Major Crimes and True Crime

Herta Oberheuser had trained to make sick people well. Instead the doctor used her skills to perform cruel, sometimes deadly, experiments on prisoners. On this day in 1946 a trial began to hold Nazi doctors accountable. Oberheuser was the only woman tried in the case. “ … I do not believe that the patients suffered that much because they never expressed any kind of disagreement,” she testified in her defense. At the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, the doctor tested antibiotics on patients by intentionally infecting wounds with wood, ground glass, and dirt. Some patients were treated for the resulting infections while others, the control group, developed high fevers with no relief. She also sterilized prisoners.  Oberheuser claimed that her work was humane because the women chosen for experiments otherwise would have been murdered. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison in August 1947 but only served a handful of years. After Oberheuser was released, she returned to worki...

The Nazis said that Johann Frehse died while imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp. In reality, he was killed as part of a secret program that gassed ill and exhausted prisoners.  Johann was initially arrested by the Gestapo for anti-Nazi activities in 1934. When he was arrested for a second time in 1939, he was imprisoned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then transferred to Dachau near Munich. As part of a program called “Operation 14f13,” Johann was eventually brought to Hartheim Castle. Inside its walls, the Nazis had carried out the mass murder of people with disabilities under the Nazi “euthanasia” program. After 1941, “Operation 14f13” used Hartheim's gassing operations to kill camp prisoners like Johann. Johann’s death certificate never mentioned Hartheim or “Operation 14f13.” Gassings of camp prisoners would continue at Hartheim until December 1944. Thirty thousand people were gassed at Hartheim; of that number, at least 5,500 prisoners were killed there as...

When German occupiers ordered Jews in the Kovno ghetto to turn over all of their books in February 1942, some residents—including 13-year-old Solly Ganor—decided to resist. "Nearly everyone ... began delivering their precious books to the assembly point. My mother had tears in her eyes as she helped me load her beloved books by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgeneyev [sic], and Pushkin onto my homemade sled," remembered Solly. He never went to the assembly point. Instead, he and a friend hid the books in an abandoned house—and even began collecting additional books for their clandestine library. They allowed other children in the ghetto to exchange or borrow books. Other residents buried books underground or smuggled them out of the ghetto in wagons. Some of these books were retrieved after the war. Saving or hiding books was highly dangerous and punishable by death. However, Solly later wrote: "It was a risky business, but life wasn’t worth living without books." Photo 1: ...

In 1937, Robert Wagemann was born in Germany with a shattered hip. He was about five years old when his mother, Luta, received a summons to come to the university clinic in Heidelberg with her son. By law, doctors and midwives were ordered to report young children with mental or physical disabilities to public health officials as part of the Nazis' child "euthanasia" program—a secret killing operation targeting disabled children. Robert was also in danger of Nazi persecution because he was a Jehovah's Witness. “I had two strikes against me: being a son born to Witnesses and also having a defect,” he later recalled. At the clinic, Luta overheard doctors discussing murdering Robert. During the doctors' lunch break, Luta grabbed her son and fled the clinic. They then went into hiding at Robert's grandparents' home.  Robert survived in hiding until the end of the war, but about 10,000 German children with disabilities were murdered as part of this Nazi program...

When she was in her early 20s, Jeanne Daman became the unlikely headmistress of a Jewish kindergarten in German-occupied Belgium. Jeanne, a Roman Catholic, taught children who were banned from public education. When the Gestapo came to her school and asked for three children by name, Jeanne felt she had no choice but to comply. She dressed the children, the youngest of whom was three years old. "I put them in the truck myself, delaying the moment when the Nazis would touch them," she wrote. The children were used to lure their parents out of hiding. That day changed Jeanne. "I was anti-Nazi by conviction before. Now I wanted to strike back myself, to damage them,” she wrote. Jeanne was eventually forced to close the school because it posed too much danger for the young students who were facing deportation. After the school closed, Jeanne joined a clandestine rescue network to find hiding places for innocent children across Belgium. Later, she helped the Belgian resistanc...

At the Sobibor killing center, Chaim Engel and Selma Wijnberg were among the few selected for forced labor. They met while working together in the clothes-sorting area—and attempted to pocket food and valuables, including any possible weapons, for an uprising. On October 14, 1943, Chaim was part of a small group of prisoners that revolted. As chaos ensued, the young Jewish couple ran into the woods. With money they had taken from separating clothing, the couple paid a farmer to allow them to hide in his barn. While close to 300 prisoners escaped, only about 50 would survive the war—including Chaim and Selma. At least 167,000 Jews were killed at Sobibor. Click the link in our bio to learn more about Sobibor. First photo: Selma and Chaim are pictured here, center, with their child and two other couples in Odessa, circa May 1945. USHMM, courtesy of Selma Wijnberg Engel Second Photo: Selma Wijnberg Engel. USHMM, courtesy of Selma Wijnberg Engel Third Photo: Chaim Engel. USHMM, courtesy of ...

Irena Sendler, a young Polish woman involved in aiding Jews, was arrested by the Gestapo 80 years ago this month. Using her position as a social worker, Irena supplied food and offered financial assistance to Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto in German-occupied Poland. But her efforts didn't end there. By early 1943, she had joined newly formed "Żegota," the Polish Council to Aid Jews, a clandestine rescue organization that was funded by the Polish government-in-exile. Irena would later become head of its children's section. Under the alias "Jolanta," she helped smuggle several hundred Jewish children out of the ghetto and found hiding places for them in orphanages, convents, and private homes. In fall 1943, Irena was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Pawiak prison. She was later released from prison thanks to a bribe organized by her fellow rescuers. Despite the danger, she assumed a new identity and went back to working for Żegota. In 1965, Iren...

Growing up in Nazi Germany, Susan Warsinger felt the effects of antisemitism in her everyday life. "I was there when they boycotted my father’s store. I was there when we were not allowed to walk through parks without being accosted. I was there when we were not allowed to go to public schools. I was there during Kristallnacht when our neighbors broke down our glass front door," remembers Susan. While many of the details of her childhood are painful to remember today, Susan still recalls one memory with “tenderness.” Four-year-old Susan and her father were walking through a park where they lived in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. “There was an ice cream cart nearby,” Susan remembers. “A middle-aged lady from behind beckoned to me to come closer.” As Susan walked up to the cart, the woman smiled and offered her some ice cream. Though she was young, Susan knew that this was risky. “I felt a pulse in my throat and understood that this lady made a choice to sell her ice cream to a Jewish...