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Sometimes historians sidestep central actors of history by limiting themselves to selected sources. When crimes and the corresponding recorded files give the backdrop for the displayed material, the offender is usually at the center of the presentation. A perpetrator-victim balancing only rarely takes place in the science of history. This imbalance can also be reconstructed through the accounts of one of the most bizarre NS-crimes in which human scientists ever participated. In August of 1943, members of the SS killed 29 women and 57 men in the gas chambers of the concentration camp Natzweiler-Struthof1. All of the women and men were Jews or of Jewish descent. Ordering authority was the SS-science organization “Ahnenerbe” (Ancestral Heritage. This organization was founded by H. Himmler, H. Wirth and W. Darré in 1935 and was incorporated into the SS in 1939. Ancestral Heritage was devoted to research concerning the anthropological and cultural history of the German race) that was planning to equip an anthropological exhibition with the skeletons of the murdered at the Reich’s University Strasbourg for the purpose of propaganda.
Dr. August Hirt and Wolfram Sievers, one an anatomy professor in Strasbourg and the other chief executive officer of the SS-“Ahnenerbe” in Berlin, were the characters primarily responsible. A new generation of anthropologists, Dr. Bruno Beger (Munich) and Dr. Hans Fleischhacker (Tübingen) were in charge of the selection. The persons who were killed for this project were selected in June 1943 in Auschwitz under criteria that - according to the NS-race ideology – should support distinctive features of an alleged Jewish race. Both of the scientists helped themselves as if they were at a department store. After a stay of several weeks in the quaratine office of the camp, the women and men were deported on July 30, 1943 via state railway to the camp Struthof in Alsace where they arrived three days later. On Wednesday, August 11, 1943, at about 9:00 pm, the first of them were suffocated in the gas chamber by the camp commandant Josef Kramer.
Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke gave the earliest account of this crime in the document collection “Das Diktat der Menschenverachtung” (“The Dictate of the Contempt for the Human Race”) that was published in 1947. However, a larger public took note of this document collection only much later when it was published under the title “Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit” (“Medicine without Humanity”). At the opening of the trial against 23 SS-physicians and SS-scientists before an American military tribunal on December 9, 1946, Mielke and Mitcherlich formed their perspective about their status as only observers of the court hearings. They saw their role “only in the conveyance of contemporary history” and tried to “forward a report without speaking out”. To grasp the truth in its entire meaning, they deemed it right to bear the truth “at first almost motionless, speechless”. By the way, a large part of the German population was never able to part from this idea.
Mitscherlich and Mielke had taken up their job by order of the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Westdeutschen Ärzte” (Working Committee of the West German Medical Association). They themselves were health professionals: Mischerlich an assistant professor, Mielke still a student. Moreover, they observed and wrote for health professionals. Their view focused on colleagues who had turned into criminals, and their documents brought up the lapses of which those were accused. The victims were only marginally noted in their report, limited to the function of an anonymous subject – exchangeable objects, no matter where they came from, who they were. Mitscherlich and Mielke did not remain the only scientists who described that very “Medicine without Humaneness”. Nevertheless, since then not much has changed on that perspective. Not even my own earlier inquiries and publications can be exempt from the above notion.
Hermann Langbein, who knew Auschwitz through his own experience and suffering, fought against the oblivion for many years as the secretary of the “Internationale Lagergemeinschaft” (International Camp Fellowship). In 1995, I asked him whether he knew how one could trace the names of the 86 Jews that were killed for Hirt’s skeleton collection. Because finally I had realized that yet, nobody, besides Serge Klarsfeld, in the research literature had ever asked for the names and origin of the victims. This void did not let me rest anymore. During the prosecuting investigations against the anthropologists Beger and Fleischhacker in the late sixties, Langbein had already missed “that the names of the victims of this extraordinary selection are nowhere known.” Since even he did not have any advice then, and further inquiries in written form remained without result, I started in 1998 with the first activities in the archives.
For the SS-“Ahnenerbe” it became directly evident after the killings that the planned exhibition could not be carried out. Therefore Hirt had the 86 corpses preserved and deposited in the cellar of the anatomical institute of the Strasbourg University. In doing so, he left his track that later significantly contributed to the solving of this crime. That is to say, that in the tumultuous fall days of the year 1944, shortly before the liberation of Strasbourg, Hirt and his accomplices were no longer able to completely dispose of the perfidious tracks. Thus, it was only a matter of time until the French investigators with the help of witnesses and official medical legal experts drew the right conclusion from the remaining corpses and body parts.
The investigation documents show that Capitaine Beckhardt, head investigator of the French military judiciary, indeed asked about the origin of the corpses. However, nothing is known about an in-depth investigation of their identity. If there was ever any interest in that, the findings over the years inevitably sank into oblivion because much information from the judiciary inquiries is still hampered by the French archive laws. Among the inaccessible documents would be the arguably sole remaining guidepost to the names of the victims: the secret notes of an employee of the anatomical institute by the name Henry Henrypierre. When in the early morning of August 12, 1943 the first of four groups of gassed victims from Natzweiler arrived at the Anatomy-Institute of Strasbourg, Henry Henrypierre suspected unnatural deaths. Several unmistakable signs troubled the trained pharmacist extremely. All corpses had numbers on their left forearm. Although he could not explain their meaning except as an unchangeable mark, he attached enough importance to them to record them for a still uncertain moment of truth. He secretly wrote them down and presented the note or the notes later to the investigators. A copy of the note was able to have a determining influence on the direction of my inquiries. The archival finding though, did not reveal direct clues concerning the identity of the numbered persons.
Quick information about the names of the victims could have been provided through the accompanying papers that were enclosed in the deportation of the 86 concentration camp prisoners from Auschwitz to Natzweiler. It is safe to say that with utmost probability Hirt’s accomplices destroyed them during the last days before the liberation of the Alsace. For this reason, it seemed forever impossible to reveal the identity of the dead.
History becomes concrete through names and locations. It becomes human only if it is not limited to the sites of crimes and offender. Whoever is hiding the victims indirectly becomes a fellow executioner of the Europe-wide extermination campaign against the Jews waged by the Nazis. The extermination of the victims will only be completed through oblivion. The memory will not bring anyone back to life, but the murdered people live on in remembrance.
This research is about the process of how the concentration camp numbers were turned again into names. Thereby, a world that hid it for many decades comes out of the darkness. With each move the persons step out of the anonymity, women and men take us to their places of living. Women and men who were not safe from the German Nazis in Europe, nor in the Norwegian Narvik or in the Greek Thessalonica, not in the Dutch Sittard and not in the Polish Szereszow. Some of them already resided for years far from their old homeland; others were abruptly torn out of their familiar surroundings. Most of them were in the prime of life, barely over 20, when they suddenly had to confront the masters of life and death, at the ramp of Auschwitz as a group and still in an existential way alone. Spouses, siblings, parents, children, distant relatives and friends were immediately sent to the gas chambers, while they themselves still had a pitiful, everything but self-determined, camp life ahead of them.
In the memory of those who have known them, the murdered persons continue to live on. Thus, I was searching globally for relatives and found some of them in Argentina, Belgium, Germany, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, Israel and the US. They helped me in conversations and letters but also with personal documents and photos to get a picture of some of the “Ahnenerbe”-victims. This shall be addressed in the following.
“Each of us had his own apple tree”, wrote Hermann Sachnowitz, Norwegian Auschwitz survivor and brother of one of the 86 victims, in his memoirs. Through this, he reminded us that before the war, his father had planted a tree of life in the garden of his house for each family member. An apple tree for his late wife and nine for the eight children and himself. Israel Sachnowitz and six of his children were killed in Auschwitz. In addition, Frank Sachnowitz, at age seventeen the youngest in the family, lost his life in the gas chambers of Natzweiler as the object of race researchers who had lost their scruples.
My inquiries were fueled by the desire to plant a tree of life for the 86 women and men who, through no fault of their own, became victims of criminal scientists. This objective gave me guidance in countless moments in which the difficult inquiries were on the verge of collapse. May the tree now thrive and prosper.
Hans-Joachim Lang
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