How heroic doc saved thousands of mums from ‘Angel of Death’s’ vile experiments at Auschwitz – but at a horrifying cost
A DOCTOR saved thousands of women from certain death and the evil experiments of Dr Josef Mengele but her methods had catastrophic consequences.
Dr Gisella Perl was one of five doctors and four nurses selected by Dr Josef Mengele to work in the hospital ward at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War.
Mengele who became known as the “Angel of Death” infamously subjected prisoners of the camp to gruesome acts of torture through his twisted experiments that routinely ended in death.
Some of these included stitching two identical twins together, injecting people with diseases and chemicals, and experimenting with male and female genitalia.
Many of his sadistic experiments resulted in pregnancy with so-called patients being forced to have sex with each other in the name of science.
Prisoners had their teeth ripped out, organs removed, and their bone marrow extracted all without anaesthesia.
By his side for some of these horrors was Dr Perl who was living in Hungary and working as a gynecologist when Germany invaded in 1944.
Perl had been born into a Jewish family and was deported with her family to extermination camps – she arrived at Auschwitz in March 1944.
Her survival hinged on being forced to work as a doctor at the camp, under Mengele.
She treated inmates for a variety of issues including injuries from torture, diseases, broken bones, lice, starvation and infections.
But, there were no beds, bandages, drugs or instruments at her disposal.
Dr Perl later said, “I treated patients with my voice, telling them beautiful stories.”
The introduction to her 1948 book I Was a Doctor At Auschwitz states: “The tasks she was ordered to perform were unfathomable, defying every scientific and medical value, principle, and procedure.”
But, her work alongside Menegle in the day, led to her biggest acts of resistance at night.
Each night, Perl would sneak into barracks to secretly treat inmates to prevent them from being sent to the gas chambers or used for medical experiments.
She then took an even bigger risk after learning of the horrific truth about what Mengele did to pregnant women.
I decided that never again would there be a pregnant woman in Auschwitz.
Dr Gisella Perl
It was a decision that challenged her morals, her professional values and skills as well as her religious beliefs.
In her book, she recalled that after Dr Mengele ordered her to inform him of every pregnant woman in the camp,
Mengele had initially told Perl and other women that those who were pregnant would be sent to another camp for better nutrition and milk.
So, expectant mothers went to him to get help for their unborn children.
But, Perl quickly learned that they were “all taken to the research block to be used as guinea pigs, and then two lives would be thrown into the crematorium,” she said.
From that moment on, she “decided that never again would there be a pregnant woman in Auschwitz.”
The devout Jewish doctor resorted to doing whatever it took to try to save the lives of pregnant women in the camp, meaning she had to go against her beliefs and terminate pregnancies.
She was forced to do this by whatever means necessary, which saw the gynaecologist carry out abortions on the filthy floors and bunks of the barracks using only her hands and no pain relief.
Perl ended the lives of around 3,000 fetuses to try to see the mothers through the horrors of the extermination camp so they could perhaps one day bear children once they were free.
God, you owe me a life – a living baby.
Dr Gisella Perl
If a pregnancy was too far along, Perl manually induced labour meaning the premature baby would not survive.
It meant the women would be able to keep working in the camps and hope to delay or prevent their death sentences.
But, it was a sacrifice Perl lived with for the rest of her life and it hugely motivated her work after her liberation.
In her book, she stated: “No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy those babies, but if I had not done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered.”
She was transferred to Belsen which the British 11th Armoured Division liberated on April 15 1945.
The newly freed doctor soon learned that her husband had been killed just before the liberation.
Her teenage son who was ripped from her arms when she was deported from Hungary had died in a gas chamber.
Both of her parents had also perished in extermination camps.
In 1947, she moved to New York City but was interrogated after officials believed she was part of the SS and played a key role in Mengele’s experiments.
It was only the testimonies of survivors that freed her, though deportation efforts continued.
SURVIVOR’S STORY
A survivor, only known as Ms B, spoke of her interaction with Perl in her testimony given to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany when she was 78 years old.
Ms B arrived at the camp in April 1944 and after a month in Barrack 10 her periods stopped, and like many female prisoners, she suffered from a horrific rash that they believe came from drugged food.
“First, pus-filled blisters appeared then turned into sores. In some cases, this rash [occurred] on both arms and my chest,” she recalled.
Every morning and night the women would be lined up and inspected with Dr Mengele making weekly visits to remove the weak and sick who would “never have been seen again.”
So, the women did their best to cover their bodies so their rashes and sores went unnoticed or “our life would be over,” Ms B recalled.
She said: “Dr. Gisella Perl assisted Dr. Mengele during the day.
“However, at night Dr. Perl came into the barrack and administered an ointment with a glue-like consistency to every sore in order to heal this horrific rash.
“Dr. Perl came periodically to Barrick No. 10 and also went to other barracks to administer this ointment.
“The rash needed several weeks to clear up; however, it would often return a few days later.”
“Without Dr. Perl’s medical knowledge and willingness to risk her life by helping us, it would be impossible to know what would have happened to me and to many other female prisoners,” she added.
OWE A LIFE
After securing her freedom in America, Perl befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, who urged her to return to medicine which saw her become a gynaecologist at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Over the following years, she delivered over 3,000 babies and always uttered the same words every time she entered the delivery ward: “God, you owe me a life – a living baby.”
In 1979 she moved to Herzliya, Israel with her daughter and grandson, whom she had reunited with.
She died aged 81 on December 16, 1988, and was remembered by The Jerusalem Post as “The Angel of Auschwitz.”
Six million men, women, and children were killed in the Holocaust, an unimaginable tragedy marked each year on Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27.
Olivia Marks-Woldman OBE, the Chief Executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust told the Sun:
“What Dr Gisella Perl did during the Holocaust will forever be a reminder of the resilience of the human spirit and the power of compassion, even in the darkest of times.
“With extraordinary courage and selflessness, she used her medical expertise to save the lives of countless women, risking her own safety to bring hope where none seemed possible.
“In a vast and complex world, it is easy to feel powerless, question our ability to create change, or believe we lack the time or energy to make a difference.
“Yet, Dr Perl’s legacy reminds us that a single person can profoundly impact others, even in the face of unimaginable hardship.”