From Clinic To Concentration Camp

Representing a new wave of research and analysis on Nazi human experiments and coerced research, the chapters in this volume deliberately break from a top-down history limited to concentration camp experiments under the control of Himmler and the SS. Instead the collection positions extreme experiments (where research subjects were taken to the point of death) within a far wider spectrum of abusive coerced research. The book considers the experiments not in isolation but as integrated within wider aspects of medical provision as it became caught up in the Nazi war economy, revealing that researchers were opportunistic and retained considerable autonomy. The sacrifice of so many prisoners, patients and otherwise healthy people rounded up as detainees raises important issues about the identities of the research subjects: who were they, how did they feel, how many research subjects were there and how many survived? This underworld of the victims of the elite science of German medical institutes and clinics has until now remained a marginal historical concern. Jews were a target group, but so were gypsies/Sinti and Roma, the mentally ill, prisoners of war and partisans. By exploring when and in what numbers scientists selected one group rather than another, the book provides an important record of the research subjects having agency, reconstructing responses and experiential narratives, and recording how these experiments – iconic of extreme racial torture – represent one of the worst excesses of Nazism.

The Konzentrationslager (KZ) Ebensee Concentration Camp was established to house prisoners tasked to further the research and production of the V-2 missile program run by Nazi SS Officer Wernher von Braun - an American Hero. This camp was liberated on May 6, 1945 freeing almost 17,000 prisoners. The Third Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron of the Third Cavalry Group came up the road to the camp at around 10AM on that fateful Sunday; at 2:45PM, the Third Platoon of F Company opened the gates. Unfortunately for the men of these military units, together with the U.S. Army 139th Evacuation Hospital, became phantom units in historical archives. Inside the Gates details the 139th Evacuation (MASH) Hospital’s involvement in freeing the thousands of inmates in the said Austrian Concentration Camp. Book Events: June 29, 2010 TV interview, lecture and book signing with Bob Persinger, the tank commander, who opened the gate at KZ Ebensee in Rockford IL. Early September 2010 - fund raiser by volunteer military support group for Youngstown OH Air Force Base in Youngstown OH. Will have book signing with a survivor of KZ Ebensee, Fred Kubli, Jr. the 139th Evac Hospital ́s personnel clerk and myself at fund raiser. Oct 6th taped 1/2 hour TV show in Chicago which will be broadcast on November 13, 2010. On that day can see whole program on web page: www.weekendwithwhitney.com. Invited by Ebensee Zeitgeschichte Museum as speaker on May 7, 2011 in Austria at ceremony to celebrate the May 6, 1945 liberation of the Ebensee Concentration Camp. Was only American speaker Inside the Gates video trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-ybaEUE3sM August 24, 2011 at Wesley Willows at 4142 Rockton Ave in Rockford IL a panel discussion with 3 US Army medical personnel liberators & a survivor from Ebensee concentration camp staring at 6:30PM in Wesley Meeting Hall. TV coverage: http://mystateline.com/fulltext-ews?nxd_id=273987&shr=addthis November 1, 2011 presentation at Camp Shelby, MS @ 10:00AM YouTube links to Chicago interview on November 13, 2010 part 1- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT2N2hEAoGQ Part 2- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vm-qu2E8h0

The general background of the groups investigated The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the severe psychic and physical stress situations to which human beings were exposed in the concentration camps of World \Var II have had lasting psychological results, to discover the nature of these conditions and the symptomatology they present, and finally to investigate which detailed factors of the above-mentioned stress situation can be con sidered decisive for the morbid conditions which were revealed. In order to elucidate these questions from different points of view, I have examined groups of former concentration camp inmates both in Norway and Israel. The Norwegians who were examined compose a fairly uniform group of men and women, born and bred in Norway, who after the War naturally returned to their native country. The Israeli groups which were examined were drawn from almost every country in Europe that had been under German occupation during World War II. They had all immigrated into Israel, mostly after 1948.

Nazis began detaining Jews in camps as soon as they came to power in 1933. Kim Wünschmann reveals the origin of these extralegal detention sites, the harsh treatment Jews received there, and the message the camps sent to Germans: that Jews were enemies of the state, dangerous to associate with and fair game for acts of intimidation and violence.

Faced with infectious diseases, starvation, lack of medicines, lack of clean water, and safe sewage, Jewish physicians practiced medicine under severe conditions in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust. Despite the odds against them, physicians managed to supply public health education, enforce hygiene protocols, inspect buildings and latrines, enact quarantine, and perform triage. Many gave their lives to help fellow prisoners. Based on archival materials and featuring memoirs of Holocaust survivors, this volume offers a rich array of both tragic and inspiring studies of the sanctification of life as practiced by Jewish medical professionals. More than simply a medical story, these histories represent the finest exemplification of a humanist moral imperative during a dark hour of recent history.

Jadwiga Lenartowicz Rylko, known as Jadzia (Yah′-jah), was a young Polish Catholic physician in Łódź at the start of World War II. Suspected of resistance activities, she was arrested in January 1944. For the next fifteen months, she endured three Nazi concentration camps and a forty-two-day death march, spending part of this time working as a prisoner-doctor to Jewish slave laborers. A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps follows Jadzia from her childhood and medical training, through her wartime experiences, to her struggles to create a new life in the postwar world. Jadzia’s daughter, anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer, constructs an intimate ethnography that weaves a personal family narrative against a twentieth-century historical backdrop. As Rylko-Bauer travels back in time with her mother, we learn of the particular hardships that female concentration camp prisoners faced. The struggle continued after the war as Jadzia attempted to rebuild her life, first as a refugee doctor in Germany and later as an immigrant to the United States. Like many postwar immigrants, Jadzia had high hopes of making new connections and continuing her career. Unable to surmount personal, economic, and social obstacles to medical licensure, however, she had to settle for work as a nurse’s aide. As a contribution to accounts of wartime experiences, Jadzia’s story stands out for its sensitivity to the complexities of the Polish memory of war. Built upon both historical research and conversations between mother and daughter, the story combines Jadzia’s voice and Rylko-Bauer’s own journey of rediscovering her family’s past. The result is a powerful narrative about struggle, survival, displacement, and memory, augmenting our understanding of a horrific period in human history and the struggle of Polish immigrants in its aftermath.