The experiments
The Experiments on the Children
Nazi doctors carried out 'medical' experiments on prisoners in concentration camps, where they did not have to abide by any rules. Since the Nazis saw some people as 'inferiour' to others, their doctors felt justified in doing whatever they wished with these people. They were motivated in their work by ambition and the desire to achieve success.
One of these doctors was Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer. In the Neuengamme concentration camp, he carried out experiments on 20 Jewish children to find a cure for tuberculosis, a widespread lung disease. He carried out the experiments even though he knew that his idea of a 'lung vaccination' had been rejected as medically unsuitable.
He 'ordered' ten boys and ten girls for his experiments, and so the 20 Jewish children were sent from Auschwitz to Neuengamme. He injected the 20 children with tubercle bacilli and operated on the lymph glands under their arms. To assess the results, the lymph glands under the armpits were removed in a painful procedure. The children developed high fevers and were still in pain long after the operation.
With his human experiments, Heissmeyer wanted to prove that tuberculosis could be combated by artificially creating skin tuberculosis and that 'racially inferior' people were more susceptible to tuberculosis.
Heissmeyer's first thesis was already known in expert circles to be scientifically untenable long before the experiments. The second thesis was based solely on the racist and anti-Semitic ideology of the Nazis.
The Murder of the Children
At the beginning of April 1945, it was obvious that Germany was going to lose the war. British forces were fast approaching Hamburg. The Nazi officers feared that the gruesome 'medical' experiments conducted on the children might come to light. So Max Pauly, the commanding officer of Neuengamme concentration camp, instructed the medic Dr. Trzebinski to kill the children.
Late in the evening of April 20, 1945, the unsuspecting children were rudely awakened. Trzebinski and his aides told them they were being taken back to their parents. Together with their for carers and six other prisoners, they were taken by truck from Neuengamme concentration camp to Bullenhuser Damm.
The former school building was a Hamburg satellite camp of Neuengamme and was empty at the time.
Members of the SS took the children to one of the rooms in the basement and ordered them to undress. Trzebinski gave them an anaesthetic - morphine - so that they could not resist. Some of the children fell asleep and died immediately. Those who were still breathing were taken to another room and hung up.
Some of the children weighed so little that the noose could not be closed, so Johann Frahm, an SS-Unterscharführer, pulled the children's bodies down with all his weight. Two days later, in the morning, the bodies were taken to Neuengamme concentration camp and cremated. After the war, Johann Frahm testified that the children "(...) were then hung on hooks like pictures on the wall".
