N@zi doctor who beat pregnant wom3n, broke legs with a hamm3r & amputated limbs without anesth3sia
On January 30, 1933, in Germany, Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was appointed chancellor. From the outset, his regime declared its intention to lead what it defined as the German “master race” to victory in a supposed racial struggle against those it labeled inferior, above all the Jews. In shaping and implementing this ideology, the German medical profession played a central role. Doctors and nurses were not merely passive observers of Nazi policy; many became active participants in its crimes. Some welcomed the regime because it reinforced their beliefs in racial hygiene, while others joined opportunistically, seeing the new political order as a path to professional advancement. Between 1933 and 1945, roughly half of all German physicians became members of the Nazi Party or its affiliated organizations.
Among them was Herta Oberheuser, a doctor who during the Second World War would conduct brutal and inhumane medical experiments on women imprisoned at Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Herta Oberheuser was born on May 15, 1911, in Cologne, then part of the German Empire. She was the daughter of an engineer and grew up in Düsseldorf. In 1931 she graduated from high school and went on to study medicine in Bonn and Düsseldorf. Her family was not wealthy, and she was required to support herself in part by tutoring and assisting in a medical practice while completing her studies.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scouting and youth movements were widespread in Germany. When the Nazi Party rose to power in January 1933, numerous political, religious, and social youth organizations already existed. The Nazis moved quickly to absorb and reshape them. They expanded the Hitler Youth, creating separate sections organized by gender and age. For young women between 17 and 21, the regime later established a voluntary subdivision of the League of German Girls known as “Glaube und Schönheit,” or Faith and Beauty.
Oberheuser joined the League of German Girls in 1935. Her assigned role was to provide medical assistance to female participants during youth events, particularly those who collapsed from overexertion. Physical training, however, was not the only function of these organizations. At the 1936 Nuremberg Rally, attended by approximately 100,000 members of Nazi youth groups, some 900 girls between the ages of 15 and 18 returned home pregnant, a consequence of the regime’s contradictory policies of moral discipline and racial reproduction.
In 1937, the same year she received her medical doctorate, Oberheuser formally joined the Nazi Party. Determined to specialize in dermatology, she accepted a position as an assistant physician at the Dermatology Clinic in Düsseldorf. By 1940 she had obtained the necessary qualification and went on to work at the Düsseldorf public health department, where she conducted research experiments on live animals. When her father became ill, Oberheuser was forced to financially support her family and began searching for a better-paid position.
That opportunity appeared when she read a notice in a professional medical journal stating that the SS was seeking a female doctor for a so-called “women’s retraining camp” near Berlin. Oberheuser applied. After three months of training, in December 1940, the 29-year-old physician was assigned to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Ravensbrück, which opened in May 1939, was the largest concentration camp for women within Germany’s prewar borders and second in size only to the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The first inmates numbered approximately 900 women. Following the outbreak of the Second World War on September 1, 1939, the camp population grew rapidly. By the end of 1942, about 10,000 women were imprisoned there, and by January 1945 the number exceeded 50,000, the vast majority of them women.
At Ravensbrück, Oberheuser initially worked under camp physicians Walter Sonntag and Gerhard Schiedlausky. These doctors conducted violent experiments on female prisoners, extracting healthy teeth without anesthesia and killing inmates by injecting petrol or phenol directly into their veins. Prostitutes imprisoned at the camp were also used as experimental subjects in attempts to find treatments for gonorrhea and syphilis. As conditions worsened and her colleagues found themselves unable to endure the brutality of the work, Oberheuser, an ardent Nazi, gradually assumed more of their responsibilities, ensuring that the experiments continued without interruption.
A decisive turning point came on May 27, 1942, when Reinhard Heydrich, Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, was mortally wounded in Prague by Czechoslovak paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. That same day, Heinrich Himmler dispatched his personal physician, Karl Gebhardt, to oversee Heydrich’s medical care.
Hitler’s personal doctor, Theodor Morell, recommended treatment with the new antibacterial drug sulfonamide, but Gebhardt rejected the suggestion, convinced that Heydrich would recover without it. Although Heydrich initially appeared to improve, he collapsed on June 3 and died the following day. Himmler accused Gebhardt of negligence for failing to administer sulfonamides and urged him to conduct experiments on concentration camp prisoners to prove that the drug would not have saved Heydrich’s life.
These experiments began at Ravensbrück on July 20, 1942. Gebhardt’s assistants included Herta Oberheuser and another camp physician, Fritz Fischer. The stage was set for some of the most sadistic medical crimes committed under the Nazi regime.
Under Karl Gebhardt’s direction, the medical experiments at Ravensbrück expanded rapidly in scale and brutality. Officially, they were presented as necessary research to aid wounded German soldiers. In reality, they were acts of deliberate torture carried out on imprisoned women who had no possibility of consent or refusal. Gebhardt sought to demonstrate that sulfonamide drugs were ineffective in treating infected wounds, thereby absolving himself of responsibility for Reinhard Heydrich’s death.
To achieve this, Gebhardt and his assistants inflicted severe injuries on prisoners and then deliberately infected those wounds. Bones were broken with hammers, muscles were cut open, and foreign materials such as wood splinters, glass fragments, and metal shavings were inserted into the wounds to provoke aggressive infections. In many cases, limbs were amputated or surgically altered without anesthesia. The suffering was extreme and intentional.
Herta Oberheuser played an active role in these procedures. She assisted in surgeries, monitored the progression of infections, and participated in the post-operative “care,” which was often little more than calculated neglect. Pain relief was routinely denied. The women screamed, fainted, and begged for water, only to be ignored or punished. The SS selected nearly 80 women for these experiments, most of them Polish political prisoners. The victims referred to themselves as “rabbits,” a grim acknowledgment that they were being treated as laboratory animals. Many were left permanently disabled, unable to walk except by hopping on one leg.
Among them was Władysława Karolewska, a Polish schoolteacher arrested for her role as a courier in the anti-German resistance. Against her will, she was subjected to bone regeneration experiments. She survived the war and later provided detailed testimony describing both the physical agony and the psychological torment she endured. Prisoners summoned to the camp hospital were given no explanation for the procedures. Injections administered beforehand caused violent vomiting, followed by surgery that left limbs swollen, infected, and immobilized in plaster casts extending from ankle to thigh.
Karolewska underwent three operations. For months she could not walk, and pus flowed continuously from her leg until June 1943, nine months after the first procedure. Though blindfolded during some operations, she was able to identify the doctors involved by voice and behavior, including Gebhardt, Fischer, Schiedlausky, and Oberheuser. In later testimony, she described an encounter that illustrated Oberheuser’s cruelty at its most deliberate.
While Karolewska and other victims lay in extreme pain, they spoke among themselves about the terrible conditions and the absence of proper medical care. Their conversation was overheard. A German nurse entered the room and ordered them to get up and dress. When the women explained that they were unable to walk due to severe pain, the nurse returned with Oberheuser. Oberheuser ordered them to dress and report to the dressing room. Unable to walk, the women were forced to hop on one leg down the corridor. After each hop, they had to stop and rest from exhaustion. Oberheuser forbade anyone from helping them.
When they finally reached the operating room, utterly drained, Oberheuser appeared and informed them that the dressing change would not take place after all, ordering them to return to their room. One prisoner, whose name Karolewska could not recall, helped her back despite the prohibition.
Another survivor, Stefania Łotocka, later recalled Oberheuser’s behavior during post-operative care. According to her testimony, Oberheuser frequently denied water to the injured women. On occasions when she permitted it, she mixed the water with vinegar. She also ordered that no medication be given to alleviate pain. Suffering was not an unintended consequence of the experiments; it was an accepted, even desired, condition.
Oberheuser later attempted to justify her actions by claiming that Germans had the right to experiment because the victims were members of the Polish underground resistance. After the procedures, numerous women were killed outright. Oberheuser administered lethal injections of phenol or petroleum, later portraying these killings as acts of mercy designed to relieve suffering.
Her crimes extended beyond medical experimentation. She was involved in forced abortions performed on women who were seven or eight months pregnant. Pregnant prisoners were beaten to induce miscarriages, and newborn infants were killed. After the war, a German woman named Anna Heil recounted how she learned that her sister had died at Ravensbrück. Seeking information, Heil contacted Oberheuser. Instead of answering, Oberheuser struck her in the face and stomach while shouting that her sister was gone because she had been “a useless eater” whom Germany no longer needed.
In total, approximately 132,000 women from across Europe passed through Ravensbrück, including Poles, Russians, Jews, Romani people, and others. More than 92,000 of them perished. When the camp was liberated by the Red Army on April 30, 1945, only about 3,500 sick women, men, and children remained alive.
Justice eventually reached Herta Oberheuser after the collapse of the Third Reich. She was brought before the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, which began on December 9, 1946. Oberheuser was the only woman among the defendants. She expressed no remorse for her actions and instead emphasized her ideological commitment, declaring that being a woman had not prevented her from being a good National Socialist and asserting that female National Socialists were as valuable as men in preserving what they believed in.
During the trial, Oberheuser claimed that she had helped the women subjected to experiments and insisted that they were grateful for her presence when she changed their bandages. Survivors categorically contradicted these assertions. Izabela Rek, one of the victims, testified that Oberheuser promised to dress her wounds, smiled, left the ward, and never returned that day. Evidence drawn from seven Ravensbrück trials and the Doctors’ Trial consistently portrayed Oberheuser as exceptionally callous. Keith Mant of the Royal Army Medical Corps later described her post-operative care as little more than sadistic.
When questioned about the pain caused by the sulfonamide experiments, Oberheuser denied that the women suffered significantly, claiming they never expressed disagreement and were pleased with her care. She suggested that the experiments gave them a chance of being pardoned. When asked how many people she had killed with injections of petroleum, she replied that she had killed no one, portraying the injections as medical assistance for dying patients. She claimed to have administered morphine followed by an unknown mixture provided by another doctor.
This testimony was false. The mixture consisted of petroleum, and death occurred three to five minutes after injection. Victims remained fully conscious until the end. Evidence demonstrated that Oberheuser personally killed at least 5 women in this manner. In court, she attempted to defend herself by invoking her femininity, arguing that a woman could not be capable of such brutality. She also claimed that the orders she followed appeared to originate directly from Adolf Hitler and were therefore legitimate, and that her actions served the greater purpose of saving the lives of 100,000 wounded German soldiers.
These arguments failed. On August 20, 1947, Herta Oberheuser, described by one Ravensbrück survivor as a beast masquerading as a human, was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 20 years in prison. She ultimately served far less. Her sentence was commuted to 10 years in January 1951, and she was released early for good behavior in April 1952, after fewer than 5 years of incarceration.
Following her release, Oberheuser resumed life in West Germany and became a family doctor in Stocksee near Kiel. For several years, her medical practice flourished. In August 1958, however, a Ravensbrück survivor recognized her. Public outrage followed. The interior minister of Schleswig-Holstein, Helmut Lemke, revoked her medical license and ordered her practice closed. Oberheuser appealed the decision to the Schleswig-Holstein administrative court, but the case attracted widespread media attention, and protests by former victims intensified. In December 1960, the court rejected her appeal. She was fined and permanently barred from practicing medicine.
Herta Oberheuser died on January 24, 1978, in a nursing home in Linz am Rhein at the age of 66. Her death passed without mourning. The suffering she inflicted at Ravensbrück endured far beyond her lifetime, preserved in survivor testimony and judicial records as evidence of how medical authority was weaponized in service of ideology. Her story stands as a stark reminder that the crimes of the Nazi regime were not carried out only by executioners and soldiers, but also by educated professionals who chose to abandon ethics, compassion, and humanity.
