Karl Gebhardt, Nazi's Killing Doctor: Attribute to Ravensbrück and Auschwitz Victims

Born 23.11.1897 in The Hague, died 2.6. 1948. Surgeon. Prof. Dr. med. Medical Superintendent of the SS Hohenlychen Sanatorium, Consulting Surgeon of the Waffen-SS, Chief Surgeon in the Staff of the Reich Physician SS and Police. Defendant in the Medical Trial.

Gebhardt studied medicine in Munich starting in 1919. After two years as an unpaid assistant physician he received a post as an intern at the Surgical Clinic of the University of Munich, under Sauerbruch in 1924 and later under Lexer. There he gained his habilitation in 1932. In 1935, he switched to Berlin, where he was appointed associate professor.

In 1936 he distinguished himself in his post as a head of the Medical Department of the Reich Academy for Physical Exercises as senior physician of the Olympic Games. 

In 1937 he became chair holder for orthopedic surgery at the University of Berlin. In his student days Gebhardt had been a supporter of the national-counter-rcvolutionary movement and was active among other things in the Volunteer Corps "the Upland Alliance."

He joined the NSDAP on 1.5.1933 (No. 1,723,317). He began his SS career in 1935 as a medical superintendent of the Hohenlychen Sanatorium. In 1938 Hitler appointed him as his personal physician. In 1940 he became Consulting Surgeon of the Waffen-SS and President of the German Red Cross. Starting in 1943 Gebhardt was active in the Reich Physician SS and Police, Ernst Grawitz's Staff as a Chief Surgeon. He rose to the rank of SS Major General and Major General of the Waffen-SS.
Due to his top position in the SS, Gebhardt was involved in a series of experiments on humans which were carried out on concentration camp prisoners.

He could pursue his personal research interests as a specialist in reconstructive surgery as the main coordinator of the surgical experiments carried out on prisoners of the Ravensbrück Women's Concentration Camp, in which he attempted to defend the principles of invasive war surgery against the controversial innovations of the sulfanilamide treatment of war injuries. 

Gebhardt was condemned to death by the American Military Tribunal No. I in August 1947 and executed on 2.6.1948.

Otherwise, Twenty-three German doctors and scientists, one a woman, sit in the dock of Nuermberg court during their arraignment on charges of inhuman experimentation on inmates of Nazi concentration camps. 
Left to right, front row: Karl Brandt, Siegfried Handloser, Paul Rostock, Oskar Schroeder, Karl Genzken, Karl Gebhardt, Kurt Blome, Joachim Mrugowsky, Rudolf Brandt, Helmut Poppendick, and Wolfram Sievers. Left to right, back row: Gerhard Rose, Siegfried Ruff, Victor Brack, Hans-Wolfram Romberg, Hermann Becker-Reyseng, George August Weltz, Konrad Schaefer, Waldemar Hoven, Wilhelm Beiglbock, Adolf Pororry, Herta Oberheuser, and Fritz Fischer.


The Auschwitz Concentration Camp
The Auschwitz concentration camp complex was the largest of its kind established by the Nazi regime. It included three main camps, all of which deployed incarcerated prisoners at forced labor. One of them also functioned for an extended period as a killing center. The camps were located approximately 37 miles west of Krakow, near the prewar German-Polish border in Upper Silesia, an area that Nazi Germany annexed in 1939 after invading and conquering Poland.



The SS authorities established three main camps near the Polish city of Oswiecim: Auschwitz I in May 1940; Auschwitz II (also called Auschwitz-Birkenau) in early 1942; and Auschwitz III (also called Auschwitz-Monowitz) in October 1942.
Commanders of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex were: SS Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Hoess from May 1940 until November 1943; SS Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Liebehenschel from November 1943 until mid-May 1944; and SS Major Richard Baer from mid-May 1944 until January 27, 1945. Commanders of Auschwitz-Birkenau while it was independent (November 1943 until November 1944) were SS Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Hartjenstein from November 1943 until mid-May 1944 and SS Captain Josef Kremer from mid-May to November 1944. Commandant of Monowitz concentration camp from November 1943 until January 1945 was SS Captain Heinrich Schwarz.
Trains arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau frequently with transports of Jews from virtually every country in Europe occupied by or allied to Germany. These transports arrived from 1942 to the end of summer 1944. The breakdown of deportations from individual countries, given in approximate figures, is: Hungary: 426,000; Poland: 300,000; France: 69,000; Netherlands: 60,000; Greece: 55,000; Bohemia and Moravia: 46,000; Slovakia: 27,000; Belgium: 25,000; Yugoslavia: 10,000; Italy: 7,500; Norway: 690; other (including concentration camps): 34,000.
Totally, approximately 1.1 million Jews were deported to Auschwitz. SS and police authorities deported approximately 200,000 other victims to Auschwitz, including 140,000-150,000 non-Jewish Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and 25,000 others (Soviet civilians, Lithuanians, Czechs, French, Yugoslavs, Germans, Austrians, and Italians).
  
Ravensbrück Women's Concentration Camp
In May 1939, the SS opened Ravensbrück in North of Germany, near Furstenberg. Ravensbrück is the largest Nazi concentration camp established for women. Over 92,000 women had been incarcerated in Ravensbrück by the time Soviet troops liberated the camp in 1945.
At the end of March 1945, the SS decided to transfer the archives of the camp and the machines of the workshops to a safer place. On April 27 and 28, 1945, they ordered the woman still able to walk to leave the camp in a Death March. Only 3,000 exhausted or ill women were left in the camp, as well as 300 men.

Every two or three weeks, the SS commandant of the camp Suhren and the SS doctors Schwarzhuber and Pflaum selected the ill or weak women for the "transport to Mittweida". The women had to lift their skirts over their hips and run in front of the SS guards and doctors. Women with swollen feet, injuries, or scars or those simply too ill or too weak to run were immediately selected for a "recovery" period in Uckermark.



This "recovery" period consisted in fact of being jailed in sealed barracks without medical care and food until death. But most of the selected women never arrived in the Uckermark "Youth Camp". They were gassed in special vans transformed in mobile gas chambers. The exhaust pipe of the engine was directly connected to the van's freight compartment, and gassing was done in 15-20 minutes. 
One of those gas vans was a captured sanitary truck from the Dutch Army. Others trucks were sealed German freight trucks, often named by the prisoners "Green Mina". The so-called "transport to Mittweida" was an SS code name for gassing. "Mittweida" was supposed to be a place where prisoners could recover from their slave work. Of course, it was an imaginary place and "Mittweida" was just a synonym for "gas chamber".

Hundreds of children were incarcerated in Ravensbrück. The cruelty and the sadism of the Nazis against the children had no limits, and the fate of those little victims was absolutely awful. Children and babies were in fact sentenced to death before they were born. Newborn babies were immediately separated from their mother and drowned or thrown into a sealed room until they died. Most of the time, this was done in front of the mother. There are dozen of testimonies about children thrown alive into the crematory, buried alive, poisoned, strangled, or drowned in Ravensbrück. 
Several children were also used for sadistic "medical" experiments. Hundreds of little girls, sometimes only 8, were sterilized by direct exposure of genitals to X-rays. In the early months of Ravensbrück, children were immediately killed. The SS doctor Rosenthal and his girlfriend Gerda Quernheim aborted by force pregnant women, and this was often done using bestial methods. Later, newborn children were sometimes allowed to survive, but due to the lack of food and the awful sanitary conditions, these babies died very soon.

Only the strongest children could survive. Those children had to work day and night with the women in the workshop and help them with the heaviest labor. Only very few of these children survived the war.
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3 Response to "Karl Gebhardt, Nazi's Killing Doctor: Attribute to Ravensbrück and Auschwitz Victims"

  1. Eddie says:

    Karl Gebhardt was never Hitler's personal physician. He was not the president of the Red Cross until 23 april 1945 after Grawitz had killed himself. His death sentence was delivered in november, not august. The reason Gebhardt joined the party and then the SS was because he became close friend to Heinrich Himmler. Many other things are wrong with the article. You should correct them, look up sources, and write the sources in the article.

    Unknown says:

    The execution of gebhardt and brandt has all the elements of victors justice. Ultimately brandt convicted on basis of negligence in not stopping experiments on allied pows and civilians.

    The judges admitted that euthanasia as reich law could not be criticised as passed by a sovereign state. They admitted brandy's sincerity in applying it to ease suffering yet he was hung

    Unknown says:

    The execution of gebhardt and brandt has all the elements of victors justice. Ultimately brandt convicted on basis of negligence in not stopping experiments on allied pows and civilians.

    The judges admitted that euthanasia as reich law could not be criticised as passed by a sovereign state. They admitted brandy's sincerity in applying it to ease suffering yet he was hung

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