On the Autopsy Table in Lodz -- Biebow from Bremen

[chopp]

"Sally, come quick to the Anatomy Building."

The excited voices of my Jewish friends reached me at chemistry class. Here I was in Lodz, in 1947, a first-year medical student absorbed in my studies of inorganic chemistry. Anatomy was far away, scheduled for next year, but there was some urgency in the voices, and I asked impatiently. "What's going on?"

"Come and see for yourself." answered Sarah, a girl I knew well from the years spent together in the Lodz Ghetto. Reluctantly I left the lab.

As I entered the Anatomy Building, the smell of formalin hit my nostrils and caused a coughing spell, but through the tears I saw a naked body on the table. The skin was leathery, yellowish, covering a rather small body of a middle-aged man. Brown hair draped the skull and thin, purple lips formed a straight line on this rather unremarkable face.

"Sally," Sarah said triumphantly, "take the scalpel and start the dissection of Hans Biebow."

HANS BIEBOW!

I looked at the exposed body again. The narrow forehead, the shape of the jaw, were the sole remainders of Hans Biebow, the man who liquidated the Jews of Lodz.

Is it the same Biebow, the tall, blond beast straight from Nietzsche's description of a German "Ubermensch?"

Is it Biebow, the six-foot-tall Wagnerian god in shiny black boots, whip in hand?

What happened to the golden hair, the cold blue eyes? That's how I remember him as he stood on the podium during the eradication of Lodz Ghetto in the summer of 1944. I was then eighteen....

by Salomea Kape a retired 66-year-old physician, specializing in anesthesiology. She came to the United States in 1966 and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

http://www.forensic-psych.com/articles/ ... Bremen.php

[I was searching for details regarding Biebow's execution and found the above memoir which I have not read before.]

[michael mills]

Information on Biebow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Biebow

According to the historian Chritopher Browning in his study of the Polish ghettos, Biebow was a "pruductionist", favouring the preservation of the Lodz Ghetto as a centre of production, using the imprisoned Jewish population as a labour force.

The article gives no information on what Biebow was charged with by the Polish court.

[history1]

On April 30th, 1947 the court in Lodz found Hans Biebow guilty of genocide and sentenced him to death by hanging (executed in the district Bałuty in the city Lodz on June 23rd 1947 ). His body was given to the education of future physicians in the field of anatomy .

Translation from: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Biebow