First tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people were led off to remote fields and forest to be slaughtered by SS guns. Assembly-line death camps were established in Poland and train loads of Jews were collected from all over occupied Europe and sent to their doom. At some of the camps, the Nazis took pains to disguise their intentions until the last moment. At others, the arriving Jews saw scenes beyond comprehension. “Corpses were strewn all over the road,” recalled one survivor. “Starving human skeletons stumbled toward us. They fell right down in front of our eyes and lay there gasping out their last breath.” What had begun as a mean little edict against Jewish civil servants was now ending the death six million Jews, Poles, gypsies, Russians, and other “sub-humans” Uncounted thousands of Jews and other hapless concentration-camp inmates were used as guinea pigs in a wide range of medical and scientific experiments, most of them of little value. Victims were infected with typhus to see how different geographical groups reacted; to no one’s surprise, all groups perished swiftly. Fluids from diseased animals were injected into humans to observe the effect. Prisoners were forced to exist on sea water to see how long castaways might survive. Gynecology was an area of interest. Various methods of sterilization were practiced--by massive X-ray, by irritants and drugs, by surgery without benefit of anesthetic. As techniques were perfected, it was determined that a doctor with 10 assistants could sterilize 1,000 women per day. The “experimental people” were also used by Nazi doctors who needed ...
