My name is Viktor.
In Buchenwald, the air carried the smell of rotting cabbage, smoke drifting from the crematorium chimney, and the unwashed bodies of thousands of men packed into wooden barracks. But in my block, the air was different. Block 46 smelled of rubbing alcohol, bleach, and expensive tobacco. The walls were white. The beds had sheets. No one struck prisoners with wooden sticks here. Instead, they ended lives quietly, with a needle, and called it science.
I was a Pflegerhäftling — a prisoner-orderly. My duties included mopping floors, changing bedpans, and steadying patients while the Hauptsturmführer administered his injections. It was October of 1943.
A new group arrived at the block. These were not the hollowed-out figures who usually stumbled in from the stone quarry. This time, forty young women were brought through the door — Soviet prisoners of war: radio operators, nurses, field medics. They had been deliberately selected. They were young, physically strong, visibly healthy. They stood in the receiving room, glancing around in cautious wonder, trying to make sense of where they had been taken. After the filth and cold of the general camp, Block 46 must have seemed, to them, like a miracle.
“Do not be afraid,” said a man in a flawlessly pressed white coat, stepping out to greet them.
This was Erwin Ding-Schuler, the master of Block 46. He had the face of a film actor and the eyes of a man who felt nothing.
“You are in the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS,” he said, in polished but cold German.
I translated: Typhus is spreading through the camp. We do not want healthy individuals — people like yourselves — to fall victim to it.
He smiled.
“We will give you a vaccination. It is a powerful new formula. It will protect you. After a short quarantine period, you will be assigned light duties — the kitchen, perhaps, or the laundry.”
I translated his words and felt my tongue turn to stone. I knew the truth. I knew that the word “vaccination” was a deception. But I stayed silent. If I had opened my mouth, I would have been on the neighboring table within the hour.
The women began to smile. One of them — tall, with a blond braid that had somehow survived the camp’s shears — stepped forward.
“Thank you, doctor,” she said. “My name is Katya. We thought… we thought they were taking us somewhere much worse.”
Ding-Schuler laughed warmly.
“Oh, come now, Fräulein. We are civilized people. Science is in the service of life. Please proceed to the treatment room.”
The group was divided.
This was the heart of the experiment. Twenty women were sent to the left wing; twenty to the right. I worked on the left side. There, Ding-Schuler personally administered injections — a clear liquid from ampoules produced by the German pharmaceutical firm Behring.
“Experimental serum,” he dictated to his secretary. “Series A45.”
The women accepted the injections. They believed it was protection.
In the right wing, something else was administered entirely. The women there received saline solution — ordinary salt water — a placebo. They were told the exact same story: It is a vaccine. They had no way of knowing what that designation meant for them. They were the control group. In science, a control group exists to provide comparison data: to understand whether a treatment works, you must observe those who received it alongside those who did not.
In an ordinary hospital, the control group simply receives no pill. In Block 46, the control group would have to perish so that the effectiveness of the formula could be verified against their outcome. They were not patients. They were reference data.
That evening, after Ding-Schuler had gone to dine with his fellow officers, I walked into the ward where the “left group” was resting. Katya was sitting on her bed, mending her tunic.
“He seems like a good doctor,” she said to me, nodding in the direction Ding-Schuler had gone. “Strict, but he cares. Tell me, countryman — is it really true they’ll move us to the kitchen?”
I looked at her. At her bright face. At the hands that still remembered home.
“Yes,” I forced out. “Get some sleep, Katya. You’ll need your strength.”
I stepped into the corridor, pressed my back against the cold wall, and closed my eyes. She was thanking her executioner. She did not know that in two weeks, the second phase would begin.
Two weeks passed. Forty women lived in relative cleanliness. They ate warm soup. They slept on sheets. Color returned to their cheeks. They laughed sometimes. They wrote letters to their families — letters that Ding-Schuler burned in the stove of his office. They believed the worst was behind them. They did not know that those two weeks served a single purpose: to allow the experimental formula time to generate a response in those who had received it, while those who had received only water simply rested and recovered their strength.
Then came November 1943.
Ding-Schuler arrived early in the morning, accompanied by two SS orderlies wheeling a gurney. On it lay a man — skeletal, his skin a deep yellow, unconscious, trembling with severe fever. His lips were darkened with dried blood. This was the source — a prisoner from the general camp, gravely ill with typhus at its most acute and contagious stage.
The doctor approached him, checked the thermometer, and nodded with quiet satisfaction.
“The biological material is ideal,” he said. “Excellent for the infection phase.”
He drew a full syringe of the man’s blood.
“Viktor,” he said, glancing at me. “Call the first group.”
I understood what was about to happen. They were not going to wait for the women to be exposed to illness naturally. They would introduce the typhus pathogen directly into the bloodstream — an accelerated test of the formula’s effectiveness. It was, in essence, the same as testing a shield by placing a person behind it and then firing a weapon at point-blank range.
I entered the ward.
“Girls,” my voice trembled. “The doctor is calling. A second injection — to reinforce the first.”
They rose obediently. Katya went first.
“More injections,” she sighed, adjusting her braid. “Well, if it has to be done, it has to be done — as long as we stay healthy.”
She entered the treatment room. She saw the gurney. She saw the syringe in the doctor’s hand.
“What is that?” she asked, her face going pale. “Why is it dark?”
Ding-Schuler produced his practiced, reassuring smile.
“Do not be afraid, Fräulein. This is a serum extracted from patients who have recovered. It strengthens your own immunity — passive immunization. A completely standard procedure.”
He lied as naturally as he breathed.
Katya looked at me. In her eyes was a question: Vitya — is it true?
I stood behind the doctor’s back. I was expected to nod. If I had shaken my head — if I had shouted, Run! — both of us would have been gone within minutes, and the other thirty-nine women as well. I nodded slowly, heavily, as though my head weighed a kilogram of stone.
“Sit down, Katya,” I said in someone else’s voice. “Give me your arm.”
She rolled up her sleeve. Her skin was warm and alive. Ding-Schuler tightened the tourniquet. The needle entered the vein. Five cubic centimeters. The dark liquid traveled inward.
Rickettsia prowazekii. Millions of microscopic pathogens rushing into her bloodstream — toward her heart, her brain, her smallest blood vessels.
“Good,” said the doctor, withdrawing the needle and writing in his log. “Next.”
Katya stood. She swayed slightly.
“My head is spinning,” she whispered.
“It’s the excitement,” said Ding-Schuler, without looking up. “Lie down. It will pass.”
Forty times. I witnessed forty injections. Half of the women had received the experimental formula and had at least a theoretical chance. The other half — the control group — had received nothing and were now fully exposed. I later confirmed, by glancing at the log, that Katya was in the control group. Opposite her assigned number was the letter “K” — Kontrolle. She had never been protected. She had been given nothing but the appearance of protection. And now the doctor simply waited for the fire to ignite.
On the third day, Block 46 ceased to be a paradise.
The pathogen, introduced directly into the bloodstream, did not take its usual two weeks to develop. It erupted almost immediately. First one woman did not rise for breakfast. Then another. By midday, twenty had collapsed — those same twenty who had been given saltwater instead of the formula, then exposed to active illness.
I walked between the cots with a tray of thermometers. Every two hours.
“Katya,” I called quietly.
She lay curled tight, shaking.
“Cold,” she whispered. “Vitya, why is it so cold? Can you close the window?”
The windows were already sealed. The ward was warm. But inside her body, a fever was raging. I placed the thermometer under her arm. When I withdrew it, the mercury read 41.2 degrees Celsius — a critical threshold at which the blood begins to behave abnormally and the mind begins to fail.
I should have given her fever medication. Aspirin. Quinine. Anything.
But Ding-Schuler had given explicit orders that morning: “No medication for the control group. We must observe the unaltered course of the illness. Any intervention distorts the outcome data.”
I looked at the mercury. I looked at Katya. I wrote in the log: 41.2. Delirium. Rash appearing on chest.
I was writing her sentence.
On the fifth day, the illness reached its most difficult phase. The typhus pathogen attacks blood vessels and the nervous system. Several of the women began to experience severe disorientation. One girl — Masha — leaped from her bed convinced she was back on the front lines, shouting about enemy vehicles approaching. The orderly and I struggled to keep her still. Her skin was burning, dry, and covered with the telltale rash.
Ding-Schuler stood in the doorway, not helping, making notes in a small notebook.
“Psychomotor agitation — day five,” he murmured. “Classic central nervous system involvement. Very illustrative.”
Katya was not agitated. She was disappearing. She lay flat on her back, staring upward with dry, inflamed eyes. I brought water.
“Drink, Katyusha.”
She managed a small sip. Her lips were cracked. Her tongue had turned dark — what physicians describe as fuliginous. She looked at me. For a moment, her gaze became clear and focused.
“Vitya,” she whispered. “Why is Lenka from the other ward still walking around?”
Lena was one of the vaccinated. She was ill but mobile.
“Her constitution is stronger,” I said, out of habit.
Katya shook her head slowly. The effort cost her something.
“No. You’re lying.” She took hold of my hand. Her fingers were burning. “They didn’t give us anything real… the first time.”
I said nothing. What was there to say?
“They used us, Vitya.” A tear ran down her cheek and dried almost instantly against the heat of her skin. “They just used us — to watch us. To measure the difference.”
She understood. She understood that she was the control, that she was expendable data, that her suffering existed only so it could be plotted as a point on a graph beside which other lives would be measured. This realization was more devastating than the fever itself. The medicine she had trusted had been a performance. The doctor who had spoken to her with warmth had been calculating her decline from the moment she walked through the door.
Ding-Schuler summoned me to his office that evening. He was seated at his desk, drinking coffee and eating a pastry. A large chart hung on the wall — two lines plotted against time. The red line, representing the vaccinated group, climbed slowly but showed signs of leveling off. The black line, representing the control group, rose sharply and remained at its peak.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said, pointing at the black line with his spoon. “Perfect correspondence with the theoretical model. One hundred percent illness rate in the control group. Severe course in every case.”
He took a bite of his pastry.
“Tomorrow the critical phase begins — cardiac involvement. Prepare camphor injections.”
“Will we be treating them?” I asked.
He looked at me as one looks at someone who has said something deeply foolish.
“No, Viktor. The camphor is to prolong the vital signs — to extend consciousness into the terminal stage so we can record precise physiological data at each interval. If the heart gives out too quickly, we lose the tissue resistance measurements. Keep them alive for exactly as long as the recording requires.”
I walked out of his office barely able to stay upright. I wanted to take hold of that chart and tear it from the wall. I wanted to shatter his coffee cup. I wanted to scream until the walls of Block 46 came down.
But I was a prisoner. I returned to the ward. The smell there had changed — something heavy and sweet, the smell of a body overwhelmed beyond its ability to recover.
Katya was moaning softly.
“Mama… Mommy…”
I sat down on the floor beside her bed. I took her hand.
“I’m here, Katya. I’m here.”
I could not give her medicine. I could not give her truth. I could not give her escape. But I could give her my hand. That was all I had left to offer. It was nothing. But I gave it.
That night, the first girl from the control group went still. Her heart, overwhelmed by the toxins, could no longer continue. Ding-Schuler entered the ward, listened at her chest, nodded briefly, and placed a mark on his graph.
Minus one. Nineteen remaining. Continue observation.
The experiment continued. The ball kept moving. Katya was number fourteen on his chart. She was still breathing.
But I knew her turn was close.
This story is based on documented testimony from Buchenwald concentration camp survivor records and post-war trial proceedings. The medical experiments conducted in Block 46 under Erwin Ding-Schuler were among the crimes prosecuted at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial in 1946–47.