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Evil Doctors and Scientists From World War II

Khalid Elhassan January 15, 2021 33 min

Second Battle of Champagne - Second Battle of Ypres — French soldiers wearing gas masks in WWI trenches, waiting for an order to launch an attack. Flickr

10. This Doctor Froze Live Human Subjects, and Deliberately Infected Others With Gangrene

Ravensbruck concentration camp, upon whose inmates Walter Schreiber conducted horrific medical experiments. All That Is Interesting

During World War II, Dr. Walter Schreiber conducted a series of cruel experiments on prisoners in the infamous Auschwitz concentration and death camp. His evil practices included freezing his victims in order to examine the effects of extreme cold. He conducted other sadistic medical experiments on female prisoners in Ravensbruck concentration camp. They included cutting open the victims’ legs and deliberately infecting them with gangrene, then giving them bone transplants. The subjects of his experiments usually died – but only after suffering prolonged agonies.

At war’s end, Dr. Schreiber was captured by the Red Army and was taken to the Soviet Union. There, he was held in the infamous Lubyanka prison in poor conditions. His conditions improved when his captors discovered his true identity and put him to work providing medical care to high-ranking German prisoners. He was produced as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials to testify against Hitler’s second in command, Herman Goering, who had been in charge of Germany’s biological weapons development.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.