Execution of Nazis who hanged 20 children on hooks & then called them “guinea pigs”
1939, a few months before the start of the Second World War, Nazi Germany. After approximately 304,000 Jews emigrated, only about 214,000 of them remain in the country. Six years of Nazi-sponsored legislation have marginalized and disenfranchised Germany’s Jewish citizenry and have expelled Jews from the professions and from commercial life. After the outbreak of the Second World War, which begins on 1 September 1939, Nazi anti-Jewish policy becomes even more radical and varies from country to country, including direct,
brutal occupation and reliance upon collaborating regimes. Especially vulnerable to Nazi persecution are children. While some are targeted on supposed racial grounds, others for biological reasons, such as patients with physical or mental disabilities, or because of their alleged resistance or political activities. By the end of the Second World War, as many as 1.5 million Jewish children alone will be murdered or die at the hands of Nazi officials or their collaborators. Among them are 20 children from various countries of German-occupied Europe
who will be killed on the night of 20 April 1945 because after they are used as human subjects in medical experiments at the Neuengamme concentration camp, their Nazi tormentors want to cover up their barbaric crimes, destroying all evidence. These children will be injected with morphine and then mercilessly hanged from hooks set into the wall. However, this atrocity will not remain unpunished, and the perpetrators will pay for this crime with their lives. The Nazis advocated killing children of “unwanted” or “dangerous” groups either
as part of the “racial struggle” or as a measure of preventative security. The Germans and their collaborators killed children for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks. Because children were generally too young to be used for forced labor, they became the first victims led to mass graves to be shot. Some however were not shot. Instead, German authorities often selected them, the elderly, ill, and disabled, for the first deportations to killing centers.
After their arrival, camp authorities at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other killing centers sent the vast majority of young Jewish children directly to the gas chambers. The German authorities also incarcerated a number of children in concentration camps and transit camps. SS physicians and medical researchers used a number of children, including twins, in concentration camps and killing centers like Auschwitz for medical experiments which often resulted in the deaths of the children. Another concentration camp where the Nazi
doctors conducted experiments on humans was the Neuengamme concentration camp. In the spring of 1944, Enno Lolling, the chief physician of all concentration camps, ordered one of Neuengamme’s barracks to be set aside for Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer’s secret medical experiments. Heissmeyer wanted to test how the body reacted to injections of tuberculosis bacilli and assess an antidote he developed. His experiments on about 30 Polish and Russian prisoners were largely unsuccessful, as most of them died. By the fall of 1944, Heissmeyer
requested the transfer of Jewish children to serve as “guinea pigs” for his reckless theories. Twenty Jewish children, aged between 5 -12, were brought to Neuengamme from Auschwitz at the end of November 1944. 10 boys and 10 girls from Auschwitz concentration camp were chosen by doctor Josef Mengele who asked the children: “Who wants to go and see their mother?” Most were from Poland, while others came from France, the Netherlands, Italy and Slovakia. The children were accompanied to Neuengamme by four female prisoners. Three of them – 2 Polish
nurses and one Hungarian pharmacist who also served as a nurse – were killed upon arrival at Neuengamme by the camp executioner Wilhelm Dreimann. The fourth woman, the Polish-born Jew named Paulina Trocki, was a doctor. She survived the war and later gave testimony in Jerusalem about what she had witnessed. Trocki said:” The transport was accompanied by an SS guard. There were 20 children, one female medical doctor and three nurses. The transport was in a separate carriage that was coupled on a normal train. Presented in this manner
it appeared to be an ordinary carriage. We had to take off the stars of David lest we attract any attention. To prevent people from approaching us they said it was a transport of people suffering from typhoid fever… The food was excellent; on that journey we were given chocolate and milk. After a two-day trip we arrived at Neuengamme at ten o’clock at night.” They were housed in the same barracks where the adult prisoners had been kept. After initial examinations, the children were infected with live tuberculosis bacilli. Their skin was cut,
and their wounds were rubbed with sputum containing the bacteria. After some time, under Heissmeyer’s supervision, their swollen glands were surgically removed from under their arms for examination. Each child underwent this painful procedure twice and the children were also photographed holding up their arm to show the surgical incision. The ordeal of these fever-ridden, weakened, and lonely children lasted for months. After the war when asked why he did not use guinea pigs, Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer responded, “For me there was no basic difference
between human beings and guinea pigs.” He then corrected himself saying: “Jews and guinea pigs”. By early spring 1945, it was clear that Germany had lost the war and the Nazis, in a rush to cover up their barbaric crimes, began destroying evidence. As part of this effort, victims of Heissmeyer’s experiments also had to disappear. Max Pauly, the commandant of the Neuengamme concentration camp received the order from the head administrator of the Nazi concentration camps – the SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, which stated that Heissmeyer department be “disbanded”
and all children and caregivers be murdered so that no witnesses to this crime would survive. Pauly passed the order on to doctor Alfred Trzebinski who was responsible for the children’s ongoing medical treatment. The killing took place on the night of 20 April 1945 in the former school building at Bullenhuser Damm, which served as a subcamp of Neuengamme. Around midnight, a small postal truck pulled up in front of the building. First, six Russian prisoners were taken from the truck and led to the
back of the school, where they were directed to the basement. Then, a group of 20 Jewish children followed in their footsteps. In the basement, all the children were crowded into one room along with Trzebinski. While the children, unaware of their fate, calmly chatted with each other, the Russians were quietly being killed in the neighbouring rooms. One by one, the Russians were hanged by ropes pulled over the heating pipes. The executions were carried out by SS men Ewald Jauch and Johann Frahm. After a while, Frahm entered the room where the children were,
and ordered them to undress. The terrified children looked questioningly at Trzebinski, who cynically reassured them that they were going to be vaccinated against typhus. During the trial after the war, Trzebinski recalled how he took Frahm aside and quietly asked, so that the children wouldn’t hear: “What will happen to them now?” Frahm replied that he had to hang them. Trzebinski then proceeded to inject the children with large doses of morphine. He and Frahm laid them on the floor under blankets. Most of them, tired and sedated,
quickly fell asleep, while a few remained awake, quietly talking amongst themselves. At least the first two children were hanged by Wilhelm Dreimann. Alfred Trzebinski later recalled what followed: “Johann Frahm picked up a twelve-year-old boy in his arms and said to the others: “Now I’m putting him to bed.” He then took him to a room with a noose hanging from a hook, about six or eight meters away from where the other children were. He placed the sleeping boy in the noose and pulled down on the child’s body with all his strength, tightening the rope.”
After witnessing this horror, Trzebinski felt sick and left the building, walking around it several times. Shortly afterward, Trzebinski left Bullenhuser Damm under the pretext of attending to formalities. Meanwhile, Frahm continued the crime until all the Jewish children were hanged. Their 4 caretakers – 1 female medical doctor and 3 nursers – were also murdered that night. That same night, about 30 additional Soviet prisoners were also brought by lorry to the school to be executed. They were guarded by Heinrich Wiehagen and Adolf Speck,
the commander of the Neuengamme’s brickworks, who shot one of the prisoners because he had thrown salt in Speck’s face. That night, six Soviet prisoners escaped, three were shot trying to do so, and the rest were hanged in the basement’s boiler room by Wilhelm Dreimann, with the help of Heinrich Wiehagen and Johann Frahm, who later testified about it. By the next morning, Trzebinski returned to the school to officially confirm the deaths of all the victims. He also ordered the burning of all the children’s clothes,
toys, and belongings to destroy any evidence. Shortly thereafter, Trzebinski returned to the camp at Neuengamme and reported to the commandant, Max Pauly, that the children had been killed. This crime became known as the Bullenhuser Damn Massacre. After Germany’s capitulation in May 1945, the murder of the 20 children in the former school building at Bullenhuser Damm aroused public outrage and horror and the perpetrators faced justice. After the war, the SS physician Kurt Heissmeyer, who had conducted the experiments on the murdered children, escaped detection and returned to his
home in Magdeburg in postwar East Germany and started a successful medical practice as a lung and tuberculosis specialist. He was eventually found out in 1959 and arrested in 1963. In 1966, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. At his trial he stated: “I did not think that inmates of a camp had full value as human beings.” The other perpetrators however fared far worse. On 18 March 1946, the trial of fourteen officials of the main Neuengamme concentration camp began
before a British military tribunal, at the Curiohaus building in Hamburg in Germany. It was the first of 33 trials that would be held over a period of the next two years brought by the British against staff of the Neuengamme concentration camp and its satellite camps. Among the defendants of these trials were also perpetrators of the Bullenhuser Damn Massacre including Alfred Trzebinski who defended killing 20 innocent children with the following words: “If I had acted as a hero, the children might have died a little later,
but their fate could no longer be averted.” He then added: “You cannot execute children, you can only murder them, but they were ‘only’ Jews.” On 3 May 1946, 11 defendants including Alfred Trzebinski, Neuengamme’s former commandant Max Pauly, the camp’s executioner Wilhelm Dreimann and commander of the concentration camp brickworks Adolf Speck were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. However, this was not the end. In July 1946 Johann Frahm and Ewald Jauch were sentenced to death as well. They
were all executed by hanging on 8 and 11 October by the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint. Until their last breath, they remained ardent Nazis. The last words of doctor Alfred Trzebinski were: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Although almost initially lost in the wake of WWII, the story and identity of the children was ultimately uncovered through the research of German journalist, Günther Schwarberg and his wife, attorney Barbara Hüsing. Today the children are remembered internationally.
There were many tears shed for all the victims of the Nazi Atrocities. Thanks for watching the World History Channel be sure to like And subscribe and click the Bell notification icon so you don’t miss our next episodes we thank you and we’ll see you next time on the channel.