This fraudulent and sadistic Nazi doctor was executed in the same camp where he once worked
Sigmund Rascher’s grotesque career ended in fatal irony
Sigmund Rascher was working as an SS doctor in 1939 when he wrote to his boss, Heinrich Himmler, and requested human subjects for his experiments. Rascher was a member of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, and a medical doctor, who was researching the effect of a plant extract on cancer. He thought human subjects would be far better than rodents, and Himmler agreed, even though the two had met only a week prior. A study was begun at Dachau concentration camp.
It was just one of many such studies, ostensibly meant to build on a growing medical understanding of human maladies. Instead, the doctor’s work merely produced the suffering it purportedly sought to address and in so doing exposed the depravity of modernity. Like most atrocities of the Holocaust, Nazi medical experiments stood at the perverse intersection of racism, industrialization, and science.
A couple years after the cancer study, when Rascher became interested in the effects of altitude, he claimed monkeys were not adequate test subjects and again requested that Dachau prisoners be made available. They were. The experiments, conducted using an air force pressure chamber, were mostly fatal — prisoners were denied oxygen, as a pilot might be during freefall. When Himmler suggested that any human who survived them be spared a death sentence and given life imprisonment instead, Rascher disagreed. They were only Poles and Russians, he argued, there was no need to give them dispensation.
Among the most egregious of Rascher’s trials were “freezing experiments” to determine the body’s response to cold. Rascher again wrote to Himmler, who granted his request, and it wasn’t long before Rascher was submerging prisoners in ice baths to measure the duration and intensity of their death throes. Not all were killed; most of the experiments were meant to measure the rewarming process after hypothermia. Although one victim later testified that some prisoners were thrown into boiling water. Others were warmed, at Himmler’s suggestion, by being placed between two naked female prisoners, Romani women from the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück.
Rascher’s interest in the development of coagulants — thickening agents that might staunch the flow of blood on the battlefield — led him to create one made up of beet and apple pectin that he called Polygal. In a 1946 affidavit, Rascher’s uncle, Dr. Fritz Friedrich Karl Rascher, described a 1943 visit to his nephew at Dachau concentration camp. While Sigmund was away from his desk, Fritz read a report on a Polygal test the doctor had performed on prisoners. Four prisoners were executed and studied as they expired. The report described how one of them, a Russian, was “shot in the right shoulder from above by an SS man who stood on a chair. The bullet emerged near the spleen. It was described how the Russian twitched convulsively, then sat down on a chair and died after about twenty minutes.”
The doctor appeared to have not a shred of human compassion. He requested that the freezing experiments be moved to Auschwitz because there was more open space and they’d be less conspicuous, complaining that “the experimental subjects bellow (!) when they freeze severely.” He also, according to a 1988 Los Angeles Times article about his documents, wrote frequently to Himmler requesting “money, tax reductions, fresh fruit, furniture, fruit juices, slave servant girls and a new apartment.” In researching Rascher’s communications with Himmler, Major Leo Alexander, an aide to the chief counsel for the Nuremberg war crimes trials, noted Rascher’s “scrounging and chiseling nature,” his insistence that he get his way.
Rascher, who also collected human skin to make saddles, was one of Himmler’s darlings, in part because of a shared connection. Rascher’s wife, singer Karoline “Nini” Diehl, was a friend and probable ex-lover of Himmler’s. As Wolfgang Benz writes in Dachau Review: History of Nazi Concentration Camps Studies, Reports, Documents, “At regular intervals, the Reichsführer-SS had sent the Raschers parcels with all sorts of affectionate gifts, especially fruit, chocolate, and other rarities for the growing throng of children.” Diehl responded, sending Himmler letters and photos of the Rascher clan and ideas for the promotion of her husband’s career. According to Benz, Himmler was so taken of a series of photos of Raschers’ three sons that he “passed it on to the responsible authorities with the suggestion that it be printed in one of the SS-Leithefte designed for training purposes.”
The Raschers’ children may have appeared in Nazi propaganda, but the couple was hiding a treacherous secret. Their quickly growing brood actually consisted of children they’d kidnapped. It was strange, then, that Rascher often drew attention to his family by touting his 48-year-old wife’s super fertility. He thought he might curry even more favor with his superiors if he could tether his own procreative efforts to the building of the Aryan population, and even suggested to Himmler that Diehl serve as a subject for the study of extending women’s window for bearing children. While pretending to be pregnant with her fourth child, Diehl was arrested for attempted kidnapping, and it was soon discovered that the other three children were also not biologically hers. Rascher was also swiftly arrested as an accessory to all of the kidnappings, and for a series of other crimes, including the murder of his lab assistant. Himmler was angry and betrayed—particularly because the Raschers had so benefited from being in his good graces. Unsatisfied by criminal charges, he condemned Rascher to the punishment he likely feared most: He was sent to Buchenwald in 1944 to languish as a common prisoner.
In 1945, Rascher was moved to Dachau and executed by firing squad mere days before the American liberation of the camp. His unceremonious death, in the very place where he had cruelly extinguished so many innocent lives, was a testament to the recklessness and the ruthlessness of the Nazi leadership. According to firsthand account of his execution, the officer who carried it out on Himmler’s orders also kicked his corpse and called him a pig.
According to the affidavit from Sigmund’s uncle, Nini Diehl was also executed on Himmler’s orders.
Unlike the best known Nazi doctor, Joseph Mengele, whose experiments could be overdetermined and unsystematic, Rascher was thought to be meticulous, even obsessive about precision in his experiments and his reporting. That’s one reason why his research on hypothermia stood as valid science for almost a half century after the war ended, until 1990, when it was finally deemed unsound.
