Block 10

Block 10

Memorial plaque at the Institute of Anatomy in Strasbourg. Translated, it reads, in part: "In memory of 86 Jews murdered in 1943 at Struthof by August Hirt, professor at the Nazi Reichsuniversität in Strasbourg. Their remains rest in the Jewish cemetery in Cronenbourg....Remember them so that medicine shall never again be perverted."

Block 10 was a cellblock at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp where women and men were used as experimental subjects for German doctors. The experiments in Block 10 ranged from skin testing for reaction to relatively gentle substances to giving phenol injections to the heart for immediate dissection.

Although Block 10 was in the men's camps, the experiments conducted were mostly for women. To please the “elite” prisoners, the Germans would house prostitutes in Block 10. The main doctors who worked in Block 10 were Carl Clauberg, Horst Schumann, Eduard Wirths, Bruno Weber and August Hirt. Each of them had different methods in doing experiments on the inmates.

The victims at Auschwitz were also exported anywhere else experimental subjects were needed. For example, twenty Jewish children were transported to the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg where they were injected with virulent tubercular serum and subjected to other experiments, and later murdered at the Bullenhuser Damm school.

The doctors

• Carl Clauberg — He focused on sterilization by injection. His method was to inject a caustic substance into the cervix in order to obstruct the fallopian tubes. His experimental subjects were married women between the ages of twenty and forty who had already had children.
• Horst Schumann — His experimental subjects were healthy men and women in their late teens or early twenties, on whom he attempted X-ray sterilization. Women were put between plates that pressed against abdomen and their back. He placed the men’s penis and scrotum on a special plate. Radiation burns and intestinal damage were a frequent result.

References

• "Block 10". An Auschwitz Alphabet. Retrieved 2007-05-01. 
• Ruth Jolanda Weinberger (2007-01-26). "The Deadly Origins of a Life-saving Procedure". The Jewish Daily Forward. Archived from the original on 2007-02-09. Retrieved 2007-05-01. 
• Hans-Joachim Lang: Die Frauen von Block 10. Medizinische Experimente in Auschwitz. Hamburg 2011. ISBN 978-3-455-50222-0

Coordinates: 50°01′31″N 19°12′13″E / 50.0254°N 19.2035°E / 50.0254; 19.2035