Use Arndt

Ilse Arndt , born Lowenberg , first wife Ilse walnut (* 5. February 1913 in Luenen , † January 2003 in Cologne ) was a Jewish eyewitness of the persecution of Jews in the Nazi era . Among other things, she survived the deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp , where she was forcibly sterilized by the concentration camp doctor Carl Clauberg as part of the National Socialist “ human experimentation ” , a death march and imprisonment in the Ravensbrück and Neustadt-Glewe concentration camps . Her later eyewitness report was archived in the Israeli Yad Vashem memorial as a historical source.

Life

Childhood and youth

Ilse Arndt, née Löwenberg, was born in Lünen , Westphalia , as the daughter of the married couple Willy Löwenberg and Henriette Löwenberg, née Lichtenfels . Her father was a master butcher. The family had their own butcher's and their own cattle. Their daughter Ilse had a brother named Helmut who was one year younger than him. In December 1916, when Ilse was almost four years old, her mother died. Her father married again, his second wife Martha, née Scholem, came from Hohensalza . "We belonged to the Jewish faith community , kept the religious holidays, but were not strictly religious," reported Ilse Arndt later.

In 1921 the Löwenberg family moved to Berlin , where relatives of Ilse Löwenberg's stepmother lived. Ilse's father opened a "wholesale cattle business" on the central cattle farm in Berlin . The Löwenberg family lived in the Prenzlauer Berg district . Ilse Löwenberg attended primary school there and later the secondary school for girls until she was 14. Since her stepmother went blind, Ilse had to leave the secondary school for girls to take on the work in her parents' household. At the age of 17, Ilse Löwenberg began an apprenticeship as a butcher, which she successfully completed. Ilse Löwenberg then worked in the food industry.

In 1937, the totalitarian laws of National Socialism were so firmly rooted that Ilse Löwenberg only found a job as a cleaning assistant in Café Engländer in Berlin-Schöneberg , which was run by Jewish owners. However, there she was soon able to work in all areas of work in the kitchen and pastry shop. The café was destroyed by the National Socialists during the Night of the Reichspogrom from November 9th to 10th, 1938.

First arrest for "racial disgrace"

Ilse Löwenberg was engaged to a man who, as a so-called “citizen of German or related blood”, was not allowed to marry a Jew according to the Nuremberg race laws . In early 1938 - one day before her 25th birthday - she and her fiancé were arrested for racial disgrace . Her fiancé was sentenced to one and a half years in prison. Ilse received a sentence of seven months in prison, which is not actually provided for in the law. She was made to do heavy physical labor while in detention. Her father became depressed after being sentenced and imprisoned . He was admitted to the mental hospital in Berlin-Buch , where he died on the same day. Ilse Arndt later suspected that he was killed there.

She herself was released from prison shortly after her father's funeral and initially stayed with acquaintances whom she had turned to because she feared allegations from her stepmother about her engagement. Her brother was also arrested because of the engagement to a so-called " Aryan ", but later escaped to England and did not return to Germany.

In 1941 her stepmother was arrested and deported to Riga , where the first mass shootings took place; their trail is lost there.

Forced labor and deportation to Auschwitz

Forced laborers in a Siemens factory in Berlin (1943)

In 1941 Ilse Löwenberg was committed to forced labor at Siemens in Berlin, where she had to work in shifts to wind motors. In 1941 she married Leopold Nussbaum, who owned a delicatessen shop in Berlin-Schöneberg and, as a Jew, also had to do forced labor.

Both were arrested on January 7, 1943 and were held in various prisons under very poor conditions. Leopold Nussbaum was deported to Auschwitz soon afterwards and murdered there. Ilse Nussbaum was last imprisoned in Berlin for about four weeks in the assembly camp on Grosse Hamburger Strasse and then also deported by train to Auschwitz. She later reported about this trip: “There was nothing to eat or drink, the urge to eat was relieved in buckets and there were arguments about a seat on the floor of the overcrowded cattle wagon . We could look out through slits in the doors. At the train stations we passed, there were people who suggested strangleholdings with their hands, which was supposed to be an indication of the fate ahead. ”The people in the carriages knew that the Train goes to Auschwitz; There were rumors about what would happen there.

Ilse Nussbaum herself had learned six months before her arrest that Jews were being gassed in Auschwitz , but did not believe in it.

Arrival and survival in Auschwitz

Photo of the gatehouse of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp (1945). Recording Stanislaw Mucha

When they arrived at Auschwitz, all prisoners were taken out of the wagons and had to line up in different groups, separated by sex: men, women, women with children under 16 years of age. They were then of concentration camp doctors selected , and not immediately able to work as a respected men and women, in part, the women and the children in the gas chambers killed the concentration camps.

Some of the women classified as fit for work were subjected to a special selection. Ilse Nussbaum was selected for " human experiments" by the SS medical officer of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Eduard Wirths . Together with about 100 other women selected for such experiments, she came to block 10 of the main camp .

Immediately these women had to put on concentration camp inmate clothing and a “ prisoner number ” was tattooed on their left forearm. Arndt received the prisoner number 47,579. In addition, the women's heads were shaved. After the women were admitted to Block 10 , their monthly menstrual period stopped suddenly. That is why Ilse Arndt later suspected that they had been given bromine in their food: "We could smell and taste that". Such experiments with bromides in the food of female prisoners are also known from the Ravensbrück concentration camp .

Because of the special "intended use", the female inmates in Block 10 were not allowed to be beaten or harassed, but were treated roughly by the guards . From Block 10, Ilse Nussbaum was able to secretly observe the executions at neighboring Block 11 , the bunker block with the black wall in front of which the shootings took place. She was also forced, along with the others, to witness the hangings of young women who had tried to "smuggle ammunition in order to blow up the crematoria".

As part of the "human experimentation", Ilse Nussbaum was forcibly sterilized by the gynecologist and SS doctor Professor  Carl Clauberg . Similar experiments were also carried out on their fellow inmates. Clauberg carried out attempts at sterilization on women on a large scale and came to Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1942 through the mediation of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler . The experiments were intended to prepare measures for the "negative demography " of the " Eastern peoples ", whereby Himmler wanted to use the Clauberg method to liquidate the Polish and Czech people.

Block 10 in Auschwitz I concentration camp (main camp) (2008)

In April 1943, Clauberg was assigned to block 10 in the main camp for his "experiments", from which the " euthanasia " doctor, Horst Schumann , who tried out the possibilities of mass sterilization using X-rays , also made use of test subjects. Several hundred Jewish women from different countries were housed in the two halls on the upper floor of this block. The “human experiments” by Carl Clauberg and other concentration camp doctors took place on the ground floor, Horst Schumann irradiated his victims in Block 30 in nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau. Clauberg developed a method for non-surgical mass sterilization, in which a chemical agent specially prepared for this purpose (a formalin solution ) was injected into the fallopian tubes , which caused severe inflammation. The women's ovaries grew together as a result of the inflammation and were blocked after a few weeks, causing infertility in almost all cases . Some women died as a result of "experiments", others were killed to sections carry the corpses. Clauberg's approach was considered brutal in the camp, since the injections took place without anesthesia and the agent used had a caustic effect. Clauberg carried out compulsory sterilization in Auschwitz and later in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The exact number is not known. Earlier estimates are around 700.

According to Ilse Arndt's experience and her later assessment, the "attempts that were made [at the same time] on Greek Jewish women [...] were the most cruel. [...] The mortality among the test persons was very high, that among the Greek women was highest ”. Ilse Arndt mistakenly names the SS camp doctor Josef Mengele as the leader of these experiments. In fact, it was Horst Schumann, who sterilized women from Block 10 (as well as from blocks in Auschwitz-Birkenau) and men with the help of X-rays and tried out the dosage that was believed to be correct.

Death march, further stays in camp

On January 18, 1945, when the Red Army approached Auschwitz, the camp was abandoned and Ilse Nussbaum and the other prisoners were forced to go on a death march to an unknown destination. The inmates had to march in rows of six without winter clothing, without sturdy shoes and undernourished, she later reported. They were "guarded on each side by SS men. There was nothing to eat and nothing to drink. Inmates who could not go on were killed by the SS men with a shot in the neck . "

Ilse Nussbaum reached Loslau with other survivors , from where they were “brought to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in open wagons in the winter cold. On the way the train stopped several times and the bodies of those who had frozen or starved to death were carelessly thrown from the train. ”She only stayed in Ravensbrück for a short time and was then taken to the Neustadt-Glewe camp in Mecklenburg . There she fell ill with typhoid fever , but survived the disease even though she “received almost nothing to eat”.

Liberation by the Soviet Army and return to Berlin

On April 30, 1945 the prisoners in Neustadt-Glewe were locked in the barracks and the guards fled. On May 2, 1945, the Red Army reached the camp and freed the inmates. Ilse Nussbaum went to the next train station and returned on an open train to the completely destroyed Charlottenburg . At the time, she weighed 75  pounds - before her arrest, she had weighed 115 pounds.

The rest of Ilse Nussbaum's life was normal, she married again and from then on had the surname Arndt . At first Ilse Arndt lived again in Berlin and after her divorce in 1955 for many years in Cologne , where she ran a restaurant together with her “friend and companion in suffering” Ruth Friedhoff, with whom she had lived through various camps. She kept in contact with other surviving inmates from Block 10 in Auschwitz, such as Erna Fleig, Erna Hoffmann and Marga Tonn.

Quote

“In addition to the severe physical damage, there is also the much more severe mental damage that we suffered from the experiments. [...] because after the liberation we were definitely at an age at which we could have had children if we had not been sterilized by Clauberg. In addition to the physical stress, the mental stress is cruel, but especially when the problem of marriage was brought up to us. "

- Ilse Arndt : Contemporary witness report for Yad Vashem, April 24, 1995

Processing and importance

The Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Memorial (2007)

Ilse Arndt was one of the surviving prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp who were able to testify that female prisoners were subjected to forced sterilization there. Among other things, she submitted a written report on her fate in 1995, which is also archived in Yad Vashem as a contemporary witness document . In 1997 she was interviewed by Michael Kühntopf for the Shoah Foundation ; the interview was filmed and is part of the global archive of the Visual History Archive . Details about Ilse Arndt can also be found in a book that documents Block 10 in Auschwitz from the perspective of the Jewish women concerned. She is mentioned there under her camp name at the time, Ilse Nussbaum .

Literature (selection)

• Margret Hamm (ed.): Unworthy of life, destroyed life. Forced sterilization and "euthanasia" . 2nd edition, VAS - publishing house for academic writings, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-88864-391-0 (published by the Association of "Euthanasia" victims and forced sterilized eV, Detmold).
• Helgard Kramer (Ed.): Nazi perpetrators from an interdisciplinary perspective . Meidenbauer, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-89975-055-1 (conference report; international conference of Nazi perpetrators from an interdisciplinary perspective , Berlin, April 15– April 17, 2005).
• Konrad Beischl: Dr. med. Eduard Wirths and his work as an SS medical officer in KL Auschwitz . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-3010-9 (also dissertation, University of Erlangen, 2004).
• Jan Sehn: Carl Clauberg's criminal attempts to sterilize prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps . In: Hefte von Auschwitz , 2 (1959), ISSN  0440-5897 , pp. 3-32.
• Robert Resch, Wolfgang Schneider: Concentration Camps and Mass Destruction . Johannes Kepler University Linz , Institute for Social and Economic History, Linz (seminar paper; available online as a pdf )
• Hans-Joachim Lang: The women from Block 10. Medical experiments in Auschwitz. Hamburg 2011. ISBN 978-3-455-50222-0

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• Written report, signed by Ilse Arndt on April 24, 1995, archived in Yad Vashem under document number 8780160.
• USC Shoah Foundation Interview 26282 (PDF) with Ilse Arndt on January 26, 1997, Visual History Archive , Transcript Freie Universität Berlin 2012 ( http://www.vha.fu-berlin.de , registration required).

Web links

• Experiments by Prof. Dr. Carl Clauberg in the Auschwitz concentration camp .
• Illustration: "Human experiment" on an imprisoned woman in Auschwitz concentration camp, Block 10 - the photo taken around 1943/44 shows a. a. Carl Clauberg (from the holdings of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , Washington, DC).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} See written report by Ilse Arndt from April 24, 1995; Document No. 8780160 at the Yad Vashem Memorial in Israel; Pp. 1-5.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Margret Hamm (Ed.): Unworthy of life, destroyed life. Forced sterilization and "euthanasia" . Frankfurt am Main 2006, pp. 16-17.
3. ↑ Reinhold Aschenberg : Ent-Subjectivierung des Menschen. Camp and Shoah in philosophical reflection . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2003, ISBN 3-8260-2556-3 , p. 52ff.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Konrad Beischl: Dr. med. Eduard Wirths and his work as an SS medical officer in KL Auschwitz . Würzburg 2005, p. 100.
5. ^ ^{A b} Helgard Kramer (ed.): Nazi perpetrators from an interdisciplinary perspective . Munich 2006, p. 182.
6. ↑ ^{a b c d} See written report by Ilse Arndt from April 24, 1995; Document No. 8780160 at the Yad Vashem Memorial in Israel; Pp. 5-7.
7. ↑ Cf. Dunja Martin: Human experiments in the infirmary of the Ravensbrück concentration camp . In: Claus Füllberg-Stolberg u. a. (Ed.): Women in concentration camps: Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück . Edition Temmen, Bremen 1994, ISBN 3-86108-237-3 , p. 128.
8. ↑ In their seminar paper at the University of Linz , Concentration Camps and Mass Extermination , Resch and Schneider report on both the shootings at Block 11 (ibid. P. 25) and the hangings (ibid. Pp. 25, 29).
9. ↑ Carola Sachse (ed.): The connection to Auschwitz. Life sciences and human experiments at Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. Documentation of a symposium . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2003 (= History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism, Vol. 6), ISBN 3-89244-699-7 , pp. 137-138.
10. ↑ X-rays with prior injection of a contrast agent, which Clauberg carried out to check his "experiments" in an X-ray room in block 10, showed "in most cases" an occlusion of the fallopian tubes. Individual cases are known in which women injured in this way later gave birth to perfectly healthy children.
    Cf. Jan Sehn: Carl Clauberg's criminal attempts at sterility of prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps . In: Hefte von Auschwitz, 2 (1959), p. 24.
11. ↑ ^{a b} Jan Sehn: Carl Clauberg's criminal attempts at sterility of prisoner women in the Nazi concentration camps . In: Hefte von Auschwitz, 2 (1959), pp. 3–32.
12. ↑ Ernst Klee : Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims . Revised new edition, Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-596-14906-1 , p. 436.
13. ↑ Till Bastian : Terrible Doctors. Medical crimes in the Third Reich . Original edition, 3rd edition, Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2001 (= Beck'sche Reihe; Vol. 1113), ISBN 3-406-44800-3 , pp. 84-87.
14. ↑ see the chapter "X-ray bombs and scalpels. People experiments by Horst Schumann. In: Hans-Joachim Lang: Die Frauen von Block 10. Medical experiments in Auschwitz. Hamburg 2011, pp. 132-143.
15. ↑ ^{a b c d e} See written report by Ilse Arndt from April 24, 1995; Document No. 8780160 at the Yad Vashem Memorial in Israel; Pp. 10-13.
16. ↑ Transcription : USC Shoah Foundation Interview 26282 (PDF) , Visual History Archive, Transcript Freie Universität Berlin 2012 ( http://www.vha.fu-berlin.de , registration required); accessed November 3, 2019.
17. ↑ Hans-Joachim Lang : The women of Block 10. Medical experiments in Auschwitz . Hamburg 2011, pp. 73, 116–118. 122f, 125, 165, 167, 198, 227, 233f, 237, 241.