Aside from the customary medical duties, the SS doctors of Auschwitz pursued the following activities:
1) According to Hunmler’s guidelines, they had to select males and females from the incoming transports of Jews who were able to work.
2) The doctors had to be present during the extermination process in the gas chambers to supervise the prescribed application of the poison gas Cyclon B by using the disinfection fixtures. Futhermore they had to make certain after the gas chambers were opened that the extermination process had been completely carried out.
3) The dentists continuously had to conduct spot checks to make certain that the prisoner dentists of the Sonderkommando pulled all the gold teeth from the gassed and dropped them into a special security container. Furthermore, they had to supervise the melting of the gold teeth and their safekeeping until delivery to the proper SS branch was made.
4) At Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as the other labor camps, the SS doctors continually had to select those Jews who could not work any more and probably would not become able to work again within the next few weeks, and detail them to be exterminated. Also, those Jews who were suspected of having infectious diseases were to be exterminated. The bedridden were to be killed by injections; the others were to be exterminated in the crematories or in the bunker by gas. The injections consisted of either carbolic acid, Eipan, or Cyclon B.
5) They had to carry out the so-called secret executions. This dealt with the question of Polish prisoners whose executions were ordered by SS headquarters or by the Security Service of the General Gouv-emment of Occupied Poland. Since these executions could not become public because of political and security reasons, they were to be masked as normal deaths using the usual causes of death in a camp. Healthy prisoners who were condemned to death were brought by the Political Department to the arrest Block 11 and an SS doctor liquidated him by injection. The sick ones were unobtrusively kiUed in the hospital also by injections. The doctor in question then had to write on the death certificate that the prisoner died from an illness which led to a quick death.
6) The SS doctors had to be present at executions ordered by the Summary Courts and certify that the executed was dead. The same applied to executions ordered by Himmler, SS headquarters, the Security Service, or by the General Gouvemment of Poland.
7) Prisoners who were to receive corporal punishment had to be examined for possible reasons which might prevent corporal punishment; the doctors also had to be present when this penalty was carried out.
8) They had to perform abortions on foreign women up to the fifth month of pregnancy.
9) Experiments were performed by:
A) Dr. Wirths: cancer research, examinations and operative surgery on those suspected of having cancer, or Jewesses having cancer.
B) Dr. Mengele: research on twins, examination of identical Jewish twins.
By non-SS doctors:
C) Professor Claubery: sterilization research, injections to paste together the FaUopian tubes and thereby prevent offspring from Jewish women.
D) Dr. Schumann: sterilization research, to destroy the reproductive organs of Jewish women by X-ray.
World History
