Beheadings in the Third Reich

[htk]

Just been reading the book "hitler prisons" by Nikolaus Wachsmann (yale uni press). Here a small part of the discribed legal terror mentioned the death sentences.

Next to the earlier discribed blood collection of the victims (the book metioned in 25 executions 1500 transfusions could be extracted), also hobby bob gynacologist was mentioned
Herr Hermann Stieve was said to have permission to experiment on woman after the execution.
Supposedly he removed their wombs. He published his results in scientif magazines even after the war ended
(source E Klee, auswitz die NS Medizin und und ihre opfer, 1997)

[aperson]

Please consider the possibility of 1500 tranfusions from 25 bodies

As someone who is not a transfusion expert but has studied a bit of anatomy and physiology, and professionally written about medicine for over 15 years, I can confidently state the following: A single 70kg adult male human contains up to approximately 5 litres of blood (Taggart, Starr and Cecie Starr. Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life. California: Wadsworth, 1989: 398). If we execute 25 x 70 kg adult males and collect all of their blood and we have 125 Litres of blood.

A "unit" of whole blood (not individual blood components such as platelets or packed red blood cells) is 450 mL (Directdelta.com.au Dictionary of Science and enginerring. Unit of blood http://www.diracdelta.co.uk/science/sou ... ource.html accessed 17/03/08). Just have a look at the size of the typical bottles you see being connected to wounded soldiers from WWII footage, they clearly appear to be about a pint or maybe 0.5 litres in volume. Note they also appear to usually contain plasma only (i.e. blood with the red blood cells taken out) which is used to just to replace blood volume. This will be perfectly suitable for otherwise healthy young men with a previously normal haematocrit (percentage content of red blood cells in the blood) who may have experienced significant blood volume loss (i.e. due to wounds) but whose otherwise healthy status (youth, good lung function, otherwise healthy circulatory system and normal haematocrit prior to injury) will allow them to survive following volume replacement only (as opposed to needing whole blood).

So complete extraction of all 5 litres of blood from each of the 70 kg adult males in a series of 25 beheadings, gives us our 125 litres of whole blood which - based on a typical red cell volume of 50% to make the calculations easy (it is usually a little bit lower in the 40 - 45% range) would give us:

either 250 X 500 mL infusions of whole blood,

or 125 x 500 mL infusions of plasma + 125 x 500 mL infusions of packed red cells.

If Nikolaus Wachsmann mentions 1500 transfusions from 125 litres of blood the volume of his average whole blood transfusion would be 83 mL. Could you please elaborate on his source or if there was some other manner in which 1500 transfusions could be extracted from 125 L of whole blood.

If anyone on this forum who has more specific medical or battlefield experience could also comment it would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance and regards

Maurice

[fredric]

Please consider the possibility of 1500 tranfusions from 25 bodies

As someone who is not a transfusion expert but has studied anatomy, physiology, worked in hospitals and professionally written about medicine for over 15 years, I can confidently state the following. A single 70kg adult male human contains up to approximately 5 litres of blood (Taggart, Starr and Cecie Starr. Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life. California: Wadsworth, 1989: 398)

Execute 25 x 70 kg adult males and collect all of their blood and we have 125 Litres of blood.

Volume replacement using plasma only or volume and red blood cell replacement using whole blood will depend on an injured person's pre-innury haemoglobin level, extent of volume loss, their size, and the desired target haemoglobin level.

A "unit" of whole blood (not individual blood components such as platelets or packed red blood cells) is 450 mL (Directdelta.com.au Dictionary of Science and enginerring. Unit of blood http://www.diracdelta.co.uk/science/sou ... ource.html accessed 17/03/08). Just have a look at the size of the typical bottles you see being connected to wounded soldiers from WWII footage, they clearly appear to be about a pint or 0.5 litres. Note they also appear to usually contain plasma only used to replace blood volume (i.e. blood without the red blood cells taken out). This will be perfectly suitable for otherwise healthy young men with a previously normal haematocrit (percentage content of red blood cells in the blood) who may have experience significant blood volume loss (e.g. due to wounds) but whose otherwise healthy status (youth, good lung function, healthy circulation and normal haematocrit prior to injury) will allow them to survive following volume replacement only (as opposed to whole blood).

So based on a complete collection of all 5 litres of blood typically present in each of the 70 kg adult males in a series of 25 beheadings, we could have a collection of 125 litres of whole blood. Based on a typical red cell volume of 50% to make the calculations easy (it is usually a little bit lower in the 40 - 45% range) and provided we could drain all the blood from a series of 25 typical 70 kg male victims we could get:

250 X 500 mL infusions of whole blood
or
125 x 500 mL infusions of plasma
+
125 x 500 mL infusions of packed red cells

If Nikolaus Wachsmann mentions 1500 transfusions from 125 litres of blood the volume of his average whole blood transfusion would be 83 mL. Could you please elaborate on his source or if there was some other manner in which 1500 transfusions could be extracted from 125 L of whole blood.

If anyone on this forum who has more specific medical or battlefield experience could also comment it would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance and regards

Maurice

I certainly do not have your expertise in this subject. I do know of two references to the collection of blood from condemned prisoners for the purposes of transfusions to wounded German soldiers. The first can be found in a book by a prisoner in Brandenburg Prison which claims prison doctors would establish the blood types of the condemned and draw blood for this purpose prior to beheading and according to the author, was a standard operating procedure in the later years of the war in order to help replenish German blood banks. I have found no supporting documentation for this claim.

A second source describes the collection of blood directly from the victim immediately after beheading. This "collection at the fallbeil" technique caught the blood in a special container. The blood was treated with a preservative enabling its use in transfusions and I think the report I have mentions that some 1500 transfusions were done with blood collected in this manner;this may the same source you mention. The document is in my files and names the doctor who developed this practice, one not widely used. I will have to check it.

We also have the extensive reports of noted German Doctor Herrlinger who conducted experiments "at the guillotine" and published his findings focusing on the spleen. He collected pipettes of blood within seconds after the head was severed and commented that the blood sometimes become contaminated with "chyme" which rendered the samples useless.
Herrlinger is discussed at some length in the book Nazi Doctors. I do not believe his objective was collecting blood for transfusions.

[htk]

the sources the writer based this story were

pro wo 309/199 vernehmung von Willi, P (11.09.45)
R. Bimmler, Eidliche aussage 23.08.47 (this was the hobby bob doctor drawing blood)
Dhr Thümmler, Eidliche aussage (26.08.45)
Kripo Brandenburg bericht, 31/10.45 (reprint ibid p.88)

Could the blood be mixed up with something else to make up the difference ?

[aperson]

Could the blood be mixed up with something else to make up the difference ?

Again, I am not an expert and would love to hear from someone who truly is but I also spent several years in a company involved in the development of artificial plasma replacements as well as solutions for the preservation of harvested transplant organs.

While it has always been of clinical interest, the development of artificial plasma volume expanders has really only accelerated since the emergence of the AIDS/HIV threat. So, as far as I know it has only been over the past 25-30 years or so that significant advances have been made in the development of wholly artificial blood volume expanders.

Provided the airway is functional, the Medics first objective preserve the ciculation - therefore to stop the cause of blood loss. If necessary the medic must then either a) restore the volume of blood through simple fluids or blood-derived plasma or artificial plasma volume expanding agents which, like plasma, preserve the osmotic pressure within the circulatory system because they contain large non-diffusible molecules (such as in hemaccel or solutions based on hetastarch) or b) restore both the volume and the total oxygen carrying capacity of the blood (using the previous agents mentioned and/or whole blood and/or additional packed red blood cells) depending on the clinical status of the injured.

The American military has extensively supported the development of both artificial plasma volume expanders and whole blood alternatives (interestingly, with much interest from Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse all blood products during medical treatment).

So as far as I know, WW2 medics only had typical fluid replacement (normal saline, ringers solution, dextrose solutions) and used either whole blood, plasma (blood without the red cells) or packed red cells to restore blood volume and oxygen carrying capacity.

I have no doubt that the blood of prisoners and the condemned was used for transfusion by the German military as fredric mentioned in the post above

As the calculation I showed previously I am having trouble understanding how 1500 clinically useful transfusions might be extracted from the bodies of just 25 beheaded people and so I am interested in the interpretation of the sources cited by htk. Unfortunately, I do not have access to the texts cited but if the specific sections dealing with the extraction of 1500 transfusions from 25 beheaded victims are available, the context and translation of the passages would be very interesting.

How did those crazy, evil Nazi doctors manage it? (sorry)

Also, I would be interested in whether those crazy (sorry, I nearly forgot the evil) Nazi doctors made any headway with organ harvesting and efforts toward organ transplantation using the beheaded. (The first successful kidney transplant was performed in 1950 & Christian Baarnard performed the first successful heart transplantation in December 1967).

Was the utterly invaluable resource of 20 to 30-odd thousand otherwise relatively healthy human beings somehow used constructively (other than harvesting blood). Any modern transplant surgeon would be gnashing his teeth at the thought of such waste.

Is anyone able to enlighten further?

Thanks again

Maurice

[Paul53]

There is possibly a slight misunderstanding here.I have the same book as htk and will give a translation of the page concerned to the best of my knowledge,its on page 309 quote...at least one prison let the blood if its executed been collected.In 1944, dr Rudolf Bimler,subdirector of Brandenburg/Havel hospital and SS member,contac6ted the nearby Brandenburg/Gorden prison.He claimed to worry about the general shortage of blood.Would it be possible for him to collect the blood of the executed which,as he put it later,was draining away uselessly?Prison authoreties gave him the go ahead.Every two weeks,Bimler and the prison docter of Brandenburg/Gorden collected blood samples from the newly convicted on death row.One day before the execution, Bimler received a list containing the names of those to be executed.He chosed five or six, based on the results of previous blood probes.{?}Next day he witnessed their executions.Bimlers assistant recalls >that when one of the thus selected was guillotined,Bimler pulled the body aside to prevent the blood from splattering uselessly against the knife...I held the container and collected the blood.<
The assistant was payed extra for his services.The blood was temporarely conserved by adding citric acid to it, and was used next for blood transfusions in the local hospital.After the war, Bimler estimated that,with his 25 VISITS to the execution site,he collected enough blood for about 1500 transfusions..unquote.
Bimler also paid 25 visits to Brandenburg Gorden, which would amount to some 150 people.The keeper of Plotzensee memorial in Berlin told me a similar story,the blood collecting there was said to have been done by medicals of nearby Charite hospital.

[Paul53]

The personal reply doent seem available now. htk I saw the John F Mortimer book on Marktplaats.nl twice.

[aperson]

Dear Paul53


Thank you for your translation of the text. As I mentioned in my last post, I strongly suspected there must have been a translation or interprative misjudgement underlying the claim that 1500 transfusions were derived from 25 bodies. 1500 transfusions from 25 visits makes so much more sense. Another aspect I am interested in is the treatment and handling of the harvested blood.

As many of you will have experienced, a modern blood collection involves applying a tourniquet to the donor's arm, swabbing the puncture site, inserting a sterile butterfly needle into a vein and then collecting the blood into a sterile bag via a sterile collecting set. The harvested blood is citrated to prevent coagulation and stored either for use as whole blood or fractionated in order to create various blood products (including plasma, clotting factors, immunoglobulins etc etc).

Based on the description of the collection process given by earlier posts, it would appear that the likelihood of significant contamination was significant. For example, by contact with the fallbeil blade itself (did they decontaminate and sterilise the blade prior to the collections or in between executions?) and through the use of an open and I am assuming, very wide-mouthd or bucket-type container (would it have been sterilised?). This is not to mention the opportunity for other various contaminents from being collected with the blood such as pieces of tissue such as spinal cord, bone fragments etc . Even if suitably citrated and appropriately stored for the bulk of the time it is required to transport the products to either hospitals or the front, the blood/blood products might still suffer (and hence the recipients might suffer) as a result of contamination resulting from collection "at the Fallbeil-side." Plasma produced from such collections would probably be fine -although it would still have a significant chance of being microbiologically contaminated. Red cells and whole blood would carry the same risk of microbiological contamination as the plasma as well as the chances of contamination by other tissues, bone fragments etc. depending on the status of haemofiltration technology at that time (again any experts on the status of 1940s German haemofiltration technology out there?)

The other factor we do not have information about is what proportion of the total blood volume would typically undergo spontaneous ejection (or once the heart stops beating, spontaneous drainage from a decapitated body). We have some 18th/19th century observational information about how long it takes for apparent brain death to occur after the loss of blood supply - it is somewhere over the last 100 odd pages of this thread that I can't recall - I think it was estimated to up to a couple of minutes at the very most (although it would be interesting to see results based on the time to extinction of electrical brain activity). Hmm, that last aside unfortunately reminds me of a recent suggestion in this thread expressing interest in viewing high speed still photography of a human decapitation to better understand the mechanics of a fallbeil blade penetrating a human neck...).

Owing to the progressive loss of blood volume as the decapitated body bleeds out, the heart too will certainly reach a point where it does not have sufficient oxygen/nutrient supply and waste elimnation services to continue to function. So I would suspect (based on at least the vivisection experiments I was compelled to perform as a student) that the heart would cease to beat significantly before it managed to eject all the blood from the body. The question is how much volume typically remains in the body by the time the heart stops beating. I am sure that there must be someone out there who could provide a meaningful estimate as to how much blood loss might be tolerated before cardiac death occurs. As we all know the heart needs its own circulation to be supplied in order for it to continue to pump and it will continue to contract for a short period in a fashion similar to the brief period of apparently purposefull brain activity in a freshly decapitated head. Then we need to consider how much will simply drain out due to gravitational forces before the effects of coagulation affect the drainage.

Consideration of these factors leads me to strongly suspect the following:

Based on my level of understanding, it would probably make much more sense to use conventional blood collection techniques as described earlier in this post to make one or more of what could be described as "overenthusiastic" blood collections on subjects awaiting execution. What I am tring to offer for consideration is that the doctors/blood collectors might simply adopt the approach of harvesting a greater volume of blood than would otherwise be collected from a subject whose long-term good health was a key concern of the doctor using a conventional techniques . This could also involve some rudimentary fluid replacement so the donor could still be dragged off to execution alive. You would have your sterile and uncontaminated blood, depending on the overall age and health of the "donor" you could probably halve the concentration of red blood cells in their body and they could still be walked to their execution. With sufficient foresight even a couple of collections might be made prior to execution.

So we agree that Nazi doctors did harvest blood from prisoners destined for execution (and probably other prisoners as well as from the general German population). As a yardstick by which to guage the volume of blood/blood products needed for a WW2 military organization, by wars end, the American Red Cross blood bank had provided 13 million units of plasma which would have required about 24 million litres of whole blood donated by the American population (WWII Combat Medic; Use of Plasma During World War II. http://home.att.net/~steinert/wwii.htm# ... 20War%20II accessed 16/03/08 and based on plasma constituting about 55% of total blood volume). A key problem with packed red blood cells and whole blood is their comparatively short shelf-life particularly when compared to plasma - how long did it take a merchant ship to cross the Atlantic?

Thinking about the various aspects of blood collection from beheaded victims in Nazi Germany however then leads to a couple of question rearing their heads that might (or may not) be worthy of further discussion:

Is there a possibility that the description of the schafrichter's (I hope I spelt that correctly) assistants and a medical doctor collecting the spurting blood from a freshly decapitated body into a bucket-like vessel belongs with the legends of diabolical Nazi evil rather than with the realities of diabolical Nazi evil? As I hope I have explained my main problems involve the methodology of collection and the quality and useability of the end products.

The other thought that subsequently creeps into my mind is how meaningful was this number of transfusions in the context of the overall needs of the German Miltary - was it worth doing?

Any coments or info greatly appreciated

Regards

Maurice

[Paul53]

Hi Maurice,
Certainly I lack the knowledge to say anything sensible about the technicals of your story.But to begin with the last questions,was it worth it? The answer is an absolute no.The gain of these methods is,even for a layman s eyes, doubtful, to say the least, but I am afraid the whole question is consonent with the general morality of what the German medical profession had come to during the Nazi rule.That morality was for a great part non existant , by any standard.The German medical profession was ,in general ,very significantly corrupted by the world view of the Nazi s.With exeptions of course. Many examples are known of the zeal with which a lot of German docters performed medical experiments in, for example, the concentration camps. Many of those responsable for these experiments were never called to justice after the war and continued their careers in post war Germany{or the Netherlands for that matter}
Detailed information about this can be found elsewhere on this forum, and I do not think this is the place to expand on the methods used on mostly innocent victims of Nazi barbarism by German medical personnel, but to name just a few,you may look for the names of Clauberg, Kitt,Entress ,Weber,Kramer,Babor,von Bodmann,Mengele,Schumann, Rascher,Hirt,Sievers,Kramer,Klehr,Thilo,Mennecke,Klein,Heyde ,Spanner, van Nieuwenhuysen etc etc.They{and many more} performed experiments,many of which bordered on the bizarre and surrealistic.I know offhand of only one, just one experiment that appeared to have had some value for general medicine after the war, a technique referred to as electroforesis,and which was pioneered in I believe Buchenwald.

[Paul53]

{ The source of my remark about the electroforesis is the book Der SS Staat by Eugen Kogon,himself a former Buchenwald inmate}Regards Paul

[gordon anderson]

QUOTE :
htk wrote:
Hi pete
if you wait long enough, i am afraid someday you might get your wish. With all the discussions about "humane Killings" the fallbeil will surely come back someday. If i recall correctly Gordon said some time ago he encountered a fallbeil
in a north german prison. Question is; what was it doing there ?

Fredric wrote:
I think it is one fabricated after the war but not used. What is it doing there? Probably waiting for laws to change

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
No Frederic, The fallbeil I posted the picture of---- was aTEGEL type . It claimed many victims througout the war. The one you refer to was The Mainz fallbeil ,an 1854 type and was built for Nordrhein Westfalia by Tiggemann , but never used. I did examine that machine and documented it in Bonn where it is still located . I have NOT posted pictures of that one. There is a recent picture of the one in question ,The Mainz fallbeil ,that shows a 2nd drainage sluice under the main metal head basin . That was never a part of the machine before ----to the best of my knowledge-----in any of the museums it has been displayed in . I have pictures that go back to the 40s of it. Where this additional part has suddenly come from ---I do not know. It is very similar to the 2nd drainage part for the Rastatt machine in Ludwigsburg, however. There are Fallbeils still in basements of several prisons throughout Germany . Hamburg for instance.

[Pete26]

If an average human body contains 5 liters of blood, not all of this blood will be lost due to decapitation. At least 20% of that blood will remain in the body after all bleeding stops.

[Piotr1]

I agree with aperson.From medical point of view too much troubles and problems for doubtfull effect

[Piotr1]

There are Fallbeils still in basements of several prisons throughout Germany . Hamburg for instance.
===================================================================================
What do you mean by"fallbeils"? Tegel or earlier model...
And how many fallbeils in total survived the war?

[htk]

the amount of blood available would be 25 (visits) x 5 (victims)x 5 (ltr blood) = 625 Ltr instead of the 125 ltr