Herta Oberheuser was a dermatologist from Düsseldorf who volunteered in 1940 to serve as a camp doctor in the women's section of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Between the summer of 1942 and the late summer of 1943 she worked beside two surgeons, Karl Gebhardt and Fritz Fischer, on a program of experiments carried out on Polish women held in the camp, women who had never consented and who had been imprisoned, as the court later put it, "without so much as a semblance of trial." When the United States put twenty-three German physicians and officials on trial at Nuremberg in the Medical Case, she was the only woman in the dock.
On August 19, 1947, Military Tribunal I found her guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The next day the tribunal sentenced her to twenty years' imprisonment. She did not serve them. She was free by 1952, opened a practice in a village in Schleswig-Holstein, and treated patients for most of a decade before the West German authorities, pressed from abroad, took away her right to practice medicine. She died in 1978.
Oberheuser was born in Cologne on May 15, 1911. She studied at the universities of Bonn and Düsseldorf and trained as a dermatologist, and she lived in Düsseldorf. In her own testimony at Nuremberg she described her work before the camp as a post in the children's ward of a dermatology clinic in that city.
Her political commitments ran in parallel with her training. The tribunal's judgment set them out in a few lines. She joined the League of German Girls in 1935, and held the rank of "Block Leader." In August 1937 she joined the Nazi Party. She was also a member of the Association of National Socialist Physicians. The prosecution did not charge her with membership in the SS, the fourth count laid against several of her co-defendants.
In 1940 Oberheuser volunteered as a camp doctor in the women's department of Ravensbrück, and she stayed there until June 1943. She worked as a ward doctor. Describing those years to the tribunal, she spoke of herself as a young physician in 1941 and 1942 who felt isolated in the camp and had no senior colleagues to turn to.
The experiments that brought her to Nuremberg began in July 1942. The tribunal found that Gebhardt personally sought permission for them from the head of the SS and personally carried out the first operations, "aided by defendants Fischer and Oberheuser." The work ran from July 20, 1942, until August 1943. The subjects were Polish women held in the camp. A second program, which the court treated separately, was carried out at the same time on the same group of women.
The judgment is plain about who those women were and how they came to be on the operating table. The camp authorities chose them. Nobody asked them for consent. They protested, the tribunal found, "both orally and in writing," and said they "would have preferred death to continued experiments." Gebhardt's defense was that the Polish women were former members of the resistance who had already been condemned to death. The court rejected that outright. Even condemned prisoners, the judges wrote, "still were entitled to the protection of the laws of civilized nations," and these women had been held at Ravensbrück without any trial at all.
The tribunal found that at least five deaths among the subjects were caused by the first series. On Oberheuser's own part it went further. A witness who had worked in the camp testified that deaths occurred among the women on whom the operations were performed, and the judges accepted that most of those deaths could have been prevented by proper care afterward. "Many of them died as a result of the experiments," the judgment says.
Her role, as the court reconstructed it, was not that of a bystander. "Oberheuser was thoroughly aware of the nature and purpose of the experiments," the judges wrote. She helped to select the subjects, examined them and prepared them for surgery. She was in the operating room during the operations and assisted in them. And after each operation, the tribunal found, she cooperated with the two surgeons by deliberately neglecting the women in her care. Fischer and Oberheuser, the court concluded, "were Gebhardt's active agents in carrying out these experiments," and "they personally committed atrocities involved therein."
In June 1943 she left the camp. With Gebhardt's and Fischer's help she moved to the hospital at Hohenlychen, where she became an assistant physician under Gebhardt and worked in the ward for women and children.
The United States brought the Medical Case, formally United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al., as the first case before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. The indictment was filed on October 25, 1946, and served on the defendants on November 5. It named twenty-three physicians and administrators, with Karl Brandt first on the list, and she was the only woman among them. The indictment described Oberheuser in two lines: physician at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and assistant physician to Gebhardt at the hospital at Hohenlychen.
She was charged under three counts: a common design or conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The specific charges against her concerned four sets of experiments. Two were the Ravensbrück programs on which she was later convicted. A third concerned sterilization experiments at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and other places between 1941 and 1945. The fourth concerned experiments at Dachau and Auschwitz in 1942.
The defendants were arraigned on November 21, 1946. The trial transcript opens on December 5, with a defense motion for a continuance, and the prosecution delivered its opening statement on December 9. Two defense lawyers represented her through the trial.
Her defense case was heard on April 3, 1947, and she went into the witness box herself on April 3 and again on April 8, when she faced cross-examination by the prosecution. Under questioning by her own counsel she built her answer on subordination. "I never worked independently," she told the court, and she said she had always followed the instructions of Gebhardt and Fischer to the letter. She cast herself as an assistant with no scientific responsibility for the work. She denied choosing the women, and under cross-examination she held to the account that the camp administration had sent them to her. She also told the tribunal that she had hoped, as a woman, to help the prisoners in her care.
The judgment did not adopt her account. Its findings on her role, from the selection of the women to the neglect that followed each operation, rest in part on the testimony of a witness who had worked in the camp, and they leave no room for the passive assistant she described.
Before the closing speeches, the tribunal dealt with the first count. On July 14, 1947, it ruled on the conspiracy charge, and in the end it declined to convict any defendant on it. The case against Oberheuser therefore turned on counts two and three, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on the particular experiments the prosecution could tie to her.
Two of the four charges never reached a conviction. The prosecution abandoned the sterilization charge, and the court said it "will not be considered further." On the experiments at Dachau and Auschwitz, she was acquitted, as were the two co-defendants charged with her on that count. What remained were the two Ravensbrück programs, and for those, the judges wrote, the same facts applied to her as to Fischer and Gebhardt.
Military Tribunal I delivered its judgment on August 19, 1947. The four judges, three state judges from the United States and an alternate member, found sixteen of the twenty-three defendants guilty. Seven were sentenced to death. Nine received prison terms. Seven were acquitted.
On the defendant Oberheuser the court's conclusion was brief. "Military Tribunal I finds and adjudges that the defendant Oberheuser is guilty under counts two and three of the indictment." The judges set out their reasoning on the nature of the crimes in one sentence: non-consenting non-German nationals had been used in at least some of the experiments, many had died, and "to the extent that the crimes committed were not war crimes, they were crimes against humanity."
The sentences followed the next day, August 20, 1947. Addressing her by name, the tribunal told her that it had "found and adjudged you guilty of War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, as charged under the indictment heretofore filed against you," and sentenced her "to imprisonment for a term of twenty years, to be served at such prison or prisons, or other appropriate place of confinement, as shall be determined by competent authority."
The Medical Case was the first of the trials before the American military tribunals at Nuremberg, and the path of review it offered ran not to an appeals court but to the Military Governor of the United States zone of occupation. The convicted defendants asked him to set the judgments aside. On November 22, 1947, the Military Governor denied their appeals, and her sentence stood. The defendants' last move was to the Supreme Court of the United States, which denied their appeals on February 16, 1948.
She was released in 1952, after about five years in custody, and she went back to medicine. She opened a practice in Stocksee, a village in Schleswig-Holstein near Kiel, licensed by the West German authorities.
Survivors of the Nazi camps tried for years, through the German government and the medical authorities, to have her barred. In 1957 a German court turned aside one attempt to revoke her license. In July 1958 the Ministry of the Interior of Schleswig-Holstein announced that it had moved again to revoke it. The announcement followed a protest from the British medical profession, voiced that month at a meeting of the British Medical Association in Birmingham. On August 13, 1958, she lost her physician's license.
At the same time the ministry ordered that she be tried again on the charges from Nuremberg. That part failed. An administrative court ruled that a second trial would breach the rule against trying a person twice for the same offense. The same court upheld the revocation itself, finding that she had practiced "contrary to German law and the ethical rules of the medical profession" through her part in the experiments at Ravensbrück. The ruling came in early December 1960.
Her lawyers appealed to a higher court. On December 20, 1960, while that appeal was still pending, the West German authorities ordered her to stop practicing medicine. On July 7, 1961, she gave up the practice of medicine and surrendered the title of doctor.
Herta Oberheuser died on January 24, 1978, in Linz am Rhein, in West Germany. She was 66.
The charge sheet and the judgment do not line up exactly. The judgment lists the charges against her as the two Ravensbrück programs and sterilization, the last abandoned by the prosecution, and does not discuss the experiments at Dachau and Auschwitz in her section at all. She was nonetheless charged on that series, and she was acquitted on it.
The precise number of women who died is not settled by the judgment. The court found at least five deaths caused by the first series, in its findings on Gebhardt, and in her own section it found that many of the subjects died, without a total.
May 15, 1911: Herta Oberheuser is born in Cologne.
1935: She joins the League of German Girls.
August 1937: She joins the Nazi Party.
1940: She volunteers as a camp doctor in the women's department of Ravensbrück.
July 20, 1942: The first of the Ravensbrück experiments found by the tribunal begins.
June 1943: She leaves Ravensbrück for the hospital at Hohenlychen.
August 1943: The experiments end, by the tribunal's findings.
October 25, 1946: The indictment in the Medical Case is filed.
November 21, 1946: The defendants are arraigned.
December 9, 1946: The prosecution opens its case.
April 3 and 8, 1947: She testifies in her own defense.
July 14, 1947: The tribunal rules on the conspiracy count.
August 19, 1947: Military Tribunal I finds her guilty under counts two and three.
August 20, 1947: She is sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment.
November 22, 1947: The Military Governor denies the appeals.
February 16, 1948: The U.S. Supreme Court denies the appeals.
1952: She is released and resumes practice in Stocksee.
1957: A German court turns aside a move to revoke her license.
August 13, 1958: She loses her physician's license.
December 1960: An administrative court upholds the revocation.
December 20, 1960: She is ordered to stop practicing pending appeal.
July 7, 1961: She gives up practice and surrenders the title of doctor.
January 24, 1978: She dies in Linz am Rhein.