“We call Herta Oberheuser to the stand,” Hardy said.
Fritz gave me a look designed to instill courage. I took a deep breath, the blood pounding in my head. I made my way to the stand, the crowd a blur, and scanned the balcony for Mutti.
“How could you participate in the sulfonamide experiments in good conscience, Herta Oberheuser?” Hardy asked.
“Those prisoners were Polish women who were sentenced to death,” I said. “They were scheduled to die anyway. That research helped German soldiers. My blood.”
I found Mutti in the balcony, fingers raised to her lips. No Gunther?
Hardy waved a sheaf of papers in my direction. “Were any persons shot or executed after they had been subjected to these experiments?”
“Yes, but they were political prisoners with—” The red lightbulb attached to the witness stand in front of me lit up. The interpreters were having trouble keeping up. I would have to slow down. “Political…prisoners with…death sentences.”
“And in your affidavit in connection with lethal injections, you admit that you gave five or six lethal injections. Is that correct?”
Why had I admitted that in my affidavit? Could I pretend not to understand the translator?
“No,” I said.
“Well, you gave injections, and after such injections the persons died, did they not?”
“Yes, but as I’ve said in previous examinations, it was a matter of medical aid to patients in their dying agony.”
“And this medical aid resulted in death, did it not?” Hardy asked.
I kept my gaze fixed on my hands in my lap. “No.”
“I said, ‘And this medical aid resulted in death, did it not?’?” Hardy said.
My heart pounded as I studied my hands. “As I said, these patients were in their dying agony.”
“Miss Oberheuser, were you ever given any awards or medals?”
“I received the War Merit Cross, if I remember correctly.”
“And for what reason did you receive that medal?”
“I don’t know.”
Hardy leaned on his podium. “Was it for your participation in the sulfonamide experiments?”
“Certainly not.”
“I have no further questions, Your Honor.”
Though evidence of American experiments similar to those we were charged with was presented and visibly shook the American judges, in the end, the verdicts hinged on the issue of whether the subjects of the experiments had been volunteers. All I could do was wander the orchard in the prison exercise yard and wait.
Fritz seemed devastated by the trial. While some of the doctors took it in stride and tried to research their way out of convictions, Fritz became withdrawn. We were not allowed to talk while in the courtroom, but he once spoke to me as he entered the elevator down to our cells.
“They may as well hang me now,” he said. “I’m finished.”
Fritz was the only Doctors Trial defendant who was openly repentant, a fact that did not go unnoticed among the other doctors, the rest of whom stayed resolute to the end.
The day of our sentencing, August 20, 1947, I wore a black, long-sleeved wool coatdress with a white bow collar provided by the court. My heart hammered at my sternum as I listened to my colleagues’ sentences announced one at a time in the great room. I waited my turn in the hallway behind the wooden courtroom door, a silent American guard at my side. I knew enough English by then to understand Dr. Gebhardt’s fate.
“Dr. Karl Gebhardt, Military Tribunal One has found and adjudged you guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in an organization declared criminal by the judgment of the International Military Tribunal, as charged under the indictment heretofore filed against you. For your said crimes on which you have been and now stand convicted, Military Tribunal One sentences you, Karl Gebhardt, to death by hanging.”
It was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe. When my turn came, the door slid open, I stepped into the courtroom, and put on my translation headphones. The room took on a vivid color, saturated and intense, as I searched the crowd for Mutti.
“Herta Oberheuser, Military Tribunal One has found and adjudged you guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, as charged under the indictment heretofore filed against you.”
Once I heard the word “schuldig” in my translation headphones, I grabbed the railing.
Guilty.
Then came the sentence. I listened, numbed. “For your said crimes on which you have been and now stand convicted, Military Tribunal One sentences you, Herta Oberheuser, 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.”
I was careful to show no trace of reaction to the sentence. Fritz was sentenced to life in prison, and many of the others were doomed to join Gebhardt at the gallows. I would be an old woman when released. In the one minute and forty seconds it took to sentence me, they stripped me of a lifetime of work.
—
ON JUNE 2, 1948, Dr. Gebhardt was hanged on one of the three portable gallows in the prison gymnasium. I read in the paper that the nooses they used that day were not adjusted properly and several of the defendants lingered, alive, for almost ten minutes. The Americans couldn’t even execute a death sentence properly. I was glad the Führer had taken his own life and had not been able to see that travesty. They soon bused me to War Criminal Prison Number 1 in Landsberg, Bavaria, to begin my sentence. The thought of not practicing medicine for all those years was debilitating, and I started my letter writing campaign.
To the mayor of Stocksee went my first.
1947
I screamed most of Wednesday, March 25, 1947. At People’s Hospital in Lublin, we nurses were happy to hear such screams, for it meant a healthy mother. A quiet birth was often a sad one. I was pleased that my baby’s lung function was productive as well, for as a maternity nurse myself, I’d seen things go wrong in seconds. Breech births. Blue babies. Our doctors were excellent (including my sister), but it was the maternity division nurses who made it hum. I was lucky it was a routine labor, since pain medication and other drugs were in short supply.
Pietrik stood next to my bed, swaddled baby in his arms, and every nurse on the floor gathered around him. He wore a white hospital smock over his factory coveralls and held her in a most natural way, not stiff and awkward like so many new fathers. As kind as my visitors were, I just wanted to be alone with the baby and get to know our girl.
“Give her back, Pietrik,” I said, my vocal cords raw.
Pietrik laid the baby back in my arms. I was soon sleepy, since it was warm for such a large ward—over fifty beds. My ward supervisor had reserved the best one for me, on the far wall away from the drafty windows, next to the radiator. I breathed the baby’s sweet-sour scent and watched the fontanel atop her head beat out a soft rhythm. She was as blond as Mrs. Mikelsky’s baby. Jagoda would have been how old by now? Eight? Should we name our baby Jagoda? That might be too sad. Maybe a name like Irenka.
Hope.
Pietrik lobbied for the name Halina, arguing my mother would have wanted that. But didn’t he see it would be too painful to say my dead mother’s name ten times a day?
The series of bells signaling visitor time rang, and the nurses scattered. Marthe was first to arrive. She carried a plate of paczkis in one hand, napkins in the other.
“We come bearing gifts,” she said. “Paczki for the mother?” Papa brought up the rear bearing Marthe’s purse.
“No, thank you,” I said. I felt as round and fat as a paczki myself. When would Zuzanna be back to fend off Marthe? She’d assisted at the delivery but had been called away to set a fracture.
Marthe placed a sugar-frosted paczki on a napkin and set it next to me. “This is no time for a slenderizing course.”