Gallery

Nuremberg

The International Military Tribunal conducted by all four allies and the twelve “subsequent trials” conducted by the American military—the first of these was United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al., or the Doctors’ Trial—were convened in Nuremberg, the site of massive Nazi rallies. On December 9, 1946, 23 leading German physicians and administrators were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, primarily focusing on medical experiments on victims such as the one in this photo. On August 20, 1947, the judges found sixteen defendants guilty and sentenced seven to death. The trial is notable for the “Nuremberg Code,” which the US and other western countries ignored for 30 year, and for the small number of doctors brought to trial despite the involvement of thousands of physicians in medical crimes, such as Josef Mengele, MD, PhD, Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death."

MAJDANEK CONCENTRATION CAMP

Majdanek Concentration Camp was initially entrusted to Odilo Globocnik, the Police Leader in the Lublin district, by Nazi Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler near the Polish city of Lublin in 1941 for forced labor rather than extermination. On February 16, 1943, it became a concentration camp—Konzentrationslager der Waffen-SS— known as KL Lublin or, simply, Majdanek because of its proximity to the Majdan Tatarski district. Approximately 80,000 Jews, Polish political prisoners, and hostages sentenced to death by German courts under General Governor Hans Frank’s decree on combating the resistance movement were gassed or executed at Majdanek, including the 18,000 shot on November 3, 1943. (The photo shows cylinders of carbon monoxide that was used in the Majdanek gas chambers before Zyklon B was introduced.) The rapidly advancing Soviet troops captured the hastily evacuated camp on July 24, 1944, the first and best preserved concentration camp liberated by the Allied forces.

Auschwitz Concentration Camp

The most infamous of the Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz was really a network of Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps in southern Poland. At least 1.1 million prisoners died in Auschwitz during World War II. Over 6,500 staffers of doctors, soldiers, prison guards, and scientists manned the network, overseeing the prisoners, taking roll call, watching them work construction sites, and ultimately facilitating their deaths. When Hitler decided to euthanize the entire Jewish population in Europe, it was at Auschwitz that doctors and scientists devised methods to kill up to 700-900 inmates at a time. Additionally, German doctors conducted medical experiments on the prisoners, testing the efficacy of X-rays as a sterilization method or injecting chemicals into women’s uteruses to glue them shut. Though the exact death toll is unknown, some estimates say it was as much as 1.5 million people killed.

Auschwitz was liberated by the Allies in 1945, and it remains as a memorial and a reminder of what must never happen again. It is a primary symbol of the Holocaust and is a World Heritage Site.

Oswiecim Synagogue

Also called Auschwitz Synagogue, this synagogue is the only active one in the town of Oswiecim, Poland. It is used as a Jewish museum and education center. It has been completely restored to its pre-war condition and is used for prayers and reflection for groups visiting Auschwitz.

Focused on Jewish heritage, the center aims for reconciliation through art and intercultural dialogue.

Warsaw

Warsaw was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe when Germany invaded Poland on September 1,1939 and closed Jewish schools, confiscated Jewish-owned property, and required Jews to wear white armbands with a blue Star of David. On October 12, 1940, the Germans established the Warsaw ghetto and sealed Jews from Warsaw and nearby towns into an area of 1.3 square miles surrounded by a wall that was over 10 feet high and topped with barbed wire. In less than two years 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. In the summer of 1942, 265,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka and killed. When the SS and the police came to liquidate the ghetto in 1943, ghetto fighters resisted for four weeks. Emanuel Ringelblum and his colleagues in the ghetto provided an invaluable record of events that became known as the “Oneg Shabat” (“In Celebration of Sabbath”).

Hartheim Castle Euthanasia Centre

In 1938 the welfare office of the Upper Danube province took over Hartheim Castle, a care facility for the mentally and physically disabled, and starting in March 1940, transformed it into a killing center with a gas chamber and crematorium as part of the “T4” operation. This killing center covered today’s Austria and parts of southern Bohemia, southern Moravia, the Sudetenland, Slovenia, and Bavaria. During its first 16 months of operation, Drs. Rudolf Lonauer and Georg Renno directed the murder of 18,269 patients, more than any of the other five euthanasia centers in part because Hartheim received victims from Operation 14f13, a coordinated effort between the “T4” physicians and concentration camp commandants such as Mauthausen, Gusen and Dachau, to “eliminate” sick inmates. Operation 14f13 directly led to the construction of gas chambers and crematoria in death camps such as Auschwitz as part of the “Final Solution.

MAUTHAUSEN-GUSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP

Dachau prisoners began construction of the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1938. Mauthausen was the central or “mother” camp for all of Austria with 49 permanent subcamps including nearby Gusen, the biggest and most brutal of the subcamps. Over the next seven years, 195,000 men and women were imprisoned in these camps with 40,000 victims dying in Gusen, nearly one-third of all the concentration camp victims on “Austrian” territory. The inmates were forced to work as slave labor under conditions that caused many deaths, especially in the Mauthausen rock quarry that was at the base of the infamous 186 “Stairs of Death” on which prisoners carried roughly hewn stone blocks weighing up to 110 lbs. in freezing weather. Before Mauthausen and Gusen built their own gas chambers and crematoria, Muselmänner or prisoners too sick to work, were often transferred to the Hartheim Castle euthanasia center where they were gassed and cremated.

Vienna

Vienna (Wien) officially became a city in 1137 and, in 1278, Rudolf von Habsburg establish the Habsburg dynasty that endured until 1916. Emperor Franz Josef I (1848-1916) replaced the city walls with the Ringstrasse and, more importantly, established a dual monarch with Hungary. In March 1938 Hitler annexed—Anschluss—Austria. CMATH held a conference at the Medical University of Vienna about Austrian Physicians and National Socialism: Historical Facts, Post-War Legacy, and Implications for Today. The conference featured a remarkable panel of representatives from six Austrian medical societies addressing the role their society’s physicians in Nazi medical war crimes. This photo shows Dr. Eduard Pernkopf, physician and rector of the University of Vienna, giving the Nazi salute to his faculty under the portrait of Adolf Hitler. Pernkopf published a beautiful anatomical atlas, which became infamous when its subjects were identified as concentration camp inmates and condemned political prisoners.