The Nazi Murder Machine: 13 Portraits in Evil by Ben Stevens

Becker-Freyseng, Hermann

    Becker-Freyseng, pictured wearing military uniform. Although a physician, he was given the official rank and title of ‘Captain, Medical Service of the Air Force’ by the Nazis.

    Becker-Freyseng qualified as a physician at the University of Berlin in 1935 (when he was then aged twenty-five), and rose to prominence when he became a consultant to the Luftwaffe, being recognized as an expert in aviation medicine.

    In 1938 he assisted with a series of important experiments concerning the effects of pure oxygen, and soon became a leading figure in the Nazi’s ‘human experimentation program’. (He had already, voluntarily, become a member of the Nazi Party.)

    The experiments which took place under Becker-Freyseng’s direction commonly required inmates selected from the Nazi concentration camps. These inmates could be placed in a pressure chamber, where the effects of high altitude flying on the human body would be measured and observed. Others were subjected to freezing temperatures, or deliberately infected with tuberculosis. (This last ‘experiment’ often involved Jewish and gypsy children.)

    Other inmates were forced to drink copious amounts of salt-water, with some also having it injected into their veins. All forty of these inmates (whom Heinrich Himmler had personally selected, at the special request of Becker-Freyseng and several other Nazi ‘physicians’) were then subjected to a liver autopsy, while they were still alive and without the use of any anesthetic.

    Becker-Freyseng had the results of these hideous salt-water experiments published in a paper entitled Thirst and Thirst Quenching in Emergency Situations at Sea .

    Captured by the Allies at the end of the war, Becker-Freyseng was one of the twenty-three Nazi physicians whose cases were heard at the so-called ‘Doctors’ Trial’. Found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, he was subsequently sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. (Of the twenty-three defendants, seven were sentenced to death and the same number acquitted. The others received prison sentences of varying lengths.)

    Karl Brandt, Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, is sentenced to death by hanging at the end of the ‘Doctors’ Trial’.

    In 1946, however, Becker-Freyseng suddenly found that his punishment had been suspended, in return for his co-operation in assisting the Americans with ‘Operation Paperclip’ – a series of projects relating to space travel. For this, he was required to move to the US.

    Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1960, Becker-Freyseng died from this condition the following year, aged fifty-one.

Blobel, Paul

    Blobel was born August 13, 1894 in Potsdam, a city bordering the German capital of Berlin. He served in the First World War, with such conspicuous bravery that he was ultimately awarded the Iron Cross.

    At the end of the war, he studied architecture, a profession he went on to practice from 1924 – 1931. Upon losing his job, he joined the Nazi Party and the Schutzstaffel (SS). Blobel rose rapidly through the ranks to become Commanding Officer of Sonderkommando 4a , a military unit active in Ukraine.

    The Sonderkommando 4a were tasked with following Wehrmacht (‘Defense Force’) troops into Ukraine, where they would subsequently ‘liquidate’ all ‘racial and political’ undesirables.

    In August 1941, Blobel ordered the creation of a ghetto in Zhytomyr, a city to the northwest of Ukraine, for 3,000 Jews. All of these Jews were murdered one month later.

    Another massacre – of Jewish women and children – occurred at Bila Tserkva, a city in central Ukraine, August 22, 1941.

    Blobel then organized the Babi Yar (‘Old Woman’s Ravine’) massacre in Kiev, September 29 – 30, 1941, in which 33,771 people died. Part of what took place was described by one of the twenty-eight known survivors, Soviet-Jewish actress Dina Pronicheva.

    She told of how the victims were lined up on a ledge, and