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Rascher submerging a human subject in an ice bath

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Rascher submerging a human subject in an ice bath

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Rascher committed countless atrocities against the prisoners at this camp all while claiming they were efforts to save the lives of German pilots.
While working on his homemade coagulant, Polygal, Rascher believed that the use of the Polygal tablets would help slow down any bleeding from gunshot wounds sustained during battle or surgery. While administering these tests, the prisoners were given a Polygal tablet then shot through the neck or chest or had their limbs amputated without anaesthesia.
While studying the effects freezing water on humans, Rascher claimed that the purpose of his experiments were to find out which was the best way for German pilots to rewarm after they had been forced down in the North Sea and suffered hypothermia.
During this wicked period of Sigmund Rascher, innocent lives were lost and many crimes were committed. Dr. Sigmund Rascher was an evil Nazi with a sick mindset.

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It is said that Dr. Sigmund Rascher did not have a “shred of human compassion.” Some examples we see of this is when the altitude experiments began and Himmler suggested that anyone who survived be spared a death sentence and given life imprisonment instead and Rascher hastily disagreed. He argued that there was no need to make any exceptions for them because they were considered to be “subhumans” and their lives were NOT valued.
Another example of Rascher’s cold-heartedness we see is when asked if the freezing experiments could be moved to Auschwitz because of the more open space and that it would be less conspicuous. He even went so far as to complain that “the experimental subjects bellow (!) when they freeze severely.”

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After they were condemned, Rascher was faced with his worst nightmare..

He was imprisoned and sent to suffer at Buchenwald after being arrested in 1944, until the camp’s evacuation in April 1945. He along with other prisoners were then transported to Dachau. Rascher was executed by SS-Hauptscharführer Theodor Heinrich Bongartz on April 26, 1945; it ended up being three days before the camp was liberated by American troops. According to sources, Nini Diehl was also executed on Himmler’s orders. Rascher faced death in the same place where he committed countless of his own murders.

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It was necessary for Rascher and his family to appear picture-perfect to the public and Himmler. His wife Diehl was a friend and probable ex-lover of Himmler’s. Rascher broadcasted your fact that his wife had given birth to three children even after reaching 48 years of age! Himmler used a photograph of Rascher and his three sons one of the SS-Leithefte as propaganda material designed for training purposes. There was more to this couple then what met the public eye; Diehl was arrested for kidnapping the three children that her and Rascher had while she was pretending to pregnant with her fourth child. It was later discovered that the three children she claimed to be theirs were not biologically theirs. Rascher was arrested as an accessory to all of the kidnappings, and for a string of other crimes he committed. Rascher was also accused of financial irregularities, the alleged murder of his former lab assistant, and scientific fraud. Both Rascher and his wife were immediately condemned without trial to the concentration camps.

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Several years after studying cancer, Rascher became interested in the effects of altitude and again, requested human subjects from Dachau be provided. He conducted these wretched experiments on the prisoners by using an air force pressure chamber where prisoners were denied oxygen, as a pilot might be during freefall. Most of the trials ended in death for the prisoner. Rascher’s clinical trials and experiments don’t end here, some of his worst, most infamous were his “freezing experiments” that determined the body’s response to cold. For these experiments, Rascher would place prisoners in ice baths to study their final reactions and see if they’d die because the experiments were actually only meant to measure the body’s rewarming process after hypothermia. He tried different warming methods, most commonly, immersion in warm water. A witness claimed that prisoners were thrown into boiling water as a “rewarming method.” Dr. Rascher was intrigued by the delevopment of coagulants that aided blood clotting so he created one. He made it out of beet and apple pectin and called it Polygal. Rascher’s experimental subjects for this were given a Polygal tablet and then shot or had their limbs amputated with no anesthesia. The inhumane treatment the prisoners endured at these concentrations will never be forgotten, and neither will the evil man behind it all.

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Rascher was possibly one of the worst Nazi physicians there ever was. Rascher was said to be meticulous and obsessive about his precision while conducting his experiments and tests. That is the main reason why his research on hypothermia stood as valid science for almost a half century after the war ended, until 1990, when it was finally regarded as inadequate.

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Sigmund Rascher was a member of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, and an S.S. doctor in the early 20th Century, who had been researching the effect of a plant extract on cancer. Rascher wanted to test on humans because he thought rodents weren’t good enough, so in 1939, Himmler granted him access to Dachau prisoners and a study began. Rascher ended up using human subjects as his guinea pigs for his many different and deadly experiments and tests to come at the Dachau concentration camp.