On some of the Nazi German doctors at Majdanek

Confinement in a concentration camp, apart from bringing us everyday hardship and ill-treatment, involved us in so many terrible, unbearably real incidents that, although numbed by the daily suffering, every now and again we felt genuinely shocked, our inner selves were completely shattered, and our human nature was provoked to impotent rebellion.

To me, as I am a doctor, the overpowering incidents which incited such reactions were the crimes committed by the German physicians in the camp.¹

From the very beginning, that is from my first encounter with the supervising Nazi doctor in Majdanek, I was utterly appalled by the fact that the women patients, the hospital, the incidence of diseases, the death rate, and generally medicine were of no concern to him: he showed absolutely no interest in patients as such, even when seen as just “cases.” And then, when I had to watch Nazi doctors assiduously selecting Jewish prisoners for death, when I saw how involved they got in selections and similar “activities,” when I observed their faces as they sent vulnerable, sick women to death or shot them, and when I compared and put their crimes side by side with their medical profession, that, I believe, was the greatest shock I experienced in the camp.

I had to watch many monstrosities and live through many nightmares. I realized that death camps were for killing people, but the fact that the accomplices to the killings or even the perpetrators of the murders were doctors, who loved their “job” and did it enthusiastically, with satisfaction and smiles on their faces—that was absolutely incomprehensible to me; it was completely beyond my grasp, it was the heaviest blow, it was an attack against the foundations of my idea of the doctor’s tasks.

Pouncing Beasts. Artwork by Marian Kołodziej. Photo by Piotr Markowski. Click the image to enlarge.

I have worked as a physician for many years. I cherish my profession and respect its ethos. And the basic principle in a doctor’s work is taking a humanitarian approach, in the broadest sense of the word. This humanitarianism should recognize no racial or ethnic hatred. Yet, Nazi German doctors in concentration camps were the very opposite of humanitarians, and their racial and ethnic hatred led them to crime. They did not even deserve to be called doctors, because their conduct was an unprecedented, absolute disgrace to the medical profession.

When I happened to witness the cruelty of the SS functionaries in the camp, both men and women, who were merciless, mindless, and primitive people, some of them hopelessly addicted to alcohol, then I knew they could be easily overcome by their own bestiality, and perhaps in them there were psychological grounds for it. However, the ruthless acts and crimes committed by the German physicians in the camps, so monstrously revolting, were then and always will be seen as completely abnormal, since they were committed by professionals whose motto is to fight evil and barbarity.

As a detainee of four concentration camps,² I had many opportunities to see and study several Nazi German doctors. I shall try to describe the most important ones.

During the first months of Majdanek, the chief SS doctor was Bodman.³ He was about fifty, fat and heavily built, and had a snub nose. Bodmann was constantly annoyed and sullen. He did not care about the hospital or the patients at all, and was only intent on commandeering the staff, so that everybody had to stand to attention in front of him, all tense and taut, and deliver their reports in German. He would stand in the entrance door of the hospital barrack and peep inside, apparently to check if the premises were clean. Almost invariably, he disapproved both of the state of cleanliness and the reports, so he yelled at us like all the other SS men. With that, his “round” was over and so was his engagement in his responsibilities. At first, when I was a new arrival with no experience of life in the camp, I attempted to talk to him about the patients, hoping to obtain some more medicines for them, but my words fell on deaf ears. However, in the realities of the camp it was just an insignificant trifle and the hospital under Bodman’s supervision had a relatively peacefu period. At that time, Majdanek did not yet have any selections of Jewish prisoners.

Bodman’s successor was Blanke,⁴ who supervised the hospital until the end of its operations, that is April 1944. His external appearance was completely different. Blanke was much younger than Bodmann, very handsome, tall, ruddy, and always smiling. His almost teenage looks and his smile gave us false hope that perhaps he was a milder creature or at least had some human feelings. Later, this first impression proved wrong, and that’s why initially we were taken aback by his atrocities. Just like his predecessor, Blanke showed no concern for the patients. It was only during the first few days that he turned up at the hospital for a moment, just to ask if everything was all right. Later he would ride his motorbike up to the hospital barrack and give a loud toot, not even bothering to get off. When I came to the door, he asked his standard question: “Everything fine?” So I would answer: “Yes, all’s fine.” Then he drove away, with a bored look on his face. On the other hand, his involvement and vigour showed up in non-medical undertakings: selecting and killing innocent Jewish women prisoners.

Blanke came to Majdanek when it was taking in huge numbers of women prisoners. New transports arrived almost daily, with very many Jewish prisoners. The first selection of a Jewish transport was performed as soon as the women left the washroom. The naked prisoners were examined by the SS men and Blanke, and separated into two groups: the young and healthy went to the right, to the camp, while the old and sickly were taken to the left, to be killed in the gas chambers. These selections were done quickly and efficiently, because the new arrivals were not fully aware of what they was really in store for them.⁵ And even when a woman was allowed to live and work in a particular unit, she was still at risk of being selected for death: Blanke repeated the procedure every now and then, always at noon, when the prisoners came back to the camp for a meal. He would scan an entire working unit, standing in rows of five. Again, he would form a separate group of the older ones, and those who either seemed unwell or had some dressings on; they too stood in rows of five, on the left. By now the terrified women knew very well what was going to happen and they did everything to evade their fate. But when Blanke noticed any of them trying to slink out of the selected group, he simply took out his revolver and shot her. Then he carried on. On such occasions, he displayed plenty of spirit and kept assailing more and more victims, with his wolfish grin spreading across his face. Yes, that grin hardly ever disappeared from it. When the selection was over, he would drive off happily on his motorbike.

One of Blanke’s frequent pastimes was shooting helpless women. One day at noon, I was busy in the hospital when I heard gunshots. So I rushed outside and saw Blanke, standing next to Oberaufseherin Elza Erich⁶ on the perimeter of the women’s section and shooting at the prisoners who were washing up their soup bowls at the standpipe. Frightened and astounded, I ran up to him, enquiring what had happened. Blanke was all smiles and said: “It’s nothing. I’ve just bought a new airgun and wanted to try it out to see if it’s any good. But those women, they’re Jewish, aren’t they?” That absolut cynical answer was more hideous and bestial than I could have ever expected.

I can see very clearly, right before my eyes, one more scene of the camp life featuring Blanke. An execution was to be carried out: a woman who had tried to escape was about to be hanged.⁷ So we were assembled in the roll call square in neat rows, facing the gallows. Blanke and Erich were standing by too, entertaining each other with a cheerful conversation. The hangman was one of the SS orderlies. He completed his task. A dead silence fell over the camp. Suddenly, it was interrupted by Blanke’s loud laughter. Overjoyed, he was showing Erich the rhythmic sway of the poor victim’s legs.

Finally, the most outrageous mass murder in Majdanek, the killing of 13 thousand⁸ Jews, took place on 3 November 1943, and Blanke participated in it as well.

On that day, no unit left the camp to work in its environs. The women’ section was full of SS functionaries who ordered the Jewish prisoners out of the barracks, lined them up in rows of five, and marched them off. We did not know where they had to go and why. We deluded ourselves that maybe the Germans wanted to arrange a separate sector for the Jewish women in the camp. Eventually, the SS men came to the hospital. For a few months we had been treating almost the entire medical staff of the Czyste Jewish Hospital, Warsaw, thirty women doctors and forty nurses. Nearly all of them had gone down with typhus upon arrival, but some were working. As 3 November was a cold autumn day and the patients were to be transported in open trucks, we wrapped them in blankets. I advised all our Jewish medics, even the convalescents, to put on their white coats and Red Cross armbands. Although I did not know where they were being taken, I was very worried for them and, being a doctor, naïvely expected that the medical coats and armbands could save them. During that operation, Blanke and Erich were extremely active. But when Erich gave me a lash of her whip for wasting the hospital blankets to cover the patients and Blanke cast a scornful look at the white coats and red crosses, I stopped deluding myself: now it was clear the Jewish women were facing the worst. All of them, as well as all the Jewish men, were taken beyond Field Five and gunned down with machine gun fire, as the Germans were unable to gas so many people in a day. They had put up loudspeakers and played loud foxtrot music to drown the noise of the shooting. Blanke attended to the end of the slaughter.

So much for Blanke.

For a fuller picture of the camp hospital in Majdanek, I should add that the German medical staff also included SS orderlies. They were our biggest nightmare, loitering around all day and inventing new ways of harassing us. Their cruelty was on a par with Blanke’s. But that is another broad topic which I should perhaps discuss on another occasion.

In that ocean of moral depravity, however, there was one exception: a young German doctor called Rindfleisch,⁹ who had just graduated. His father, a top-ranking military official in Berlin, secured the job for him to keep him from being sent to the front. Rindfleisch started work soon after Blanke’s arrival. He was concerned about patients and did not insult or harass us. He even tried to help out with the everyday business of running the hospital, and was more affable and approachable. His attitude stood in sharp contrast to that of the other German personnel; he was normal, just like an ordinary doctor. Working with him did not involve constant emotional tension and it was quite a relief to see that decent people could be found even among the German camp functionaries. Rindfleisch did not participate in the selections: that was Blanke’s exclusive area of expertise. Yes, but Rindfleisch was the only exception among all the German doctors I met in the Nazi concentration camps.

***

Translated from original article: Perzanowska, Stefania. “O niektórych hitlerowskich lekarzach na Majdanku.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1966.

1. Perzanowska describes the SS doctors she met in the women’s section of Majdanek (Lublin concentration camp) between January 1943 and April 1944.^a
2. The fourth camp in which Perzanowska was held, apart from the ones listed at the beginning of this article, was Neustadt-Glewe, a sub-camp of Ravensbrück, to which the Germans relocated her in March 1945.^b
3. SS-Obersturmführer Franz von Bodmann (1908–1945), chief physician of Majdanek, German war criminal. Captured by the British at the end of the War and committed suicide before being brought to trial. His surname is misspelled in the Polish article.^a
4. SS-Hauptsturmführer Max Blancke  (1909–1945), German war criminal; chief physician of Majdanek from 10 April 1943 to 20 January 1944. Committed suicide as the War was coming to an end. Perzanowska misspells his surname and gets the dates of his Majdanek period wrong.^a
5. Jewish prisoners from Warsaw started to be deported to Majdanek in the spring of 1943. This is why the majority of them had not heard of the camp before.^a
6. Elsa Ehrich (1914-1948), senior female warden at Majdanek and other concentration camps; German war criminal. Apprehended by the Allies after the War and handed over to the Polish authorities. Charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes, tried, found guilty, sentenced to death and hanged in Lublin. The name is misspelled in the article.^b
7. Only one case is known in the history of Majdanek when a Jewish woman prisoner was hanged for attempted escape.^a
8. On 3 November 1943, about 18 thousand Jewish people, inmates of Majdanek and other labour camps in the area of Lublin, were killed.^a
9. SS-Untersturmführer Heinrich Rindfleisch (1916–1969). German war criminal, worked in several concentration camps; chief SS physician of Majdanek reported by witnesses to have taken part in selections and pseudo-medical experiments. Wanted by several countries after the War, but never brought to justice.^a

a—notes by Marta Grudzińska, Expert Consultant for the Medical Review Auschwitz project; b—notes by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Head Translator for the Medical Review Auschwitz project.

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