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Throwing Slaves Overboard to Drown and Other Dark Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan July 26, 2020 35 min

Plateau - Slave ship — Slave ship hold. History Channel

18. Dark and Horrific Experiments

The liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp, upon whose inmates Dr. Schreiber conducted horrific experiments. Pletz

Dr. Walter Schreiber experimented upon prisoners in Auschwitz by freezing them in order to examine the effects of extreme cold. He conducted other sadistic medical experiments on female prisoners in Ravensbrueck concentration camp by cutting open their legs, deliberately infecting them with gangrene, then giving them bone transplants.

The subjects of his experiments usually suffered slow and agonizing deaths. At war’s end, Schreiber was captured by the Red Army and taken to the USSR, where he was held in the infamous Lubyanka prison in poor conditions. His conditions improved when his captors discovered his true identity, and the Soviets put him to work providing medical care to high-ranking German prisoners.

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.