After Hitler’s pal died, Nazis recreated his injuries on 72 women in a sick experiment

The Polish woman had returned to Ravensbrück, 70 years after she had last seen the place. This time, she was in a wheelchair, strolled around by an attentive volunteer who called her his “auntie” and wore a Polish flag scarf with her concentration camp number emblazoned on it. They would stop periodically to take selfies with some of the young people who had gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of the camp.

Stanislawa “Stasha” Sledziejowska-Osiczko was one of the lucky ones. She had made it home.

Stasha was a member of the Ravensbrück rabbits, 72 Polish Catholic female prisoners who were subjected to a series of inhumane medical experiments by Nazi doctors at World War II’s only all-female concentration camp. The group’s name came from their treatment as medical lab rabbits — and also, because the cruel experiments often left them with injuries and deformities that meant hopping was the only way they could get around.

German doctor Herta Oberhauser, who was desperate to be a surgeon and performed many of the brutal experiments. She was eventually sentenced to 20 years in the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, but only served five.

Their story has never been widely told, but now, a new novel called “Lilac Girls” by Martha Hall Kelly, describes their incredible journey, which spanned from the concentration camp to the United States, where a well-known philanthropist and socialite named Caroline Ferriday would help them recover from their horrific injuries. Her circumstances could not have been more different than that of the Ravensbrück prisoners — and yet she became one of their biggest defenders during a time when the reality of concentration camps seemed very distant to most Americans.

Prisoner Jadwiga Dzido’s legs bore scars of the gruesome treatment.

“In the beginning, [SS commander] Heinrich Himmler used [Ravensbrück] as a show camp. There were flowers in the window boxes, birdcages and a beautiful road lined with trees. Himmler would show it to the international Red Cross to prove [he was] supposedly treating the prisoners well,” says Kelly of the camp 56 miles north of Berlin, which housed prostitutes, socialists, communists, political protesters, abortionists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, among others.

The experiments began after the death of one of Hitler’s close friends, Reinhard Heydrich (left) who’s physician refused to use sulfa drugs when operating on him. The experiments recreated, and usually exaggerated, the injuries—to prove to Hitler that not using sulfa was the correct decision.

Stanislaus Sledziejowska-Osiczko or “Stasha,” one of the few survivors of Ravensbrück, who returned to the camp for the 70th anniversary of its liberation.

“In the middle of the war, they needed all hands on deck to work, so they weren’t executing as many people. Toward the end, when [Germany was] losing, they began using the gas chambers.” Some 120,000 prisoners passed through the camp over the course of the war; 50,000 died.

While “Lilac Girls” is a novel, Kelly used several real people as characters, including Caroline Ferriday and a German doctor named Herta Oberheuser, who performed many of the experiments. A dermatologist who was desperate to become a surgeon, Oberheuser seized the opportunity to work in the camp. (Later, she would be sentenced to 20 years during the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial. She only served five years; after she was released, she would go on to open a family medical clinic in Stocksee, Germany.)

Ravensbrück’s sulfonamide experiments, as they were known, were performed to test the efficacy of sulfa drugs. They studied nerve and tissue regeneration, including bone transplantation from one person to another. Otherwise healthy prisoners had parts of bone, muscle and tissue removed without anesthesia; healthy limbs were amputated.

Read more http://nypost.com/2016/05/08/the-women-tortured-by-nazi-doctors-and-the-american-heiress-who-saved-them/