Trials of war criminals before the Nuernberg military tribunals under control council law no. 10, volume IVarious
Philosophy
Trials of war criminals before the Nuernberg military tribunals under control council law no. 10, volume I
Various
Nuremberg Trial of Major German War Criminals, Nuremberg, Germany, 1945-1946; War crime trials -- Germany -- Nuremberg
The deep interest of the German Air Force in capitalizing on the
availability of inmates of concentration camps for experimental purposes
is even more apparent in the case of the freezing experiments. These,
too, were conducted at Dachau. They began immediately after the
high-altitude experiments were completed and they continued until the
spring of 1943. Here again, the defendant Weltz was directly in charge
of the experiments, with Rascher as his assistant, as is shown in a
letter written in May 1942 by Field Marshal Erhard Milch, the Inspector
General of the German Air Force, to SS Obergruppenfuehrer Wolff, one of
Heinrich Himmler’s principal subordinates, and this letter specifically
requested that the freezing experiments be carried out at Dachau under
Weltz’s supervision. (_343-A-PS._)
The purpose of these experiments was to determine the most effective way
of rewarming German aviators who were forced to parachute into the North
Sea. The evidence will show that in the course of these experiments, the
victims were forced to remain outdoors without clothing in freezing
weather from 9 to 14 hours. In other cases, they were forced to remain
in a tank of iced water for 3 hours at a time. The water experiments are
described in a report by Rascher written in August 1942. (_1618-PS._) I
quote:
“Electrical measurements gave low temperature readings of 26.4°
in the stomach and 26.5° in the rectum. Fatalities occurred only
when the brain stem and the back of the head were also chilled.
Autopsies of such fatal cases always revealed large amounts of
free blood, up to ½ liter, in the cranial cavity. The heart
invariably showed extreme dilation of the right chamber. As soon
as the temperature in those experiments reached 28°, the
experimental subjects died invariably, despite all attempts at
resuscitation.”
Other documents set forth that from time to time the temperature of the
water would be lowered by 10° Centigrade and a quart of blood would be
taken from an artery in the subject’s throat for analysis. The organs of
the victims who died were extracted and sent to the Pathological
Institute at Munich.
Rewarming of the subjects was attempted by various means, most commonly
and successfully in a very hot bath. In September, Himmler personally
ordered that rewarming by the warmth of human bodies also be attempted,
and the inhuman villains who conducted these experiments promptly
produced four gypsy women from the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. When
the women had arrived, rewarming was attempted by placing the chilled
victim between two naked women.
A voluminous report on the freezing experiments conducted in tanks of
ice water, written in October 1942, contains the following (_NO-428_):
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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