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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

26. This Evil Doctor Fed Prisoners Used Clothes

Dr. Walter Schieber, from a British propaganda card. Psy War

Doctor Walter Schieber (1896 – 1960) was a chemist who worked in textile manufacturing in Germany between the world wars. When World War II began, he joined the Reich Ministry of Armaments and War Production. He held various positions, including Chief of Armaments Deliveries, and Head of the Central Office for Generators. He was also an SS member, and became an SS Brigadefuhrer – equivalent to an American brigadier general. He rose within the Ministry of Armaments’ hierarchy to become a deputy of its chief, Albert Speer, and head of the Armaments Supply Office. In 1943, Hitler awarded Schieber the War Merit Cross.

Newly arrived prisoners at Mauthausen concentration camp, bedraggled after surviving a week-long journey on open rail cars. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Schieber conducted some bizarre and needlessly cruel experiments on prisoners. In one evil experiment in Mauthausen concentration camp in 1943, he wanted to examine the impact of food shortage on slave laborers. So Schieber picked 150 slave workers, and instead of their usual watery broth, he gave them an artificial paste which he had personally designed, made up of used clothing. Not surprisingly, the experiment reached the obvious conclusion, that people can’t survive if you feed them used clothes. 116 of the 150 subjects died before the experiment ended.

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.