The Ravensbruck "Rabbits"

I feel sick just reading this.
"It was one of the big secrets of the murderous Nazi regime: a camp of 72 female prisoners used as experiments to test torture techniques.
The girls, all high school-age Catholics from Poland, were dubbed the 'rabbits' since they were treated like laboratory animals, and their injuries meant many had to hop instead of walk.
When they war ended, they were rescued by the Red Cross along with the hundreds of other prisoners in Ravensbruck concentration camp - but all accounts of their 'treatments' had been destroyed.
It meant their ordeal paled into oblivion as the world grappled to deal with the aftershocks of the Holocaust, particularly the horrific obliteration of the Jews.
But the women were finally brought out of the shadows in 1958 by an unlikely fairy godmother: a socialite from Connecticut.
Caroline Ferriday, a philanthropist who split her time between New York City and Bethlehem, CT, Caroline Ferriday heard of their ordeal after the war.
She made it her mission to bring them to the States for medical treatment, a road trip across America, Christmas at her holiday home, and a dinner with senators in Washington, D.C.
The rabbits were not meant to survive; Heinrich Himmler planned to have them all murdered before word got out.
They were brought in to Ravensbruck, 50 miles north of Berlin, in August 1942 to test different kinds of surgical procedures.
In total, each underwent six operations, having bones broken, muscle tissue removed, limbs amputated, and more - all without painkillers.
The wounds were then deliberately infected so the surgeons could test whether sulfonamide - a kind of penicillin - would cure it.
It came after Himmler's personal doctor, Dr Karl Gebhardt, failed to save the life of a senior Nazi officer, Reinhard Heydrich.
Heydrich, one of Hitler's closest friends, died in a car bomb.
Gebhardt did not use sulfonamide, a drug similar to penicillin, to treat his gangrene.
Hitler believed that decision killed Heydrich.
To disprove Hitler's theory - and to save his own skin - Gebhardt designed a series of experiments: his team at Ravensbruck would wound prisoners and deliberately infect the wounds then see whether sulfa drugs could cure the infections.
At first they operated on male prisoners. Accounts differ on why they switched to women. Some historians say women were typically healthier prisoners. Others say Gebhardt assumed females would be more docile and submissive.
Word of the rabbits leaked outside the walls of Ravensbruck thanks to notes passed from prisoners to sympathetic guards to their families, and so on.
But for a number of reasons their cause did not receive widespread attention for more than a decade."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3579886/How-American-socialite-helped-rehabilitate-dozens-young-Polish-women-endured-grotesque-experiments-Hitler-s-doctors-recreated-injuries-killed-henchman.html


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3579886/How-American-socialite-helped-rehabilitate-dozens-young-Polish-women-endured-grotesque-experiments-Hitler-s-doctors-recreated-injuries-killed-henchman.html#ixzz48AbxalDi
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Thanks for sharing that story, Gordon. What a terrible little nightmare corner of the war...

I suspect the Mail is wrong about much of this, in particular the reason (as if there could be a justifiable reason for treating humans like this) for these experiments. Sulfa drugs were already widely used and somewhat the "miracle drug" of the era. It had first come out about 1930 and in fact was originally developed by Bayer, a German company. Within a few years (well before the war), Bayer and other companies had already developed a number of drugs within this group that were effective against various bacterial strains. All of this was well known and every designated PFC medic in either army knew which type of Sulfa for surface wounds or gut wounds, etc, (aerobic vs anaerobic bacteria, whatever).

At any rate, this Doctor Gebhardt knew all of this, and anyone that has taken an introductory biology course knows that any further testing is best done with a Petri dish where you can actually count the bacteria colonies by eye against control dishes. Freshman biology students know this, so Doctor Gebhardt certainly knew this.

I can't imagine what he was actually doing or why. I don't suppose we ever will, now.

I pulled up Doctor Gebhardt to learn he was captured, convicted of war crimes and hanged in 1947. That's kind of a shame. You'd hope a guy like that would have died slowly over many years in a Soviet work camp located in a very cold and miserable corner of Siberia.

 

Good to hear justice caught up with him though.
Yeah, the good old "medical research" excuse for being a sick, evil bastard.

 

The article is just a bunch of false informations and half-truths.

The women weren't forgotten, the doctors responsible for those experiments were among the first convicted war criminals. Their trails started just a year after the end of the war.
Among them a woman - Doctor Herta Oberheuser, sentenced for 20 years for euthanizing prisoners with phenol, although he served only a few years and was released.

Reinhard Heydrich was killed by a hand grenade not by a car bomb.

They weren't testing any torture techniques, they were trying to improve wound-healing procedures. Among others, treatments for gas gangrene and frostbites.
In the case of gangrene one of their findings was that the available sulfa drugs were not working and it would be better to discontinue their use.

The women were called rabbits simply because in Polish "guinea pig" is "rabbit".
A probable reason they were selected was that they all were sentenced for death for real or alleged underground activities.
There were 74 Poles, a Czech, Ukrainian and German among those women.

In 1943 the women rebelled forcing the Nazis to stop the experiments. But they continued them anyway on mentally-ill women. The rabbits rebelled again in the last days of war when the Nazis wanted to remove them from the camp and presumably execute.
After that they were called "kings" (like in bosses) because "rabbit" can mean "small king" too.

One of the women testifying in Nuremberg:
View attachment 24318

 

Thanks for those details, wm. Journalism standards are awful today, so when one see a story like this you often have look further to get at the real details.

It would be interesting to know if Bayer itself played a role in this.

 

Think forgotten in this context refers to the fact not many people have heard the story.

 

Thanks for clarifying WM.