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Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans

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Vivien Spitz is half German by heritage but, she strongly indicts her countrymen in this chilling account of horrific "medical experiments" that Nazi doctors and medical assistants performed on innocent people. The descriptions of what was done is creepy but the story must be told. Ms. Spitz was the youngest court reporter during the Nuremberg trials as she transcribed the testimony in the trals of medical personnel. She documents a dozen types of experiments and, some truly had no medical value but were done only for the sake of perpetrating inhumanity to non Arians, most of whom were Jews and Gypsies. There were other vicitms as well, such as Russians. Among the defendants, some were sentenced to death, others to prison terms of varying legnths and a total of seven were acquitted. The acquittals were probably due to the court leaning over backwards to make the trials look fair.

An example of an experiment that was done with no possible scientific value was to force victims to drink brackish seawater to see the effects. Of course this made the victims sick and drove them mad. Most did not survive. Another awful experiment was to amputate limbs and attempt to transpant them to others. Without modern microsurgery and anti rejection medication, this could never have possibly worked but these ghouls killed and permanently maimed people in the name of science. Even if this experiment could have worked, the real purpose was to do the most horrible acts of brutality on the victims, not to accumulate medical knowledge. Horrible diseases, such as malaria were deliberately introduced to vicitims. Another horrible experiment was to lock victims into vaultlike chambers where the atmospheric conditions of 68,000 feet in altitude could be simulated.

Ms. Spitz is truly a wonderful person as she makes sure that holocaust deniers don't get away with their revisionism. She has confronted them and, importantly, she has written this book. The book is difficult to read because of the horrors that are documented. Still, it should be read so that we never forget.

Written by skilled journalist Vivian Spitz, who counts being the youngest court reporter at the Nuremberg Trials among her many accomplishments, Doctors From Hell: The Horrific Account Of Nazi Experiments On Humans presents literal testimonies of Nuremburg war crimes trials specifically pertaining to murderous medical experiments performed on living people. A bleak, stark, and severe account; the dry yet thoroughly detailed testimony speaks for itself. Information concerning the conviction and sentencing of defendants is also included. The author offers closing chapters about adapting to a normal life after her role in bearing witness to unspeakable atrocities, including her encounters with poisonous and sometimes threatening Holocaust deniers. A straightforward primary source appreciable to scholars and lay readers alike, and a welcome contribution to Holocaust Studies and reference shelves.

The reader of this book quickly learns that the gruesome experiments conducted against helpless victims were not just done by a few "warped" Nazi ideologues, such as the infamous "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele, but by a large cadre of German doctors. One also quickly realizes that the victims were not limited to Jews, but included members of various nationalities. Every imaginable grotesque experiment was performed. Perhaps the most instructive part of the book is chapter 14, which discusses forced sterilization. The Germans found that physical castration was too slow and costly. X-radiation often made the victims ill or killed them outright. A drug derived from a certain Brazilian plant induced sterility, and was tried on inmates.

What was said to be ultimately needed was a method of sterilization that could easily be employed en masse and was preferably one in which the victim did not know that he or she was sterilized. Obviously, mass sterilization was intended for very large target of victims. In fact, defendant Rudolf Brandt cited Heinrich Himmler (pp. 191-192), who stated that forced sterilization was to be used to exterminate not only Jews but also Russians and Poles. So, although the author Spitz does not develop this further, Himmler's statement adds proof to the fact that after the Jews, most of the Slavs were next in line for genocidal extermination. Mass shootings and gassings were useful for killing a few million people (Jews and Polish intellectuals), but mass sterilization was much more practical for the eventual extermination of tens of millions to hundreds of millions of people (Slavs as a whole). Just as a small number of sterilized Jews were kept alive for forced labor, so also a remnant of the Slavic peoples would be kept alive as slaves of the German Reich. It is high time that educational Holocaust materials include focus on the fact that the Slavs were also victims of genocide. Only the end of the war spared most of the Slavs from forced sterilization, and eventual extermination.

Way back in 1980, I had the opportunity to know a Polish American girl in Toledo,Ohio. She and her family are originally from Krakow, Poland. Her mother showed me the horrible scars on her deformed left leg and some presumably whip marks on her back. She told me she was interned in 1944 at the notorious concentration camp in Ravensbruck,Germany which was a concentration camp for women. The horrendous deformity and scars on her left leg were the result of experiments consisting of injecting germs to develop infection down to the bone and testing it with different drugs.
She was lucky she survived in spite of her weighing only 50 lbs at that time. The book "Doctors from Hell" is just appropriate for its title and content. Reading the book brings back memory of that mother and all the horrendous detail of not only her own experience but also those of her fellow inmates in that concentration camp. The book's authenticity is just
summed up by that mother's narration to me, a human being who was actually in and escaped from that "Hell" on earth. I highly recommend it.

Josef Mengele is a name that even people with a small knowledge about the Second World War knows about, or at least has heard mentioned sometime. He was the Nazi doctor who performed the most gruesome experiments on humans (especially twins) in the name of Nazi science, and after the end of the war he managed to escape the Allied forces and hid in South America, among other places, until his death.

But he was not the only one.

There were more men like him. Many more.

In 1946, a young Vivien Spitz was hired by the American war department to go across the Atlantic and attend the war trials in Nuremberg and report, document, and save to the world what the criminals confessed and didn't confess. She wasn't new to criminal world, having worked on trials in the U.S., and thus she thought she wouldn't have any problems doing what she was supposed to do. But Nuremberg after the end of the war was a bombed-out city, a wasteland with no hot water and filled with German terrorists who gladly attacked any representative of the Allied forces.

And if that wasn't enough, Spitz volunteered to (without really knowing what she was getting herself into, one must guess) to report from the interrogations with those Nazi doctors who had performed macabre experiments on humans (or "materiel" as they themselves referred to the inmates) in the many concentration camps around Europe. She wasn't naïve, she knew very well that horrible stories and descriptions were to be part of her daily routine, but she still wasn't able to remain untouched.

Here are some of the stories she was told in the court room:
People were forced to stand for hours in freezing water, so the doctors could see how long time it took until their death (which was interesting to the Luftwaffe in case their pilots were shot down over open water).
Malaria-experiments where people were infected with the virus (for troops fighting in foreign countries).
Amputations of arms and legs, burning of the skin, and other mutilations of the body (in order to simulate the injuries a soldier could suffer on a battlefield).
Poisoning of food (simply so the doctors could see how long it took for the ones eating it to die).
Different sterilizations (since Jews and Gypsies and other "non desirable materiel" were welcome to work but not reproduce).
People who had to live on nothing but seawater for days in a row, which resulted in both madness and death.

And so on. It's a scary book to read, especially when one reads about how the doctors explain it all away as duty and fighting for their Fatherland. But the book is also, here and there, quite boring with long sections of witnessing that don't really say anything interesting. Furthermore, considering how bizarre the experiments were, it would have been interesting to learn more about WHY the doctors did what they did, that is, how they as doctors could become such devoted Nazis. It's a well-known fact that some of the most brutal Nazis were "just like you and me" in their private life, but Doctors From Hell doesn't touch this aspect. It's an important and informative book but it would have been easy for Spitz to make it ever MORE important and MORE informative.

I have seen some footage on tv about the horrible things that have happened in WWII, but this book really tells alot due to a strong woman who went over to Germany for the trials of the "horrific" experiments that the drs who were still alive and on trial after the war was over.

This book is a must to read for those interested in Nazi and or WWII history.

~k

Most people are aware that one of the fundamental moral principles for all doctors is to "do no harm," a principle which can be traced back to Hippocrates and the very beginnings of the Western medical tradition. Unfortunately, not all doctors heed this precept: the worst and most extreme examples can be found in the history of Nazi Germany, where not only doctors, but the entire medical profession, appears to have become a twisted mirror image of what it should have been.

The author presents a fascinating narrative of the Nuremberg Medical Trials intertwined with authentic factual testimony by nazi doctors and their victims. The writing is both personal and professional. The book is all encompassing describing all medical experimentation that occured under the Third Reich. The authenticity of the court transcripts sets this book apart from other accounts giving the reader the feel and tension of the courtroom. There are a mix of photographs depicting all players as well as pre and post war Nuremberg. The medical terminology is accurate but not too technical allowing even the layman to grasp the extent of Nazi medicine. The numerous categories of medical experiments are adequately spaced throughout the book as opposed to an aggregate section. The fate of the defendants are mentioned with their final statements at the end.

It is clear the author felt very strongly of persons and organizations denying the Holocaust. The defendants never admitted any wrong doing, even to their last dying breath. It is clear National Socialism and needs of the state over the individual trumped even Hippocrates and further demonstrates the all out power of Hitler and the Nazi machine. Some will argue to stop talking and writing about this tainted period as to not glorify them; in this case we need to keep talking and writing and making movies on this subject matter. The manifestations were so severe and history has proved that any actions, good or evil can be repeated. A must read.

This book is a must read for anyone that is human. This is the most disgusting book of all time. We need to never forget the things that were done to these people.

This book tended to be a bit slow for me. The best parts of it is the author's accounts of life in Germany after the war. The danger and the terrorism going on for years after. She also included portraits of the Germans on trial so you are able to see the faces of those who commited such atrocities. In some of the portraits, it's chilling. The best part for me because some of them looked like everyday normal people when in reality they were grotesque monsters.