their incredible journey, which spanned from the concentration camp to the United States, where a well-known philanthropist and socialite named Caroline Ferriday would help them recover from their horrific injuries. Her circumstances could not have been more different from those of the Ravensbrück prisoners — and yet she became one of their biggest defenders during a time when the reality of concentration camps seemed very distant to most Americans.

“In the beginning, [SS commander] Heinrich Himmler used [Ravensbrück] as a show camp. There were flowers in the window boxes, birdcages and a beautiful road lined with trees. Himmler would show it to the international Red Cross to prove [he was] supposedly treating the prisoners well,” says Kelly of the camp 56 miles north of Berlin, which housed prostitutes, socialists, communists, political protesters, abortionists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, among others.

“In the middle of the war, they needed all hands on deck to work, so they weren’t executing as many people. Toward the end, when [Germany was] losing, they began using the gas chambers.” Some 120,000 prisoners passed through the camp over the course of the war; 50,000 died.

While “Lilac Girls” is a novel, Kelly used several real people as characters, including Caroline Ferriday and a German doctor named Herta Oberheuser, who performed many of the experiments. A dermatologist who was desperate to become a surgeon, Oberheuser seized the opportunity to work in the camp. (Later, she would be sentenced to 20 years during the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial. She only served five years; after she was released, she would go on to open a family medical clinic in Stocksee, Germany.)

Ravensbrück’s sulfonamide experiments, as they were known, were performed to test the efficacy of sulfa drugs. They studied nerve and tissue regeneration, including bone transplantation from one person to another. Otherwise healthy prisoners had parts of bone, muscle and tissue removed without anesthesia; healthy limbs were amputated.

While the research was ostensibly to study battle wounds, “That was [only] what the Nazis wanted people to believe,” says Kelly.

The experiments were actually precipitated by the death of one of Hitler’s close friends, high-ranking SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, who died from injuries sustained during a car bombing in 1942. Heydrich was treated by Himmler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Gebhardt, who refused to use sulfa drugs when operating on him. When he died, Hitler blamed Gebhardt, insisting Heydrich was killed by gas gangrene.

Gebhardt devised the experiments with Himmler to prove to Hitler that the decision to avoid sulfa drugs was correct. Heydrich’s injuries were re-created in detail on the women, in order to research just what had gone wrong. The doctors would deliberately maximize the potential for infections by inserting glass shards and bacteria into open wounds before sewing them up.

At first, the experiments were conducted on male prisoners at Sachsenhausen, a camp in Oranienburg, Germany, but those were suspended because the prisoners complained too much and were becoming difficult to control.

So the physicians turned to women, thinking they would submit meekly.

“They would take groups of 10 women, keep them for a while and then use a different group,” says Kelly. “Some of them died during the experiments, and several were executed right after. Some hadn’t healed yet, and had to be carried to the shooting wall.”

In researching details for “Lilac Girls,” Kelly spoke to several Ravensbrück survivors, who told her a heartbreaking detail: When the women were about to be executed, they would do each other’s hair.

“They would pinch their cheeks for color, do their hair, do the best they could to make themselves beautiful for that last walk,” Kelly says.

“And they talked about whether they would be brave enough to shout ‘Long Live Poland,’ because the Nazis hated that. There was a sedative drink [guards] would give them, and some women refused to take it.”

During the last months of the war, the Nazis determined to execute all remaining rabbits, as they were living proof of the atrocities committed. But other Ravensbrück inmates intervened in a great show of solidarity.

The rabbits had been gathered in a room and rumors were circulating; everyone believed this would be the night of their execution.

That’s when a group of Russian prisoners shut down the electrical grid, plunging the camp into darkness and allowing the women to hide under bunkers and in attic spaces. They remained safe this way until March 1945, when they were rescued and brought to Sweden via the Red Cross (and, eventually, back to their native Poland).

When the women were about to be executed, they would do each other’s hair.

Ravensbrück was one of the last camps liberated, leaving the Nazis plenty of time to destroy documents. As a result, little is known about the camp. But by the time it closed down, the results of the countless rabbit experiments were slanted in Gebhardt’s favor.

The story of the rabbits went largely untold until 1958, when Ferriday, who lived in Connecticut and came from a wealthy NYC dry goods fortune, learned of it from a friend and convinced journalist Norman Cousins to write an article in the Saturday Review. Reader donations poured in, totaling $5,000 — a healthy amount at the time.

Ferriday, then 56, was determined: The women would come to America, and she would help them get treatment for their Ravensbrück injuries.

“Americans right after the war were really sick of [the] war,” Kelly says. “That’s what was amazing — that she was able to galvanize people.”

After months of negotiations with the Communist Polish government, 35 of the rabbits — nearly half of the group — came to the States for extensive treatment, both physical and mental.

The women went to different cities, depending on which hospitals were best suited to handle their specific injuries. Four of the former prisoners stayed at Ferriday’s house in Bethlehem, Connecticut, for Christmas in 1958.

When Kelly went to Ravensbrück in 2015 for the 70th anniversary of its liberation, she met Stasha, now one of five surviving rabbits, each of whom has a volunteer aide who takes care of them.

“When I asked her about coming to America and meeting Caroline, that was the one thing she has trouble talking about, because she wanted to stay [in America] and be an actress,” says Kelly.

“After everything that happened to her — the fact that Stasha had to come home from America, that was the sad thing!

“But there is such a wonderful peace to the rabbits I spoke to. They don’t hate anymore. They let everything go. [When talking about Ravensbrück], Stasha said, ‘I don’t hold a grudge at all. I forgive them completely.’ ”

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Doc. 2: SS-Doctor Oberheuser's affidavit concerning medical experiments

Content-author profile / contact, download (pdf, powerpoint, documents, ...), affidavit of dr. herta oberheuser concerning medical experiments, extract from dr oberheuser’s affidavit.

4. The operations were performed by Dr. Fritz Fischer. Sometimes I helped and assisted at these operations, and had the duty, to attend the patients after the operation. Different series of experiments were conducted; in some glass or wood splinters and cloth fibers were forcibly brought into the wound, in order to cause gangrene. For this purpose, a cut on the calf of an approximate length of 10 centimeters was usually made. I don’t recall how deep these wounds were, and I don’t recall either, which muscle was used for the purpose of the experiment.

5. I cannot say, how many persons, on whom experiments were conducted, suffered permanent injuries. But I know, that three died as victims of these experiments. I found that their heart failed. But since I had examined these three persons before the experiments were conducted on them, it is very probable that they died because of the infection which was caused by the experiments.

10. It was no rarity at Ravensbrueck, that persons who were already approaching death, were killed by injections. I myself have given 5 or 6 such injections. [...]

The entire affidavit is provided in the download section .

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Herta Oberheuser

Herta Oberheuser was a physician at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She performed medical experiments. She was found guilty of performing sulfanilamide experiments, bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration and bone transplantation experiments on humans, as well as of sterilizing prisoners. 

This portrait of Herta Oberheuser was taken when she was a defendant in the Medical Case Trial at Nuremberg.

Critical Thinking Questions

How were various professions involved in implementing Nazi policies and ideology? What lessons can be considered for contemporary professionals?

Investigate how some professional codes of conduct changed following the Holocaust.

Beyond the verdicts, what impact can trials have?

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Biography of Herta Oberheuser

Early life and education, work at ravensbrück concentration camp, nuremberg trials and aftermath.

Herta Oberheuser was a Nazi doctor who conducted medical experiments at the Ravensbrück concentration camp from 1940 to 1943. She was born on May 15, 1911, in Cologne and died on January 24, 1978, in Linz am Rhein.

Herta Oberheuser was born into a modest family and had to support herself during her medical studies at the University of Bonn and the University of Düsseldorf. At the age of 26, Oberheuser earned her medical degree and began working at a physiological institute. In 1937, she became a member of the ruling Nazi party, NSDAP.

In 1940, Herta Oberheuser volunteered to work at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. In the summer of 1943, she was transferred to the Hohenlychen hospital, where she worked under the supervision of Karl Gebhardt, the personal physician of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, until the end of World War II.

Oberheuser took part in horrifying medical experiments aimed at studying the human body under conditions that occur during combat. She performed extremely painful and gruesome medical procedures, sometimes substituting for her colleagues who found it difficult to conduct experiments on living subjects.

Under Karl Gebhardt's guidance, experiments were conducted on healthy Polish women who were political prisoners at Ravensbrück. They were wounded and foreign objects such as dirt, sawdust, rusty nails, and shards of glass were placed in their wounds. Oberheuser also administered lethal injections to healthy children and then removed their limbs and vital organs while they were fully conscious, which lasted for three to five minutes.

Oberheuser also participated in late-term abortions and forced sterilizations of prisoners, aiming to develop methods for mass sterilization with minimal time and resources.

Herta Oberheuser was the only woman to stand trial at the Doctors' Trial of the Nuremberg Trials. Surprisingly, she was sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment instead of being executed, due to the leniency of the judges. In 1951, her sentence was reduced to ten years, and in April 1952, she was released for good behavior.

After her release, Oberheuser resumed her medical practice. However, in 1956, she was recognized by a former prisoner of Ravensbrück at the Johanniter hospital where she worked. Consequently, her medical license was revoked in 1958, and she faced new charges from numerous former prisoners under pressure. The case gained significant public attention, leading Oberheuser to change her place of residence and cease her medical activities.

© BIOGRAPHS

• Carl Clauberg
• Herta Oberheuser
• Josef Mengele
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Who was Herta Oberheuser?

What experiments did herta oberheuser conduct.

At Auschwitz extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with several million persons eventually killed through gassing, starvation, shooting, and burning. Dr. Herta Oberheuser killed children with oil and evipan injections, then removed their limbs and vital organs. The time from the injection to death was between three and five minutes, with the person being fully conscious until the last moment.

She made some of the most gruesome and painful medical experiments during World War 2, focused on deliberately inflicting wounds on the subjects. In order to simulate the combat wounds of German soldiers fighting in the war, Herta Oberheuser rubbed foreign objects, such as wood, rusty nails, slivers of glass, dirt or sawdust into the wounds. After WW2, in October 1946, the Nuremberg Medical Trial began, lasting until August of 1947. Twenty-tree German physicians and scientists were accused of performing vile and potentially lethal medical experiments on concentration camps inmates and other living human subjects between 1933 and 1945. Fifteen defendants were found guilty, and eight were acquitted. Of the 15, seven were given the death penalty and eight imprisoned.