75 years ago yesterday (h/t Tom Gross) SS troops murdered 20 Jewish children and at least 28 adults in the basement of a school at Bullenhuser Damm 92-94 in Hamburg. They were kids from Italy, Slovakia, France, Poland and the Netherlands.
They had been subjected to barbaric medical experiments as prisoners in Neuengamme Concentration Camp on the outskirts of Hamburg. In Nov 1944, 10 girls and 10 boys, aged between 5 and 12, were brought from Auschwitz to Neuengamme at the request of a Dr Kurt Heissmeyer.
He and his team of doctors wanted to experiment on them. He hoped to gain a professorship from his research, he said. The children’s skin was cut open and tuberculosis bacilli rubbed into the wounds. Heissmeyer then had their lymph glands removed by operation.
He wanted to discover whether antibodies had developed against the tuberculosis. All this took place in the last weeks of the war, when Heissmeyer knew the war was lost. With the British Army now less than three miles away, they decided to cover up their barbaric crimes.
The SS doctors and SS-Obersturmführer Arnold Strippel decided the children had to die. The children were taken to the basement of the building and hanged, together with adult prisoners who had witnessed the experiments.
Heissmeyer returned to his home in Magdeburg, in East Germany to start a successful medical practice as a lung and tuberculosis specialist. He was eventually found out in 1959 after he boasted about his wartime experiments.
In 1966, seven years later, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died a few months later. Justice had been done. But not really.
