Dentistry in Auschwitz

In the early 1940s, public opinion worldwide was becoming better informed about the appalling conditions as well as the more and more elaborate methods of mass extermination in Auschwitz, even though the SS wanted to keep the matter confidential. Therefore, for the purposes of Nazi propaganda and to keep up appearances, medical specialist clinics were set up in the camp. One of them was Zahnstation, a dental clinic, which was made part of the prisoners’ hospital.

It was located in the main section of Auschwitz in Block 21, to the right of the corridor that served as the waiting room. The dental clinic had two rooms. The larger one was a surgery and the smaller one a prosthetist’s room. The equipment in the surgery had been confiscated from a Silesian dentist of Jewish origin. It included a chair, a spittoon, and other elements of a dental unit, such as an electric dental drill, a scialytic lamp and another, three-arm lamp, an air gun for cold and warm air, a pulp tester, and a cauter. Also, we had a complete set of instruments for caries treatment and dental surgical procedures. These instruments and dental materials were stored in two metal cabinets. Surgical sponges and dressings were sterilised in an autoclave in the surgical ward. We also had a Ritter dental X-ray machine and two trolleys. In mid-1942, we were issued another dental unit for the second dentist. The clerk’s table was placed by the door. The chairs were positioned by the windows, which looked onto the laundry, which was being built in 1942, and the entrance to Block 11.¹ Therefore we were able to observe and commit to memory many facts that the SS men strove to keep secret. For instance, we could see the men who were brought to Block 11 and their dead bodies taken away after the executions, because initially the killings were carried out during the day. Later, they took place after the evening roll call.

The prosthetic work was done in the smaller room. Our principal task was to clean the false teeth from the dentures that had been used by people killed in the gas chambers. The Nazi regime took the virtue of thrift seriously: old dentures were provided to us in dozens and dozens of suitcases. We had to scour the teeth, sort them, and build whole sets which were then delivered to the SS hospital, whence, presumably, they travelled to Berlin. Just like the prisoners’ hospital, also the dental clinic had its SS supervisor, a dentist. That position was held first by Hauptsturmführer Teuber² and then by Hauptsturmführer Frank.³ They treated the Polish personnel politely and in some cases we could even rely on their help. For example, on two occasions I was to be sent to the Bunker⁴ and would have surely died there if it had not been for Dr Frank’s intervention. The punishment was to be meted out in consequence of an escape by fellow inmates who were patients of ours; [on the second occasion] I was denounced to Commandant Aumeier⁵ by a German criminal prisoner. However, the same SS physicians also selected newly arrived prisoners for death on the Auschwitz unloading ramp.

Our deputy head, who spent all his days in the clinic, was Mann, a Sudeten German NCO. He proved to be fairly manageable, especially as we kept violating the camp regulations and bribed him with wangled sausage and margarine. The Zahnstation served as a meeting point where you could contact a fellow prisoner, either from the main camp or its sub-camps, and exchange information.

At first, the only treatment we could offer was to remove a tooth or do a filling during one appointment. Later we were permitted to perform the entire range of dental procedures, including the surgical ones. For the most severe dental surgical cases we even had over ten hospital beds, allotted by the senior management.

The hardest time during our incarceration in Auschwitz was the 1942 and 1943 period, with the highest numbers of patients with maxillary fractures. Other cases were gunshot wounds to the maxilla and mandible, dental abscesses, trismus (lockjaw), and even noma (cancrum oris), usually affecting Roma people, who were debilitated due to extreme starvation.

I shall describe one of the typical cases. One night in 1942, a Soviet prisoner was brought in after the evening roll call. He had been shot during an attempted escape, apparently. The bullet entered at the mandible angle and went out at the chin, but did not damage any of the major blood vessels. A massive blood suffusion had made his neck swell so much that it was level with his chest. The X-ray showed that the mandible had been crushed medially, with several loose splinters, but luckily the incisors were not dislocated and stayed in place in larger bone fragments. When the swelling subsided, we wired the maxilla and mandible together, administered sulphonamides orally, and treated the wounds with Marfanil and Prontalbin⁶ powder. They healed nicely, with some sequestra surfacing on the chin. After a few weeks, when we removed the last sizeable sequestrum, the wound was completely healed on the outside. We found more exfoliating tiny bone chips in the mouth and after they had been extracted, the larger fragments with the undamaged incisors healed too. The treatment was a success and the patient was discharged after four months.

On A Stretcher. Artwork by Marian Kołodziej. Photo by Piotr Markowski. Click the image to enlarge.

As a rule, prisoners suffering from noma were brought to our clinic in a critical condition,
with necrotic openings in the mucous membrane and skin. The round, reeking lesions, which tended to expand, left the mandibular bone bare. The edges of the wound were red and swollen. We applied oxidatives and silver nitrate externally and injected Vaduril⁷ and Cebion⁸ around the wound. Causal treatment was hardly possible, given the malnutrition. All the patients with noma were starved Roma prisoners, who were ultimately killed in the gas chambers.

We had more and more work day by day, having persuaded our superiors that we could manage to carry out the entire range of dental procedures. Both officially and illicitly, we procured anything we needed both for dental treatment and for making dentures. Thanks to the help of Jan Sikorski and Tadeusz Szewczyk, our fellow inmates who worked in the pharmacy of the SS hospital, we managed to finagle considerable amounts of medicines and materials, as well as instruments.

The people who started the dental clinic in Auschwitz were prisoners Janusz Kuczbara, who worked in the capacity of a dentist; Czesław Duzel, a dental technician; and Antoni Jabłoński,⁹ a clerk.

Janusz Kuczbara was not a professional dentist, but was quite efficient at extracting teeth and administering simple treatments. When I started to work in the clinic, he handed all the medical duties over to me and moved to a different Commando. Later, he and a few other prisoners, including Arbeitsdienst Otto Küsel,¹⁰ organised a successful escape from Auschwitz. However,¹¹ he died a hero’s death in Warsaw after a skirmish with the German soldiers.

Antoni Jabłoński was the clerk for our clinic. He and Czesław Duzel, had to keep it tidy. In 1943, he was given the same job in the Roma section, that is Auschwitz II. He died of typhus in 1944. Czesław Duzel, aged 19, came from Kraków and worked as a dental technician. He was planning to escape, so to save us from the inevitable reprisals,¹² he joined a different work unit, just like Janusz Kuczbara.

Duzel and several other prisoners wanted to leave the camp in a truck powered by wood gas and equipped with a box for wood, in which they wanted to hide. The driver, an SS man, who was privy to the plot and had received adequate compensation in hard currency, was to take them through the main checkpoint. Regrettably, he turned them in when the car was being looked over, and so the prisoners were locked up in the Bunker. Duzel ingested poison to avoid the torture.

In the latter part of 1942, the clinic got new dentists, Janusz Krzywicki and Jerzy Budny.¹³ In 1943, Budny as well as Jabłoński were moved to the Roma camp. At that time, more hospitals were arranged in the other men’s and women’s sections of Birkenau, the Roma camp, and the Monowitz camp (Buna-Werke). I worked in the dental clinic of the last camp for a few months in 1943, until the job was given to a Jewish dentist from Czechoslovakia, whose name I cannot recall. As Antoni Jabłoński had started work in the Roma camp, our new clerk for a few months was Tadeusz Hołuj,¹⁴ later replaced by Bolesław Głębowicz,¹⁵ who stayed with us until the camp was liberated. Głębowicz became so involved in dentistry that he enrolled for medical studies right after the War and now he is a dentist.

In 1943, new prosthetic technicians arrived. They were Tomasz Napierała and Józef Garbaciak, and were joined in 1944 by Karol (Karl) Risch, a German from Stettin.¹⁶ Our orderly was Leon Pleskacz, a young boy from Tarnów, whose mother¹⁷ was imprisoned in Birkenau.

Our work was well organised and all the prisoners who had jobs in the clinic were very close, like in a family. Our daily routine followed that of the camp: we got up at 5 a.m. and had a morning roll call. In the first years of the camp’s operations, the roll calls for the hospital staff were held in the hospital yard, but in 1942 we were assembled in the blocks, in our wards, which was undeniably more convenient, especially in rainy and frosty weather.

In the early years, the hospital personnel had to wear wooden clogs, just like other prisoners. Yet, thanks to the efforts of our superiors and the intervention of the hospital management with the camp administration, later we were allowed to wear leather shoes and prisoner doctors could also have watches, which otherwise were taken away from the new arrivals in the camp and then kept in the storage rooms.

Our work in the clinic started at 7 a.m. and lasted until noon and then from 2 to 6 p.m. After the evening roll call, we had some leisure time in the blocks until 9 p.m.

A prisoner could be given an appointment in the outpatients’ clinic if he reported to his block functionary after the evening roll call or, during work, to the Kapo supervising his unit. The functionary issued a special pass and put the prisoner’s name on two lists, one of which went to the main hospital admissions office during the morning roll call and the other to our clerk. Every patient had to be entered in the hospital register. We had to enter the prisoner’s number, his name, the number of his block and his working unit if he was to be given leave from work for the appointment; we also wrote down what treatment was administered. If more appointments were needed, we issued appropriate notes, giving their dates. Generally, they were accepted by the functionaries and SS personnel, so we could give them to those inmates who needed some rest in the waiting room, because they were working in hard conditions in the fields. So a day or two of respite helped them to carry on with their hard work.

Sometimes, the dentists saw larger groups of patients from those sub-camps that had no hospital, or those who needed a specialist to examine and treat them. They were escorted by an SS man and all the necessary procedures were performed in his presence. The aim was to prevent communication with prisoners in the main camp. However, despite the strict regulations, our clinic served as a place where relatives could meet to comfort each other and exchange gifts of clothing, food, and medicines. They would also exchange news about the situation in the main camp and the sub-camps. Thanks to the help of fellow prisoners who worked in the camp’s main office and the Political Department, we established connections with the SS personnel and obtained vital information. Then we were able to change the contents of some documents, for instance, by giving the names of deceased prisoners instead of those alive to help several fellow inmates dodge being sent to work in the Sonderkommando¹⁸ or avoid other severe punishments, because they were relocated to other camps in due time.

This shows that our efforts were not limited to medical and dental care, but involved some other endeavours: our ultimate goal was to consolidate all the forms of resistance since we feared all the prisoners could be annihilated if the camp were to be closed down.

It was chiefly thanks to the medical staff that the will to survive was sustained in those who were emotionally more vulnerable and became mentally exhausted. The working conditions in the hospital were definitely better than draussen, that is outdoors. Therefore it was less of a burden for us to analyse the possible scenarios of the crazy ideas devised by the SS, and to draw up plans to thwart those demented designs. Hungry and overworked prisoners were unable to think about anything except getting food and rest, so we had to do the thinking for them.

The prisoners’ dental clinics in Auschwitz provided only the most essential treatments: teeth were extracted and filled. Only our clinic in the main camp had a prosthetist’s room. There, the dentures of gassed prisoners were scrubbed and also new dentures, both removable and fixed ones, were made, such as steel bridges that were then given the final touches by the prosthetists in the SS hospital. Typically, removable dentures were made for prisoners of German origin and those Poles who got a special permit. Fixed dentures were the privilege of Germans, such as Kapos.

Often when we were commissioned to make one denture, we prepared several, using materials provided by our friends who worked in the SS prosthetist’s room, Mikołajski, Szczęsnowicz, Oleksy, Bohusiewicz, and others. Our co-operation was very effective. Now, when two decades have elapsed,¹⁹ it is difficult for me to describe the operations of the dental clinic in Auschwitz and the other efforts undertaken there in an absolutely comprehensive way, which means that my account must be incomplete and not as vivid as I would have liked it to be. I would like to close these reminiscences with a tribute to the late Dr Władysław Gałka,²⁰ who saved my life when I had typhus and pneumonia and was cared for so well in Block 20. That happened in 1942. I was able to see that Dr Gałka was a conscientious and dedicated physician, fully and unconditionally devoted to his patients in the infectious ward. He neglected his own rest and meals, nursing the most severely sick, unconscious patients and watching over them at night. Tired and emaciated, Dr Gałka did not manage to survive typhus. That great man died, having done a physician’s duty. He shall live on in our memory.

***

Translated from original article: Szuszkiewicz, Roman. “Dentystyka w obozie koncentracyjnym w Oświęcimiu.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1964.

1. Block 11, “Death Block,” was a dungeon in which prisoners sentenced to death waited for execution. Its cells were known as bunkers.^a
2. SS Hauptsturmführer Karl-Heinz Teuber (1907-1961), German dentist and war criminal serving in several concentration camps including Auschwitz. After the war sentenced by a Polish court to 4 years in prison and released in 1955, after which he set up a private dental practice in West Germany and died before being put on trial in the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Heinz_Teuber^a
3. SS Hauptsturmführer Willy Frank (1903-1989). German dentist and war criminal. Served in Auschwitz and Dachau. Held as a POW by the Americans, thereafter set up a private dental practice and only brought to trial in the second Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, and given a 7-year prison sentence for his part in the selections on the ramp. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Frank_(Zahnmediziner)^a
4. The Bunker - a metonymic name for Block 11 - was a dungeon for solitary confinement. Few inmates survived it.^b
5. SS-Sturmbannführer Hans Aumeier (1906-1948 ), deputy commandant of Auschwitz, German war criminal. After the war extradited to Poland, sentenced to death by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal and hanged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Aumeier^b
6. Marfanil and Prontalbin were anti-bacterial sulphonamides manufactured by the German pharmaceutical industry during the war. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Mode-of-Action-of-Benzylarnine-Sulphonamide-Goldacre/2bee017f0586fa536d630307a0234eed12363bd5https://pharmacycode.com/Prontalbin.html^b
7. Vaduril, a hormone preparation for the treatment of caries and paradentosis, manufactured by the German pharmaceutical industry during the war. https://www.cabdirect.org/cabdirect/abstract/19371400972^b
8. Cebion—a vitamin C supplement containing ascorbic acid. https://www.allecco.pl/cebion-krople-30-ml.html^b
9. More on Kuczbara, Duzel, and Jabłoński is available on this website in the English version of Tadeusz Paczuła’s article, “The organisational structure of the prisoners’ hospital at Auschwitz I.”^b
10. Otto Küsel (1909-1984), German criminal and functionary prisoner, one of the first inmates of Auschwitz (camp number 2). Earned a good reputation for treating other prisoners humanely. Escaped with three Polish prisoners, but was caught and sent back to Auschwitz, thereafter Flossenbürg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_K%C3%BCsel^b
11. For more information on escapes from Auschwitz, see the official website of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/resistance/escapes-and-reports.^a
12. Whenever there was an attempt to escape, regardless of whether successful or not, the SS conducted “reprisals,” executing randomly selected prisoners, sometimes from the escapees’ work unit.^a
13. Janusz Krzywicki and Jerzy Budny are mentioned in Tadeusz Paczuła’s article on this website. See Note 9 above.^b
14. Tadeusz Hołuj (1916-1985) Auschwitz survivor and well-known Polish poet and novelist with communist political views. His memorial of fellow prisoner is available in English on this website.^b
15. For more on Głębowicz and his camp mug shot, see the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s profile on Twitter, https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum/status/1500743057347526657.^b
16. Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland).^a
17. Olimpia Pleskacz née Królikowska (1895-1976) Polish nurse, arrested and sent to Auschwitz with her son Leon; later transferred to Ravensbrück, where she was one of the human guinea pigs in the criminal medical experiments. http://www.rodzinaravensbruck.pl/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Olimpia-Pleskacz_BIOGRAM.pdf^a
18. Sonderkommando prisoners operated and attended the crematoria, putting corpses in and removing the ashes. Few of them survived, because usually the entire group would be killed after a few weeks on the job, and a new team sent in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderkommando^b
19. The article was published in 1964.^a
20. Dr Gałka is mentioned In other articles available in English on this website; see the biographies of Dr Wilhelm Tuerschmid and Dr Witkowski, as well as W. Fejkiel’s article on the health service in Auschwitz Main Camp.^b

a—notes by Marta Kapera, the translator of the article; b—notes by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Head Translator for the Medical Review Auschwitz project.

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The contents of this site reflect the views held by the authors and do not constitute the official position of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.