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 (doctor) 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

References

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