“This won’t hurt” — the lie uttered by the SS doctor before beginning the experiment.
Before we venture into the sterile corridors of horror, I ask for your attention for a moment. What we are doing here is fighting against oblivion. These stories are difficult, but they must be told so that the past never repeats itself. If you support our work of remembrance, subscribe now, click on the bell.
It’s a free gesture for you, but invaluable to us. And tell me in the comments where you are watching this video from? From France, Algeria, Canada, Russia or elsewhere. I would like to know how far the voice of these victims resonates. Now, take a deep breath. We are going to meet Dr. R. The man who smiled before he cut.
Doctor, don’t do that. Be patient, my dear. Part 1. The selection of the smile and the promise of healing. Ravensbruck July 1942. Summer in Germany can be sweet with the scent of bread and the sound of birds. But at Ravensbruck, the women’s concentration camp located 90 km north of Berlin, summer was just another season to die.
The heat made the garbage rot faster, and the fat, black flies were the only free creatures in the camp. In the midst of this hell of exhaustion and hunger, there was an angel, or at least that’s what everyone said about Elsa. Elsa was 16 years old. She was Polish, originally from Lubelin. Before the war, she was a piano prodigy.
She had slender hands with long, delicate fingers, hands made for lists and Debussy. She also had insolent health, a peasant robustness inherited from her grandmother which had allowed her to survive the tifus. the previous winter. That morning, the call was not like the others. Usually, SS doctors would come to collect the sick, the useless, to send them to the gas chamber or the black transport.
They looked for weakness. But today, Dr. H was searching for strength. H was an elegant man, in his thirties, with a clean-shaven face. He wore his white coat not as work clothes, but as a prestigious uniform. It smelled of clean soap and cologne. A smell that overwhelmed the prisoners, who were used to the stench of the latrines.
They walked along the rows of young Polish women. He didn’t shout, he didn’t hit, he smiled. It was a fatherly, reassuring smile, a terrifying anomaly in this place of hatred. He stopped in front of Elsa. He delicately took her hand, the one that used to play nocturnes, and examined it. He felt his wrist, checked the strength of the tendons.
“You have beautiful hands,” he said in German with a soft voice. “You were playing an instrument, weren’t you, Elsa?” Terrified but mesmerized by this unexpected gentleness, he nodded his head. “The piano, Doctor.” HH sighed as if he were saddened by her situation. “It’s tragic. An artist shouldn’t have to carry stones.
Look at your legs, my child. You have inflammation. I can see it in your gait.” This was false. Elsa was fine. She only had a few scratches from the brambles. But H continued, placing a warm hand on her shoulder. “If we do n’t treat this right away, the infection will spread. You could lose your legs. And how will you use the pedals of your piano without legs?” Elsa’s heart raced.
An SS doctor was worried about her future as a pianist. It was a miracle. ” I want to help you, Elsa!” he murmured. ” I have a place at the clinic; it’s clean. There are Real beds, white food. We’re going to do a little procedure to clean up your muscles. Nothing serious, just to secure your future.
Elsa looked at her companions. They were jealous. They saw Elsa being chosen for paradise, the clean infirmary, the rest, the food. “Come with me!” said H, holding out his hand. “You have nothing to fear.” I am a doctor, I take the Hippocratic Oath. She took a step forward. She left the line to follow the man in white.
She didn’t know she wasn’t walking towards a hospital. She was walking towards an experimental laboratory. Dr. Her did not want to treat her. He worked for Professor Gbart, Himler’s personal physician . They needed healthy human guinea pigs to test treatments for gas gangrene that was killing German soldiers on the Eastern Front.
They needed healthy legs to break, infect, and observe. But in order to keep the subject calm, in order to keep the heart rate stable before the incision, it was necessary to lie. And H was a master of lies. Elsa entered the infirmary building. The smell of the herbs caught in her throat. It was the scent of hope, she thought.
She didn’t know that in a few hours, that smell would become the smell of her nightmare. The operating room was dazzlingly white. After the mud of the camp, this harsh light reflected by the immaculate tiles hurt Elsa’s eyes. She was laid down on a cold metal table. The air smelled of disinfectant. Dr. Holler was busy near a tray of steel instruments, a Wagnerian rumble.
A massive nurse nicknamed Schwester Clara lifted Elsa’s right leg, her healthy leg, and smeared it with orange diode. Why the right leg, doctor? I thought the pain was coming from the left. HH turned around, a mask covering his face. Only her laughing eyes were visible. “It’s symmetry, my child,” he lied.
The infection sometimes hides on the opposite side. We’re going to make a small preventative incision. This is modern medicine. Elsa, she wanted to believe it. Then Clara fastened the straps: chest, pelvis, ankles. They were tight, brutal. Elsa tried to move. Impossible. It’s too tight. I can not move.
She moaned. H approached. His gloved hand rested on Els’s forehead. Calm down. The straps are for your safety. Sometimes muscles react when they are treated. Wouldn’t you like to kick and knock over my instruments? He leaned over very close. Are you afraid of the pain, Elsa? Yes, doctor. He smiled beneath his mask.
Don’t worry, we have excellent products. You won’t feel anything. Just a little pressure, like a slightly firm caress. He signaled to the nurse. Clara handed him a syringe. The liquid inside was clear. Water, an anesthetic. In reality, stocks of morphine and anesthesia were reserved for soldiers at the front.
For the female prisoners, the ” canine rabbits” as the SS called them, diluted doses or mild sedatives were often used which paralyzed the body, but did not extinguish the pain or sometimes nothing at all, just the lie. Ur injected the product into Elsa’s arm. “There,” he said softly. Count to 10.
It won’t hurt, I promise. It’s just a little cleaning. Elsa began to count, her eyes fixed on the large sialitique above her. 1 2 3 She felt a little heavy. Her eyelids blinked. It was the effect of a cheap muscle relaxant. She felt blurry, but she could still feel the coldness of the table, the bite of the straps. She could smell everything.
4 C where the scalpel resumed. A 10x centrimeter blade sharpened like a razor. He did not check if she was asleep. He knew she wasn’t asleep. He didn’t care . The relaxant would prevent him from struggling too much and the straps would do the rest. For him, these cries were not a problem.
The block was soundproofed. Six Hur placed the tip of the blade on her calf, her skin taut and healthy, tanned by the camp sun. He pressed the button. The promise shattered in a fraction of a second. It wasn’t a mosquito bite, it was fire. The blade sliced through the epidermis, the dermis, the fat and plunged directly into the red, living muscle.
Elsa never stops counting until she’s fast. She let out a scream, an absolutely inhuman cry that came from the depths of her gut, a cry of betrayal as much as of pain. Her eyes widened in horror. She tried to sit up, to pull herself away from the table, but the leather straps were digging into her skin.
His body arched violently, causing the metal table to rattle. “Here, take it,” he ordered the nurse sharply. His gentle voice vanished instantly. He didn’t stop . He continued cutting. He opened the leg, making a 15-centimeter incision. Blood spurted out, hot and red, splattering the savior’s immaculate white coat. Elsa wept, screamed, begged: “You promised.” You promised.
“That hurts, stop.” He looked up at her for a second. The fatherly smile was gone. There was a cold, scientific look, irritated by the noise. “Stay still,” he said calmly, as if speaking to a defective object. “You’re making my job difficult, it’s for your own good.” He spread the plaice’s lips with metal retractors.
He could see the healthy muscle, the white tibia. It was the perfect testing ground. He reached for the tray. “Give me the cultures.” And the shards of glass were just the beginning. The incision was only the opening of the door. Now he was going to let the evil in. He was going to introduce gangrene, tetanus, and foreign bodies to simulate a dirty war wound.
Elsa, half- conscious, saw the nurse bring in a jar containing fragments of wood and worm. Then, in a terrifying flash of lucidity, she understood that this had never been discussed. to treat her. He was destroying her from the inside out. In the next part, we will witness the perverted medical act. Ur will introduce the deadly bacteria directly into the open wound.
We will see Elsa’s post-operative ordeal as she wakes up with a raging fever, realizing that her pianist’s leg has become a piece of rotting meat. Tell me, is there a greater betrayal than a doctor becoming an executioner? Elsa’s calf was ripped open like an anatomy book. Blood continued to flow, soaking the green surgical drapes that had long since ceased to be sterile. Elsa had stopped screaming.
She had fallen into a state of shock, a protective semi-coma where the pain was a distant but ever- present wave. Dr. Holler, unperturbed, reached for his assistant. The samples, Chouester. The nurse handed him a long pair of forceps. At the end of the forceps was a piece of wood, a dirty, rough splinter of chain about three meters long.
Hur plunged the forceps into the open fold. He didn’t just set the wood down; he drove it in. He forced the foreign object deep between the muscle fibers of the inner gastrocnemius until it reached the periosteum, the membrane covering the bone. Asa’s body jerked violently on the table. A purely animal reflex spasm. The leather straps creaked.
H adjusted the piece of wood with his gloved fingers. Perfect, like a splash of water in a muddy trench. Then he took shards of glass, irregularly sharp pieces. He slid them alongside the wood. The idea was to see if the glass aggravated the infection or prevented healing. For Nazi science, Elsa’s leg was just a living specimen.
But the worst was yet to come, the highlight of the show. The nurse brought a A small glass vial contained a cloudy, yellowish liquid. It was a pure bacterial culture, a concentrated cocktail of Clustridium persingenes, the agent of gas gangrene, and Staphylococcus aureus. Our doctor dipped a wick of gas into the culture broth. The gas neutralizes the poison.
He inserted the infected wick deep into the wound, right up against the bone. It was a cellular death sentence. He was introducing billions of killer bacteria directly into the body’s sanctuary, bypassing all the skin’s natural barriers. “Phil,” he ordered, “This was the crucial step.” For gas gangrene to develop, it needs an oxygen-free, anaerobic environment.
” So the wound had to be sealed tightly.” Our began to stitch. He didn’t use loose stitches to allow the infection to drain, as a surgeon might do to save a patient. Instead, he used tight stitches, very tight stitches. He sealed the skin over the horror he had just deposited there. He imprisoned the monster inside.
Elsa’s calf was now a time bomb sewn with black silk thread. “Done,” he declared, his gloves covered in blood. It was a beautiful, clean, quick operation. He looked at Elssa’s pale face, covered in cold sweat and dried tears. “You see!” he whispered in her unconscious ear. “You’re alive.” “I told you I’d take care of you.
” The straps were untied. Elsa’s ankles bore the purplish marks of her struggle. She was loaded onto a stretcher and taken out of the sterile ward. She wasn’t taken back to the women’s barracks. She was taken to a special room in the river. A dark room with windows painted white so no one could see inside.
It was the rabbit room. There were 12 beds there. On each bed, a young Polish woman moaned or was delirious. A dreadful stench filled the room: the sickeningly sweet smell of rotting flesh on a living body. Elsa woke up four hours later. The awakening wasn’t gradual. It was a brutal shock, as if she had been plunged into boiling water.
Her leg—her leg was no longer a leg, it was a blazing inferno. It felt like embers Burning sutures had been sewn under her skin. The pressure was unbearable. Bacteria, nourished by her body heat, were already beginning to multiply, producing gas that stretched the tissues until they burst. She tried to sit up, but her head spun.
She had a fever, a raging, rapidly rising fever . She lifted the gray drac. Her right leg was tightly bandaged, but she could see that her calf had doubled in size. The bandage was already stained with a thick, dark fluid. Another girl in the next bed turned her head toward her. Her name was Maria. She had had surgery three days earlier.
Her face was gray, waxy. “Welcome to the club,” Maria whispered, barely able to see. “He told you he was going to take care of you, didn’t he?” Elsa shook her head, tears streaming down her cheeks again. “He lied,” Maria continued. He doesn’t heal us, he watches us rot. We are his lab rabbits.
Elsa fell back onto the pillow. The pain pulsed in time with her heartbeat. Boom boom boom. Each heartbeat sent a wave of pure suffering through her entire body. Dr. Holler had promised it wouldn’t hurt. It was the biggest lie in history because the real pain was only just beginning. The gangrene would soon begin its work of digestion and would return not to give morphine, but to measure the diameter of the swelling with a tape measure.
He noted the temperature and watched death rise centimeter by centimeter. The rabbits’ room did not have a clock. Time was measured only by the rise in fever and the expansion of the black spot on Elsa’s leg. Since the operation, Elsa’s leg was no longer a human limb. It was a swollen, shiny monster, stretched to the breaking point.
The skin, once golden and healthy, had turned purple and then bottle green marbled with black streaks. It was gas gangrene. The bacteria, trapped without oxygen by the tight stitches of the herleur, devoured the muscles and produced gas. When she moved, even by a millimeter, she could feel bubbles moving under her skin.
If she pressed on her shin, it made a frightening noise, a dry crackling like snow being crushed or parchment paper being crumpled. Jack! It was the sound of its own decomposition. On the morning of the 4th day, the door opened. Doctor Ur entered. He was fresh, clean-shaven, and impeccable in his white tuft of hair.
He was holding a black notebook and a gold pen. He was accompanied by two other doctors in grey uniforms who were laughing and discussing an evening at officers’ mass. They stopped at the foot of Elsa’s bed. Our doesn’t say hello. He didn’t ask how you are? He lifted the sheet with the tip of his pen, wincing slightly at the foul odor emanating from the wound. The smell was unbearable.
It was a sweet, heavy smell, a mixture of blood, notebooks, and spoiled meat. A smell that clung to clothes and hair. Subject number 104th post-operative day dictated by Ur to one of his colleagues who was taking notes. Massive infection confirmed, significant. He took a ribbon out of his pocket.
He approached Elssa. She was burning with fever. His temperature had risen to 41 degrees . Her lips were cracked, her eyes glassy. She watched him approach, still hoping in her delirium that he would save her. “Water, please, it’s burning,” she whispered. He completely ignored it. He wrapped the master ribbon around the monstrous calf.
He squeezed, driving the ribbon into the swollen flesh. Elsa screamed, a cry that broke her spirit. “Circumference 48 cm,” Hur announced calmly. An increase of 12 since yesterday. The progress is excellent. Excellent. That word echoed in Elsa’s skull like a final insult. His death was excellent.
His suffering was a scientific success. One of the young doctors asked, “Should we administer sulfamamides, doctor, to test their effectiveness?” Hur sequou la tête. No, this group is the control group. We need to see how long the body can resist without help. If we give medication, we are misleading the way we give it.
Allow the infection to run its natural course until septicemia develops. She heard. Through the fog of fever, she understood. She was not one of those they were trying to cure. She was one of those people watched die to see how long it took. She was a biological clock that was left running until it stopped, and for the pain, a passing nurse timidly asked .
She screams all night. She keeps others awake. Hur ha os shrugged, noting an observation in his notebook. Pain is a nervous reaction. Morphine alters the heart rhythm. No morphine, what a death from his pillow. They left, discussing the lunch menu, leaving Elsa alone with her monster. The night that followed was the longest of his life.
The fever made her delirious. She could no longer see the grey walls of the river. She was back in Loublin, in her parents’ living room. There was his piano, a large black piano. She sat down to play Chopin. She placed her hands on the keys, but the keys were not in them, they were razor-sharp. Each time she pressed, her fingers bled, but she couldn’t stop. Dr.
Herr was there, keeping time with a scalpel. Play, Elsa, play for science. She was playing and the music was a howl. She woke with a start, drenched in sweat. She had bitten her lip until it bled. His leg was pulsating. She could feel the poison creeping up her thigh. Red streaks rose towards the ine.
Septicemia, the poisoned blood that would soon stop his heart. Next to her, Maria, her bed neighbor, was no longer moving. She died silently during the night so as not to disturb the doctors. His body was already cold. Elsa looked at the ceiling. She knew she was next. She was no longer afraid of dying. She was afraid of dying without anyone knowing what they had done.
She looked at her hand, that pianist’s hand that would never play again. She grabbed a small piece of plaster that was falling from the stucco wall. She began to scratch at the wooden board of her bed, hidden under the rotten straw mattress . She couldn’t write a letter. She had no papers.
She just engraved a date and a name, so as not to forget the name of the one who had smiled before killing. But Elsa had underestimated her own strength. This robust peasant heart refused to stop. She would survive that night and the next, and capricious fate would offer her an incredible chance, a chance not to end up in the crematorium, but to become living proof.
In the 5th and final part, we will see the unthinkable, the survival, how Elsa escaped the final liquidation of the witnesses, how she dragged her mutilated leg to liberation. And most importantly, how she later found Dr. Erné again, not in a hospital, but in a courtroom where she was finally able to show him her scar.
Prepare yourself for the verdict. Elsa should have died. According to the cold calculations of Dr. Roller. The septicemia should have prevailed within 5 days. But the human body has resources that Nazi science could not quantify. The will to live. His body fought the infection with incredible ferocity.
The fever burned everything, but the heart held strong. The gangrene ate away at the muscle, leaving a gaping cavity in his calf, but it stopped before reaching the femoral artery. She remained there for 6 months, 6 months rotting alive, hidden by Polish comrades who stole medicine from the infirmary to keep her alive.
When the order to liquidate the rabbits, the inconvenient witnesses of the experiments, came in February 1945, Elsa was hidden under the boarding floor in the mud and cold, huddled against other mutilated survivors. On April 30, 1945, the Red Army liberated Ravensbrook. When Soviet soldiers found Tela, she weighed only 33 kg.
She could no longer walk. His right leg was stiff. deformed, a dead stick of wood attached to a living body. She returned to Poland, but there was no longer a piano for her. The muscles in his leg were destroyed. She could no longer use the pedals and her hands were shaking too much. The nervous trauma had destroyed his art.
The music had been played the day it was cut off. Number 9 December, the trial of the doctors opened. three defendants among them the leading medical figures of the Reich and in the third row seated with an impassive face the doctor he pleaded not guilty his defense was monstrously cynical. “It was war,” his lawyer declared. His wives were condemned to death.
In any case, the doctor was indispensable in saving thousands of German soldiers. It was a patriotic and scientific act where the head was raised in a dignified pose. He was talking about protocols, statistics, and infection curves. He transformed horror into abstract data. Then came the accusation.
We call the witness Elsaka. Elsa entered the courtroom. She walked with two crutches, dragging her right leg with painful heaviness. Silence fell. The sound of her crutches clacking on the parquet floor resonated like an accusation. She sat down at the bar. She looked and recognized him. He took a slight step back.
Topic 104 had returned. The statistical error was alive and well. The prosecutor asked, “Madam, the accused claims that these operations were carried out humanely and according to the rules of medical practice. What do you have to say?” Elsa did not answer right away . She put down her crutches. Slowly, she stood up, holding onto the edge of the bar so as not to fall.
She grabbed the hem of her long skirt and pulled it up . A look of horror swept through the room. The judges, though accustomed to the gruesome tale, averted their eyes. It wasn’t a leg, it was a wreck. The calf had disappeared. All that remained was the bone covered with a thin, parchment-like skin, healed in a deep, purple crater.
You could see the marks of the glass shards, the marks of the stitches that were too tight and had strangled the flesh. It was a geographical map of pain. “Here is your humanity, doctor,” said Elsa in a voice that no longer wavered. She pointed her finger towards the time. “You told me it won’t hurt.
You told me I’m going to take care of you.” You smiled. She turned towards the judges. He did not use anesthesia because he wanted to see if the pain influenced the infection. He put wood and glass into my body like you fill a garbage can. He’s not a doctor, he’s a butcher. Our white wine. These statistics could do nothing to counter this image.
Elsa’s scar screamed the truth louder than all those falsified medical records. He lowered his head. For the first time, the mask of scientific arrogance fell away. He was no longer the savior in a white coat. He was just a small and cruel man who had taken advantage of his power. The verdict. On August 20, 1947, the court delivered its verdict. Dr.
Holler was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to hang. He went to the gallows at Landsberg prison a few months later. It is said that he no longer smiled. Elsa lived until she was 10. She never played piano professionally, but she did become a music teacher. She taught children to love beauty as a form of revenge against the ugliness she had witnessed. She limped all her life.
Each step was a reminder. Each change in the weather aggravated the pain in her phantom leg, but she was standing. Epilogue. The story of Elsa and the rabbits of Ravensbrook is the most terrifying example of science without conscience. Doctors have betrayed their most sacred oath. First, do no harm. They lied.
They said, “It won’t hurt while preparing hell.” Today, the Nuremberg Code, which governs global medical ethics and prohibits experimentation on humans without consent, exists thanks to women like Elsa. Thanks to those who dared to show their scars to the world. Your duty to remember. This story is hard to hear, I know.
Facing the truth hurts, but it’s necessary. If you have the courage of Elsaché, do not leave without leaving a trace. Subscribe so that these voices never fade away. Share this video to remind everyone that trust should never be blind. And write these words in the comments for all the victims of pseudoscience.
Never again .