Within these gray stone walls, French women were stripped of their names, their clothes, and all traces of humanity. And it always began the same way: "Take off your clothes and kneel." This phrase echoed through the narrow corridors, spoken with clinical coldness, without anger or hatred, a simple order executed like a protocol.
What happened next, no one dared to speak of, at least for a long time. Officially, the place didn't exist. In Vermarth's archives, it appeared only as a medical triage center for civilians suspected of belonging to the French Resistance. In reality, it was a laboratory, and the man who ran it was Dr.
Ernst Felker, a doctor trained in Berlin and a member of the German military medical corps, had an impeccable record, at least on paper. Felker was methodical. He wore thin-framed glasses, spoke softly, and always washed his hands. He noted everything: body temperature, resistance time, skin reaction, intensity of pain.
Everything was recorded in black hardcover notebooks, written in precise cursive handwriting. For him, these women were not victims, but data. Among the prisoners were nurses captured while caring for wounded Allied soldiers, Resistance messengers intercepted on country roads, schoolteachers accused of hiding Jews, seamstresses denounced by their neighbors as collaborators, ordinary women, women whose faces have disappeared from collective memory because their names were never found.
They were locked in damp cells in the basement of the old factory, without windows, without natural light, only a dim bulb hanging from the ceiling that flickered as military trucks passed on the road above. The cold was so intense that some woke with chapped lips from the night's chills. There were no mattresses, only old straw and torn blankets that smelled of mildew.
The routine was always the same. At six in the morning, the soldiers banged on the iron gates with the butts of their rifles. "Ofstein, get up!" The women were led barefoot, bound with cables, through the icy corridors to a large room that must once have been the factory's textile warehouse. There, under the white light of makeshift surgical lamps, stood Dr. Felker.
Beside him stood three assistants, German nurses forcibly conscripted, who obeyed orders without looking up. And in a corner of the room, still standing with his hands clasped behind his back, an SS officer silently observed the scene. He didn't say a word. He simply took notes, and that was even more terrifying. "Undress and kneel," repeated one of the soldiers, in broken but understandable French. Some women obeyed immediately, already resigned. Others hesitated, searching their eyes for something, a way out, a witness, a miracle. But there was nothing, only the cold, the silence, and the doctor's indifferent gaze.
Felker didn't shout, didn't threaten, he simply waited. And when they were all on their knees, naked, vulnerable, his work began. Injections of unknown substances, cold resistance tests, women immersed in bathtubs of ice water for minutes, sometimes hours, while he timed and took notes. Small incisions made without anesthesia to observe the healing process, amputations of fingers and ears under the guise of scientific research.
But the worst thing wasn't the experiments; it was the silence. The women didn't scream, not because they weren't suffering, but because they had learned that screaming was pointless. Screaming only attracted attention, drew more soldiers, and enforced stricter order. So they bit their lips until they bled, clenched their fists until their nails dug into their skin, and they endured.
They endured it because they had no choice. And when he finally returned to his cell, staggering, bloodied, trembling, he would curl up in the dark corners and wait for the next morning. Some never came back. The bodies were taken away at night, always at night, wrapped in military tarpaulins and transported by soldiers who obeyed orders without question.
No one knew where they were going. But in February, a farmer who lived near the old factory began to notice a strange smell coming from an abandoned cellar at the back of his property. He didn't investigate. In those days, investigating could mean death. So he simply closed the windows of his house and tried to forget about it.
Volker continued his work for over a year. From time to time, he received visits from senior officers who leafed through his notebooks with clinical interest, asked a few technical questions, and left. No one questioned the ethics, no one spoke of humanity. The war had transformed morality into something malleable, adaptable, practical.
