page_title: Sigmund Rascher
section_title: Freezing experiments
hierarchical_section_title: Sigmund Rascher / Career with the SS / Freezing experiments
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Wolfram Sievers (1905-1948)English: Wolfram Sievers, Executive Secretary of the SS-Ahnenerbe. He was sentenced to death on August 7 1947 for crimes against humanity in the Doctors' Trial, and hanged on June 2, 1948.
context_page_description: Sigmund Rascher was a German SS doctor. He conducted deadly experiments on humans pertaining to high altitude, freezing and blood coagulation under the patronage of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, to whom his wife Karoline "Nini" Diehl had direct connections. When police investigations uncovered that the couple had defrauded the public with their supernatural fertility by 'hiring' and kidnapping babies, she and Rascher were arrested in April 1944. He was accused of financial irregularities, murder of his former lab assistant, and scientific fraud, and brought to Buchenwald and Dachau before being executed.
  After his death, the Nuremberg Trials judged his experiments as inhumane and criminal.
context_section_description: Rascher also conducted so-called "freezing experiments" on behalf of the Luftwaffe on 300 test subjects without their consent. American investigators later concluded that Rascher had been merely a convenient front for Luftwaffe chief surgeon Erich Hippke, who had been the true source of the ideas for Rascher's experiments.
  The experiments were conducted at Dachau after the high-altitude experiments had concluded. The purpose was to determine the best way of warming German pilots who had been forced down in the North Sea and suffered hypothermia. Rascher's victims were forced to remain outdoors naked in freezing weather for up to 14 hours, or kept in a tank of icewater for three hours, their pulse and internal temperature measured through a series of electrodes. Warming of the victims was then attempted by different methods, most usually and successfully by immersion in hot water; at least one witness, an assistant to some of these procedures, later testified that some victims were thrown into boiling water for rewarming.
  Himmler attended some of the experiments, and told Rascher he should go to the North Sea region and find out how ordinary people there warmed victims of extreme cold. Himmler reportedly said he thought "that a fisherwoman could well take her half-frozen husband into her bed and revive him in that manner" and added that everyone believed "animal warmth" had a different effect than artificial warmth. Four Romani women were sent from Ravensbrück concentration camp and warming was attempted by placing the hypothermic victim between two naked women.
  In October 1942, results of the experiments were presented at a medical conference in Nuremberg in two presentations named "Prevention and Treatment of Freezing", and "Warming Up After Freezing to the Danger Point".
  Rascher, who had by now been transferred to the Waffen-SS, was eager to obtain the academic credentials necessary for a high-level university position. A habilitation which was to be based on his research failed, however, at Munich, Marburg, and Frankfurt, due to the formal requirement that results be made available for public scrutiny.
  Similar experiments were conducted from July to September 1944, as the Ahnenerbe provided space and materials to doctors at Dachau to undertake "seawater experiments", chiefly through Wolfram Sievers. Sievers is known to have visited Dachau on 20 July 1944, to speak with Kurt Plötner and the non-Ahnenerbe Wilhelm Beiglboeck, who ultimately carried out the experiments.
  While at Dachau, Rascher developed the standard cyanide capsules, which could be easily bitten through, either deliberately or accidentally.
caption: Mugshot of Wolfram Sievers, taken by American authorities after his arrest
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