Medical Experiments at Dachau
Dr. Klaus Schilling
on the witness stand, 7 December 1945
Dr. Klaus Schilling, shown in the photo
above as he testified on the witness stand in the post-war trial
of the Dachau staff, conducted medical experiments on inmates
at Dachau.
Dr. Schilling was one of the world's
foremost experts on tropical diseases when he was ordered by
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the head of all the Nazi
concentration camps, to come out of retirement to work on a cure
for malaria after German soldiers began dying of the disease
in North Africa. Before his retirement, Dr. Schilling had worked
at the prestigious Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. He began
specializing in tropical diseases after he himself contracted
malaria.
After the war, Dr. Schilling was arrested
by the American Army and charged with participating in a "common
plan" to violate the Laws and Usages of War under the Geneva
Convention of 1929 because he had conducted experiments on Dachau
prisoners, using various drugs in an effort to find a cure for
malaria. Most of his subjects were young Polish priests whom
Dr. Schilling infected by means of mosquitoes from the marshes
of Italy and the Crimea, according to author Peter Padfield in
his book entitled "Himmler." The priests were chosen
for the experiments because they were not required to work, as
were the ordinary prisoners at Dachau.
One of the prosecution witnesses at the
trial of the German Major War Criminals at the Nuremberg International
Military Tribunal was Dr. Franz Blaha, a Czech medical doctor
who was a Communist political prisoner at Dachau. An affidavit
signed by Dr. Blaha was entered into the main Nuremberg trial.
It was marked Document Number 3249-PS, Exhibit USA-663. His comments
in this affidavit about Dr. Schilling are quoted below from the
transcript of the Nuremberg trial for January 11, 1946
"3. During my time at Dachau
I was familiar with many kinds of medical experiments carried
on there on human victims. These persons were never volunteers
but were forced to submit to such acts. Malaria experiments on
about 1,200 people were conducted by Dr. Klaus Schilling between
1941 and 1945. Schilling was personally ordered by Himmler to
conduct these experiments. The victims were either bitten by
mosquitoes or given injections of malaria sporozoites taken from
mosquitoes. Different kinds of treatment were applied including
quinine, pyrifer, neosalvarsan, antipyrin, pyramidon, and a drug
called 2516 Behring. I performed autopsies on the bodies of people
who died from these malaria experiments. Thirty to 40 died from
the malaria itself. Three hundred to four hundred died later
from diseases which were fatal because of the physical condition
resulting from the malaria attacks. In addition there were deaths
resulting from poisoning due to overdoses of neosalvarsan and
pyramidon. Dr. Schilling was present at my autopsies on the bodies
of his patients."
The 74-year-old Dr. Schilling was convicted
by an American Military Tribunal at Dachau and was hanged. In
his final statement to the court, Dr. Schilling pleaded to have
the results of his experiments returned to him so they could
be published, but his work was confiscated and used by the US
military. During his trial, Dr. Schilling tried to justify his
crime by saying that his experiments were for the good of mankind.
This page was last updated on September
22, 2010
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