Shownotes Transcript
Part 1: Hitler's Hell for Women During World War II, a large underground resistance movement swept through Poland. These underground resistance groups would attempt to sabotage and defy the Nazi regime by providing information to intelligence agencies or intercepting and disrupting German supply lines. They were ultimately responsible for saving more Jewish lives than any other organization or government.
Being a hero, however, is never a safe job, and a group of female Polish activists had a particularly gruesome journey. These activists were captured by the Gestapo, the official secret police of Nazi Germany, and sent to prisons in Lublin and Warsaw. After spending several months in these prisons, they were transported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, otherwise known as Hitler's Hell for Women.
This women's only concentration camp was run by one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, named SS Chief Heinrich Himmler. Initially, this concentration camp was used as a show camp, which Himmler would show to the International Red Cross to prove that the prisoners were treated humanely.
Ravensbruck, to all appearances, was a charming camp decorated with beautiful roads that were lined with trees, flowers sprouted in the window boxes, and bird cages were scattered across the camp. The beauty, however, was nothing more than a facade. Hidden within and weaved throughout the confines of charming Ravensbruck were dark, terrifying secrets. The female inmates of Ravensbruck were far from humanely treated.
and they fought to survive every single day. These women came from over 20 different nations, and this diverse group banded together to help each other get through the horrors of Hitler's hell for women. They organized education classes, shared food and clothing, organized parties and get-togethers for the children, and cared for the sick. While every woman in this concentration camp suffered,
the 74 young female Polish activists were subjected to an even darker layer of Hitler's hell for women. These women came to be known as the Ravensbruck Rabbits. Part 2: Heinrich Himmler and Dr. Karl Gebhardt Heinrich Himmler was a patriotic agriculturalist who dreamt of serving as an officer in his childhood.
In 1925, he quit his job at a manure processing factory near Munich, joined the Nazi party and began working his way up the ranks. Himmler dedicated his life to the Nazi party. And five years after joining, he was appointed as the leader of the SS, a group that served as Hitler's personal bodyguards. He took it upon himself to expand the SS, which immediately began increasing in size.
After Hitler gained power, Himmler established the Third Reich's first concentration camp at Dachau and was eventually appointed assistant chief of the Gestapo. This promotion allowed him to assert control over the police forces of the entire Reich. Heinrich Himmler grew to be the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, right above Adolf Hitler.
The man who once studied agriculture and worked at a manure processing factory was now one of the most dangerously influential Nazis of the Holocaust. In 1938, Himmler appointed a man named Dr. Karl Gebhardt as his personal physician. Prior to World War II, Gebhardt had studied medicine in Munich and, among other things, was active in the volunteer corps the Upland Alliance.
Before the young doctor joined the Nazi party, he had an established career in which he made significant contributions to the development of sports medicine. In 1935, a few years after joining the Nazi party, Gebhardt joined the SS and was appointed medical superintendent of a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, which he converted into an orthopedic clinic. The committed doctor established the first sports medicine clinic in Germany,
developed sports programs for disabled people and amputees, and served as the senior physician of the 1936 Summer Olympics. His success in the medical field contributed to his appointment as Heinrich Himmler's personal physician. And when World War II started, Gebhard served as the chief surgeon of the Reich.
Several years into the war, Heinrich Himmler ordered Dr. Gebhardt to do an emergency operation on another powerful member of the Nazi party: Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich was a high-ranking SS official, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, and a principal architect of the Holocaust. He is often regarded as the darkest figure within the Nazi regime. Adolf Hitler himself proudly referred to Heydrich as "the man with the iron heart."
Reinhardt had suffered severe wounds from an anti-tank grenade that required intensive surgery, which Dr. Gebhardt dutifully performed. Despite successful surgery, Heydrich developed a fever in his early stages of recovery. In an attempt to save the loyal and influential Nazi member, Adolf Hitler's personal physician, Theodor Morel, recommended administering an early antibiotic called sulfonamide.
Gebhardt refused these suggestions, believing sulfa drugs to be ineffective and unnecessary for Heydrich's recovery. Just eight days later, on June 4th, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich died of sepsis. Hitler was incensed at the loss of the man with the iron heart and blamed Dr. Gebhardt for his death.
This paved the path to some of the Holocaust's lesser known horrors as Dr. Gebhardt, determined to shed himself of blame, stepped into the role of the man with the iron heart. Part Three: The First Rabbit It was February 17, 1941, around 7:30 a.m., when Wanda Wojcickiowna was arrested. A civilian interpreter and a strong, dark-haired man in a uniform with a scar on his chin approached her.
She asked why she would go with them, and the man in the uniform replied, "We are Gestapo." The uniformed officer led the young girl into the Gestapo building for an examination that ended in the middle of the night. Wanda was then taken into the basement where she was tied to a table and interrogated about her alleged affiliation with an anti-German organization.
The corner of the table dug into Wanda's skin as the dark-haired Gestapo fired questions at her and hit her repeatedly on the back and feet with his whip. When the officer with the scar on his chin was done interrogating the girl for the night, he untied her and dragged her to a dark cell with a cement floor where the prisoner slept on boards and pairs. The investigation continued relentlessly for two days.
when it was finally over. Young, battered Wanda was packed into a tiny prison cell with 22 other prisoners that shared six beds. The prisoners were given 25 grams of bread and half a liter of barley soup each day for food and were released from their dank, crowded cell only once a day for a few minutes to use the toilet.
Otherwise, there was one small bucket in the cell that often overflowed with feces and another small bucket filled with water for washing, both of which were shared by all 23 prisoners in the cell. During her time at this prison, Wanda spent two weeks in a small, damp cell in the basement with eight others. The cell had cement beds and was situated next to the toilets. At one point, she was placed in a cell that had 57 prisoners already crammed in,
all sharing one bucket as a toilet. Wanda was imprisoned for seven months before she was removed and transported with 154 other women to Ravensbruck concentration camp and given the number 7709 for identification. The young girl arrived with 400 other female Polish resistance activists. All of them had just been transported from prisons in Lublin.
From September 1941 to March 1942, Wanda worked at the concentration camp through the winter, doing hard manual labor. Among other things, she dug ditches in frozen ground and carried dirt, stones, and cement in slings that weighed over 100 pounds.
Additionally, she spent copious amounts of time sewing large straw boots for the Sentinels. In March, she worked in the Sänitetschlager, which was a workshop where huge sheets of triple paper were made to carry the wounded. At this workshop, Wanda's job was to roll up hundreds of pounds of paper. The excessive amounts of heavy lifting and muscle strain caused the lymph glands in Wanda's left armpit to become inflamed.
The camp doctor Oberhauser treated the inflammation, which involved cutting Wanda's arm in two places without any form of anesthesia. As soon as the resulting wound was healed enough for Wanda to work, she was back in the workshop rolling paper until the end of summer. On July 27th, 1942, a month and a half after Reinhard Heydrich's death, Wanda and the large group of women she arrived at Ravensbruck with were called to the Commandment Office building.
None of them knew why they were there. Some optimistically thought they'd be shipped to Switzerland, while others were certain it was for a max execution. A group of camp doctors, including Dr. Carl Gebhardt, keenly observed the group of women as they were ordered to form ranks and expose their legs. Wanda calmly complied as the doctors walked down the ranks, looking only at the legs of the prisoners.
The examination abruptly ended, and the women were told to go back to their blocks with no explanation of why they were summoned. Two days later, the same group of women was called to the district hospital, but this time, only 10 young girls, aged 16 and older, were examined. The examination consisted of parading naked in front of Dr. Rosenthal as he examined their arms and legs.
The following day, the 10 girls that had been examined the day prior were summoned to the hospital. It was still unknown why they were being called for examinations, what the doctors were looking for, and why those 10 girls specifically were selected. Wanda, who was the youngest of the 10 at 16 years old, was sure they were going to be executed. At the hospital, the 10 girls were bathed in pleasantly warm water,
they'd all but forgotten what it was like to bathe and properly wash themselves. After the group was clean, they were ordered to go to bed. The beds in the hospital were neatly made with clean sheets, which was a luxury that most of the girls had not seen in many months. Drowsy from the warm bath, Wanda followed orders and pulled back the clean sheets to lay down in the enticing hospital bed. Before the girls drifted off,
A nurse came in and administered an injection of light yellow liquid into their right thighs. When Wanda received the injection, her heart rate increased and she grew extremely weak and nauseous. She struggled to get up because she was so dizzy. A few minutes later, a nurse came in with a razor and shaved their legs up their knees. The girls were then left alone to slip into an uneasy slumber, wondering why they were there or what was going to happen to them.
The following day, the group was promptly sent back to the block to go about their day as usual. Wanda was still suffering from the nauseating effects of the mystery injection as she left the hospital and returned to work, where she ultimately fainted during a numerical assembly. The side effects eventually wore off and the girls continued with their lives at the concentration camp. Three days later, they were brought back to the hospital in the early morning and given the same injection again.
One by one, the girls were lifted into wheelchairs by nurses as the injection made them so weak that they could not get up on their own. Wanda was wheeled down to the corridor in front of the operating room and was given another injection that quickly took effect. Before young Wanda realized what was happening, she fell unconscious as the nurse wheeled her into the operating room. Later that evening, Wanda woke with searing pain in her head and leg, which was wrapped in a cast up to her knee.
Unaware of what had happened to her leg, the young girl began to panic. As the night went on, Wanda developed a fever, which added to her pain and misery. She was eventually given a morphine injection to dull the excruciating pain. But even with the morphine, the pain was too intense to sleep. By morning, a rotten smell radiated out from the cast on Wanda's leg, which had swollen to double the size, causing the plaster to cut into her wounded ankle.
Five other young women in the group woke up with their legs in a similar condition shortly after Wanda. Still, none of them knew why they were there or what happened to their legs. In the first week of recovery, they weren't given anything to eat, and three days passed before young Wanda had a sheet yanked over her head to have her wound dressed and the bandages changed. The dressing procedure was excruciatingly painful.
Several days later, Wanda's fever hadn't broken and her leg was still swollen and red. A brown, smelly liquid began trickling out from under the plaster cast. In their second week of recovery, the six girls were fed only pureed vegetables. Their infected, pus-filled wounds aggressively emanated a repugnant odor that resembled the smell of rotten meat.
Anyone who entered their room would immediately start gagging and back out to the open windows. By the end of the second week, Wanda's fever had slightly dropped, but the pain in her leg raged on. Her cast was completely removed, revealing a large green and yellow bone wound above the ankle on her right leg. An obedient female doctor, Dr. Oberheuser, examined and inspected their legs every morning.
One of the six girls asked why they had been operated on and Dr. Oberheuser replied that they should have stronger legs from it. When they asked another woman the same question, they were told that it was because they were the prettiest women in the Lublin transport. The group of girls recovering from surgically infected wounds felt that their questions were dismissed. Part four, the mastermind.
The rabbits who managed to survive would later found out that their operations were experimental in nature and that Dr. Carl Gebhardt was the mastermind behind their operations. There were two groups of experiments. One group of rabbits was operated on to test the efficiency of the sulfonamide drugs.
The other group was operated on for more exploratory purposes, such as to study the process of regeneration of bones, muscles and nerves, or the possibilities of transplanting bones from one person to another. After Reinhard Heydrich's death was blamed on Gebhardt's refusal to use the antibiotic sulfonamide, the bitter doctor was determined to prove that sulfonamide was ineffective as a result.
He set out to do experiments on the prisoners at the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Experiments that were meant to simulate battle wounds that would maim and cripple healthy humans. Thus, the girls that were operated on were selected because they were deemed the strongest and healthiest. In the experiments, subjects would have their surgical wounds deliberately infected with bacteria, sawdust, rusty nails, and slivers of glass.
For these operations, an incision would be made on the leg, filled with an infectant, and sewn up. As the experiments went on, increasingly more potent bacteria cultures were used such as Streptococcus, Gas gangrene, and Tetanus. In some cases, sawdust, glass shards, and rusty nails were sewn into the wound and used in conjunction with the bacteria cultures.
In addition to experiments intended to prove the ineffectiveness of sulfonamide, Gebhard also designed other radical surgical experiments for exploratory purposes. These were intended to see what happened when parts of bone, nerve, and muscle were removed or when limbs were amputated and transplanted. One inmate at Ravensbruck, a Polish physician, was in charge of taking x-rays after each operation.
The inmate described the surgical procedures for bone operations and muscle operations in their testimony, stating that typically, for bone operations, the shin bones of both legs were broken with hammers on the operating table. After both bones had been exposed by an operation first, then the bones were set with the aid of clamps or without clamps.
The wounds were sewn shut, and the extremities were put into plaster casts. And after a few days, the plaster cast was taken off, and the bone extremities were left to heal without the protection of a plaster cast. For muscle operations, pieces of muscle were excised from the lower extremities, both from the thigh and shin.
The victims were operated on several times, removing larger and larger pieces of muscle the second and third times, causing larger and larger holes and greater weakness of the extremities. Initially, Dr. Gebhardt's experiments were conducted on male prisoners at the Sachenhausen concentration camp, but Gebhardt felt that the male prisoners complained too much and were difficult to control. He suspected that female prisoners would submit quietly to his experimentation.
So in July of 1942, Dr. Gebhardt began selecting young girls at Ravensbruck to be his lab rats. The girls were referred to as rabbits because they were used as human laboratory animals. Ultimately, 74 young, healthy Polish girls and women were selected to be experimented on. Five of them died after their operations, and six were executed after surgery because their role as experimental material had ended.
63 of these young women survived. All of them were subjected to extremely invasive and inhumane operations that rendered them sick, crippled, and mutilated. Part 5: The Road to Recovery In mid-August, three weeks after her operation, Wanda was released from the hospital with an open and aggressively infected wound. The young rabbit was sent to a block where she had to sleep on a mattress without sheets.
The festering gash in her leg, which radiated heat from her body's attempts at fighting off the infection, would leave puddles of pus on the bare mattress while she slept. This went on for three months before her wound started to heal. It wasn't until December that Wanda was able to even attempt to walk, and still, she moved with a distinct limp due to the residual pain in her leg.
The resilient rabbit endured another several months of pain and labored limping as the wound inflicted by Dr. Gebhardt continued to heal. In the spring of 1943, Wanda finally started walking with more ease, but her right leg was weak and continued to ache. Her newly redeveloped ability to walk meant she was forced to go back to work. Fortunately, Wanda's job was to knit, and she was allowed to do light work unless she was needed elsewhere.
At one point, she was needed to unload large stones from a ship. The task proved to be too intense, and while young Wanda was moving heavy stones, she had her first heart attack. A Czech doctor working in the camp hospital determined that the experimental operation she underwent had caused her heart muscle to weaken, and it wasn't fully healed when she was moving the large stones. After surviving her heart attack, Wanda continued healing and working at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp.
which had a consistent stream of new inmates arriving, and as the number of inmates increased, the living conditions continuously worsened. The camp was too small to reasonably accommodate the growing population, and the living quarters became infested with lice, fleas, bedbugs, German cockroaches, and scabies, among other disease-ridden bugs and rodents. As time dragged on and chances of survival decreased,
Wanda and the other rabbits continued dredging down the long road to full recovery in hopes of at least living long enough to tell their story. Part Six: Spreading the Word In February of 1943, roughly seven months after the experiment started, the rabbits attempted to rebel against the operations.
They wrote up a strongly worded petition protesting the experimental operations in which they pointed out that the international law forbade the performance of operations, even on political prisoners. This petition did not bode well and the girls were punished for their act of rebellion. Regardless, they continued to seek refuge from the brutality. After their written petition failed, the rabbits attempted to spread information about the experiments to the outside world.
Even though the inmates at concentration camps were largely isolated and forbidden from interacting with those outside the camp, a few of them managed to intermittently stay in contact with their families. Two rabbits, Bogomila Jazowick and Krysia Chizh, were some of the few that had contact with their families. The girls knew they could not explicitly disclose their stories in their letters home.
so they used urine to write hidden messages in the margins about their experiences as subjects of Dr. Gebhardt's gruesome experiments. The young victims were presented with a potential opportunity for rescue as Bogumila's uncle was in the Polish Home Army. Fortunately for the Rabbits, her uncle was able to successfully reveal the hidden message in the letter and used army couriers to inform the Polish government and the International Red Cross.
As a result, Bogumila and Ciz's hidden messages were broadcasted on a clandestine radio station that operated from a small village in Buckinghamshire, UK. The best chance at intervention, however, was through the International Committee of the Red Cross. This group had received the report about the hidden messages along with various other reports about the grotesque crimes against humanity that were freely taking place at Ravensbruck. Unfortunately,
The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Max Huber, happened to be a close friend of Dr. Carl Gebhardt, the designer and executor of the heinous experiments. To protect his friend, Huber prevented the Red Cross from investigating the inhumane criminal activity. As such, the rabbits were, once again, left to fend for themselves.
This task became even more daunting as the war took a turn for the worst for the Nazis, who feared the information about the camps and experiments were being leaked to the outside world. Their solution was a mass elimination of human evidence of their medical experimentation. Nonetheless, these young women were determined to survive and displayed unprecedented resilience and selflessness as they looked after one another, even when they were suffering through dangerous infections themselves.
The other inmates at the camp, who struggled to survive the grueling conditions of Ravensbruck, also did what they could to help the rabbits spread their story and avoid execution. Wanda, the first rabbit to undergo an operation, stated, "We could find it easier to die if we could be certain that news of our deaths would reach the world outside." As a result, the young women were hell-bent on documenting the brutal experiments.
To do this, they used a secret camera that had been smuggled into the concentration camp to take photographs of their mutilated legs. The camera film with photo evidence of the experiments was hidden in their barrack as a backup means of sharing the tales of the Ravensbruck Rabbits if none of them managed to survive. As the war moved closer to ending,
an agreement known as "Project White Buses" was made between Heinrich Himmler and Count Volker Bernadotte, the president of the Swedish Red Cross. Under Project White Buses, 7,500 women were liberated from Ravensbruck and transported to Sweden. The Ravensbruck Rabbits were specifically excluded from this liberation as they were living proof of medical crimes.
because they were forced to stay behind and threatened with execution. The rabbits gave the film with pictures of their mutilated legs to a fellow prisoner, Jermaine Tillian, who was released from the camp under Project White Buses. Part 7: The Escape When young Wanda discovered that she had been selected for execution, she and the other young victims devised and executed a last-minute escape plan.
The clever rabbits concealed their legs, wrote false tattoo numbers on their arms, and hid amongst the other inmates at Ravensbruck who risked their lives trying to help the young women evade execution. On February 13th, 1945, Wanda, using a fake name, hid in a group of women being transported to Auschwitz. And on that day, the young rabbit escaped Ravensbruck. Her simple escape plan succeeded and she evaded her execution
But the successful escape was not the end of young Wanda's struggles. Until the war was over and the inmates at the concentration camps were released in May of 1945, Wanda was subjected to the most horrible conditions she'd yet endured. She spent those last three months after her escape in the Neustadt-Gliebe concentration camp, where she was crammed into a small room with 60 or more women.
There were no beds or blankets, so they were forced to sleep in rows on the bare floor, which was too small for them to even straighten their legs. The tight quarters and sleeping arrangements also led to rampant amounts of lice, which crawled through their hair and laid eggs at night as they slept. For food, the inmates were given between a sixth and a tenth of a kilogram of moldy bread once a day, as well as a quarter of a liter of dried turnip soup, cooked without any salt.
Due to the lack of food, Wanda developed starvation diarrhea, which she endured until May 2nd, 1945, when the war ended. At that point, the inmates were released and the first and youngest Ravensbruck rabbit survived to tell the story of the gruesome experiments and crimes against humanity. While Wanda escaped to a different concentration camp, many of the other rabbits remained hidden at Ravensbruck for the last few months of the war.
The night before their execution, the young victims were up late writing goodbye letters when the Ravensbrück inmates that were not at risk of execution came up with a plan to hide the rabbits. This plan went into action immediately as a group of Russian prisoners shut down the electrical grid, which gave the rabbits an opportunity to hide. Some rabbits hid under bunkers and in attic spaces amid the pervasive darkness.
Other rabbits exchanged numbers with fellow inmates, who also helped a different group of rabbits sneak into the typhus block, which they hid among the dying inmates. The Nazi staff never went into the typhus block out of fear of contracting the disease, which made this the safest hiding spot. One of the surviving rabbits recounting their experience said, "We dug holes under the blocks and squeezed ourselves under there. We could hear the dogs searching for us. It was terrifying.
The entire camp helped us, hid us, protected us. Their plan succeeded and the rabbits evaded execution that morning and managed to stay hidden until the camp was liberated. Between the inhumane and intentionally unsanitary operations and the scheduled executions, 63 of the 64 rabbits miraculously managed to escape almost certain death.
These victims were all young and healthy when they arrived at Ravensbruck, and many of them left with permanent disabilities and medical conditions. The scars that were left on their bodies and in their minds served as daily reminders, not only of what these young women went through, but also of their strength and resilience that kept them alive.
several of the surviving rabbits testified about the experiments, which led to the convictions of Dr. Carl Gebhardt and the other primary doctors involved in the experiments. Dr. Gebhardt was convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes for which he was sentenced to death and hanged on June 2nd, 1948. Part Eight: Conclusion In the years following the war, the editor-in-chief of the Saturday Review collected donations from the American public
These donations were put towards reconstructive surgeries and treatments for any physical damage or medical conditions that the surviving rabbits were still suffering from. Over time, the rabbits continued to share the stories of their experiences at Ravensbruck. A few of these women are still alive today. Wanda Wojcik-Poltauska is one of them.
Many years after the war, Fritz Fischer, an SS doctor who partook in experimenting on the rabbits, reached out to Wanda asking for her forgiveness. Wanda relayed her response in an interview: "I told him there was nothing I could forgive him for. He would have to seek forgiveness from God." And thus, the group of courageous women that risked their lives to fight against the Nazi regime as part of the Polish underground resistance were forced to battle the beast face to face.
Wanda proudly proclaimed, "The whole team, the team of scouts from school joined the conspiracy. I made an oath that I was ready to die for my country." These women repeatedly looked death directly in the face and repeatedly refused to give in, choosing instead to push through the excruciating pain of their surgically infected wounds through sickness, starvation, and heart attacks, and through the unforgiving conditions at Ravensbruck concentration camp.
These intrepid women chose survival above all else, and ultimately, their decision ensured that justice was brought against Carl Gebhardt and others that partook in his experiments and allowed them to tell the tale of how they became the Ravensbruck Rabbits.