by Anne S. Reamey
S.S.-Hauptsturmführer Prof. Dr. August Hirt was born
April 28, 1898 in Mannheim, Germany1 to an old Strasbourg family. Little is
known of the life of August Hirt prior to his involvement with the Ahnenerbe
leading up to and during World War II, but due to his role in several radical
medical experiments and collections, his works during the war have been closely
examined. He joined the Institute of Anatomy at the Reichsuniversität
(initially the University of Strasbourg, overtaken and turned to the Anatomisches
Institut der Reichsuniversität2) early in 1941 where he became the chairman of
the anatomy department3. When Hirt became employed at the University4 he was
already an established member of the S.S. and the Ahnenerbe Society5 (the
Society for the Heritage of the Ancestors).6
August Hirt, like many Nazi doctors, is most closely
associated with his role in the medical experimentation on and gassings of
groups of Jewish prisoners. What makes him unique was motive: instead of seeing
the gassing of prisoners as a quick and effective method of extermination, Hirt
wanted to significantly expand the skull and skeleton collection for his
institute at the University of Strasbourg.7 He wanted to create a museum of
"sub-humans, in which proofs of the degeneracy and the animality of the
Jews would be collected." Hirt considered it to be a task of upmost
importance and extremely time-sensitive since soon the Jewish population would
be completely exterminated, at which point Jewish "skeletons would be as
rare and precious as a diplodocus… "." 8
The Report of Death: Catalyst for
the Collection of Medical Research
Attached to a letter from Ostuf. (Obersturmführer -
First Lieutenant) Wolfram Sievers (Reich Secretary of the Ahnenerbe Society) to
Stbf. (Sturmbannführer - Major) Dr. Rudolf Brandt,9 was a report written by
Hirt in February 1942 describing the minimal amount of Jewish skulls existing
at the Strasbourg Reich University (Reichsuniversität Strasbourg), and how to
best procure the desired number of additional skulls through the assistance of
the field Military Police ("Feldpolizei").10 It should be noted that
in the report, the skulls requested for procurement were those of "Jewish
Bolshevik Commissars". Historian Heather Pringle points out in her book,
The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust, that "by
"commissars," the army actually meant "Jews." Nazi
propagandists had skillfully portrayed Soviet political officers and officials
as Jews for years, and so deeply engrained was this notion in the minds of many
SS and Wehrmacht officers that they simply accepted it as fact."11
In addition to Hirt's personal interest in the
collection of skulls he hoped to obtain, it has also been suggested that Hirt
himself had considered getting into the skull mail-order business12 as an
additional source of income.
Himmler's Response to Hirt's
Deadly Proposal
Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler received Hirt's
report with great enthusiasm. He was "prodigiously interested" in the
project, considering it to be of "enormous value,"13 and according to
Jean-Claude Pressac, he "unceasingly gave his entire support to Professor
Hirt's proposal."14 Soon after his receipt of the report, Himmler sent
Wolfram Sievers15 of the Ahnenerbe Society to meet with Hirt personally, and
agreed to the importance of his research. Sievers then worked with Hirt to determine
the best method of transportation of his victims.
A letter used as evidence during the war crime trials
at Nuremburg, includes an attachment with a report on "securing skulls of
Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars for the purpose of scientific research," which
initially allowed Dr. August Hirt to begin his gassings of Auschwitz Jews at
Natzweiler - Struthof. A reproduction can be found here.
The Compounding of Hate:
Multi-faceted Anti-Semitism Meets the "Final Solution"
So what was it in Hirt's report that caught the eye of
Himmler and caused him to be supportive of the proposed "scientific"
endeavor? While the Jews were on the top of Hitler's list for extermination,
Himmler and Hirt brought together two strands of anti-Semitism: rumors of
Jewish conspirators and racism. During the proceedings of the fourth Yad Vashem
International Historical Conference, Robert Jay Lifton explained, "On one
hand, there is the mystical tradition of anti-Semitism and racism as
exemplified by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - the notorious forgery
around the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy involving Jewish Bolsheviks and
Jewish capitalists. On the other, there is the "scientific" racism
that his study of these skulls directly reflects."16
In the case of Hirt's proposed skull collection
enhancement, timing was everything: Only a month prior to Hirt's proposal, a
new policy had been secretly adopted at a villa overlooking Großer Wannsee17
that would be known as the "Final Solution." In addition to their
decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe, and eventually the world, was the
debate of what to do with the Mischlinge ("part-Jews"). "Himmler
was keen to take action. He wanted the SS Race and Settlement Office (Rasse-
und Siedlungshauptamt-SS (RuSHA)) to racially evaluate all children of mixed
marriages and their progeny for three or four generations, just as
agriculturalists did when attempting to breed superior varieties of plants and
animals. Descendants who exhibited Jewish traits could then be at least
sterilized, if not murdered. For this, the SS needed a much clearer picture of
the Jewish Race." 18
The Beginning of the End for the
Prisoners of Auschwitz
After receiving permission from Himmler, Hirt began
the task of selecting his victims from the prisoners of Auschwitz (although
there is some debate as to whether Hirt himself made the selection, or if it
was done by SS members Dr. Hans Fleischhacker [Tübingen] and
SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Bruno Berger19 [Munich], who arrived in Auschwitz the
first half of 1943 )20, as indicated by Tübingen Professor, Dr. Hans-Joachim
Lang21, with the initial selection totaling 115 people - 79 Jewish men, 30
Jewish women, 2 Poles, and 4 "Asians" (most likely Soviet POWs). Once
his selections were made, SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Bruno Berger collected
personal data and biometrical measurements from the prisoners, completing his
task by June 15, 1943.22
Although the Ahnenerbe supported Hirt by instructing
all members working in the concentration camps to collect "any
particularly interesting and demonstrative"23 anatomical specimens, the
only known victims for the Institute's skeleton collections came directly from
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Robert J. Lifton explained that "there were apparently
difficulties in rounding up Jewish-Bolshevik commissars and possibly in
severing heads, so that it was decided to make use of full skeletons rather
than merely skulls and to collect specimens in the place where any such task
could be accomplished - namely, Auschwitz." 24
While there were killings in such substantial numbers
at Auschwitz that an extra hundred here or there would make relatively little
difference, the fate of Hirt's victims was not a well-kept secret among the
camp doctors. "Dr. L. had seen enough of Auschwitz to suspect the terrible
truth ("I told myself immediately,…. 'They are going to a museum' "),
though she and others refrained in saying so because they "lacked the
courage," felt it would be more kind to remain silent, and could not in
any case be certain of their suspicion." 25
Meanwhile, the collection of potential victims wasn't
the only problem to be dealt with. In a memo from Sievers to Brandt, Sievers
quotes the concerns of Hirt: the preparations of Natzweiler-Struthof were going
too slowly. More importantly, the camp's administration demanded that Hirt's
Institute pay for the prisoners throughout their stay at the camp. This spurred
great debates as to who was to pay for the project, and how payments were to be
made.
The reproduction of a letter that describes the
relationship between Dr. Hirt and the Natzweiler-Struthof camp administration,
including the attempt to attach a price to each victim gassed as part of Hirt's
"research" as compensation to the camp, can be found here.
Death at Natzweiler-Struthof
Following the initial selection, the prisoners were
held inside of the quarantine office at Auschwitz due to the outbreak of a
typhus epidemic26 before being relocated to Natzweiler-Struthof, the only
extermination camp on French territory.27
Both prior to and following the second World War,
Natzweiler-Struthof (31 miles outside of Strasbourg), perched 2,500 feet up on
the top of a mountain in the Vosges Mountains, was used as a ski resort for
tourists. It is only during WWII that the now-serene location (ironically one
that mimicked the German Schwarzwald across the Rhine River) was used as a
concentration camp. Originally the camp, known as "Le Struthof" to
the French, was not intended as a death camp for mass exterminations, but
rather to house Anti-Fascist resistance-fighters and convicted German
criminals,28 often referred to as the "Nacht und Nebel" (Night and
Fog) operation because fighters were arrested without warning, and without
notification to their families, making them appear to simply disappear into the
fog. 29
The camp itself, holding only about 1,500 prisoners at
a time30 (one of the smaller camps constructed by the Germans), was run by the
"brutality incarnate" Joseph Kramer 31 (condemned to death and
executed, 10th Military Region archives). Instead of being located immediately
within the camp, the building was located about a mile away off a small side
road, making the location almost peaceful.32 Due to the local quarries filled
with red granite, the prisoners of Struthof were subjected to manual labor in
order to create new monuments for Germany.33
The building eventually used as the gas chamber was
originally used as a refrigerator room with cold storage chambers by the
Struthof hotel, and converted in April 1943 to a site to test the gas masks of
SS recruits34 by filling the building with tear-gas35 to help prepare the
recruits for the dangers of chemical warfare.
The gas experimentation chamber was modified in August
of 1943 to allow for the gassings at the suggestion of Kramer. He considered
the similarities of the tear-gas testing with the requirements of a building
that was to use the "hydrocyanic salts" Hirt provided to Kramer for
the killings. Already lined with white tiles and kept cool by blocks of ice,
the SS works doctorate named the site "Bauwerk 10" or building site
10.36 The adaptation of the building was completed between August 3 and 12,
1943.37
The wall of the chamber was perforated below and to
the right of the peep-hole. A metal pipe was passed through, with the inside
end opening into a small porcelain basin, and the outside wnd consisting of a
1.5 litre fullel equipped with a tap flow and safety control. According to a
plan drawn up when the camp was liberated, it seems that a protective housing
was installed, hiding the equipment from view… Kramer proceeded as described in
his 2nd deposition of the 6 December 1945. In fact, there was no other way to
carry out the operation. Water poured into the funnel flowed onto a substance
previously placed in the basin, triggering the release of hydrocyanic gas
("Gas Blausäure") .38
As knowledge of the camp spread to the United States,
so did the awareness of Hirt's victims, according to The Simon Wiesenthal
Center and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Nuremberg IMT (International Military Tribunal)
records indicate that an assistant to Dr. Hirt secretly noted the numbers
tattooed on the arms of the 86 victims, making their identification possible.39
The Arrival of Hirt's Victims at
Natzweiler-Struthof
Although there is little information regarding the
time gap between June 15, 1943 when Dr. Bruno Berger completed his part of the
record-keeping and the time of the arrival of the prisoners from Auschwitz to
Natzweiler-Struthof, the records that are available indicated that the 2 month
gap took place during the quarantine of prisoners during the typhus outbreak at
Auschwitz. Once it was considered that the prisoners could be transported, they
were moved to Natzweiler-Struthof in August of 1943. Joseph Kramer, commandant
of Natzweiler-Struthof, recalled, "during the month of August 1943, I
received from the Supreme S.S. Commandant in Berlin an order to accept about 80
prisoners from Auschwitz. I was to get in touch with Professor Hirt." 40
Once the prisoners did arrive, we have a clear account
of the events that followed given at the Military Tribunal in Strasbourg by
Joseph Kramer. Kramer was instructed to meet Hirt at the Institute of Anatomy.
During their meeting, Hirt provided Kramer with instructions to gas the convoy
using crystals Hirt supplied for their "treatment." There is some
debate as to the exact contents of the flask given to Kramer by Hirt, but it
usually falls within two possible answers:
Either the flask provided by Hirt, with a capacity of
about 250 ml, contained an inert combination of sodium or potassium cyanide
thoroughly mixed with a crystalline acid, such as citric, oxalic or tartic
acid, these being two agents that react with one another only in an aqueous
medium. Or the flask contained calcium cyanide, which has the peculiarity of
decomposing in water with hydrocyanic acid release. It would be possible to
determine exactly what substance was used by complicated calculations, based on
the volume of the gas chamber (approximately 20m cubed), the quantity used (1/3
or ¼ of 250 ml), and the expected HCN release, as a function of the amount of
water added, needed to bring the room's atmosphere rapidly up to a lethal
concentration for man.41
During his conversation with Hirt, Kramer was also
told he was to divide the bodies into smaller groups to be delivered directly
to Hirt following the gassings.42
One evening, about nine o-clock, the eighty prisoners
arrived. I led about fifteen women to the gas chamber. I told them they were
going to be 'disinfected.' With the help of some of the S.S. guards, I got them
completely undressed and pushed them into the gas chamber. When I closed the
door they began to scream. I put some of the crystals that Hirt had given me
into the funnel above the observation window. I would watch everything that was
going on inside through it. The women continued to breathe for half a minute
and then fell to the floor. I turned on the ventilation, and when I opened the door
they were lying dead on the ground, full of shit. I told some of the male S.S.
nurses to put the bodies in a truck and take them to the Institute of Anatomy
at 5:30 the next morning.43
Following the initial gassing, the same procedure was
repeated with four or five more groups over a period of three nights.44 In
total, 86 people would fall victim to Kramer's gassings. It should be noted
that the discrepancy in numbers by multiple sources (86 versus 87 bodies) was
due to an incident that took place at Natzweiler-Struthof. As the victims were
being herded into the gas chamber, one prisoner resisted and was shot by an SS
officer. Due to the pistol's bullet wound, the body was not sent to Strasbourg
with the others because it was considered "spoiled."45
Extract from interrogation of
Josef Kramer by Major Jadin, military investigative judge with the Military
Tribunal in Strasbourg on the 26 July 1945:
'As soon as I locked the door, they started to
scream..Once the door was locked, I placed a fixed quantity of the salts in a
funnel attached below and to the right of the peep-hole....