What the Nazis did to the prisoners AFTERWARDS is unbearable…

According to his notes, the most effective method was to gradually warm the victims using heated blankets. But this conclusion cost the lives of dozens of women, who died of hypothermia, cardiac arrest, or shock. All because of a single note in a black notebook. Another experiment involved deliberately inducing infections. Volker injected live bacteria, tetanus, gangrene, and septicemia through small incisions made in the prisoners' legs or arms.

He then observed the progression of the infection without providing any treatment. He noted the rate at which the fever rose, the color of the skin around the wound, and the point at which delirium began. Some died within three days, others within a week. They compared the results, looking for patterns, and when a victim died, they simply noted: "Subject 12, next to die."

He also tested experimental antiseptics applied to open wounds without anesthesia. The women screamed, struggling against the straps that held them to the metal tables. Volker measured the intensity of the pain by observing muscle contractions, pupil dilation, and heart rate. For him, pain was not suffering; it was a fact, a physiological indicator to be recorded and analyzed.

But perhaps the most disturbing aspect was the constant presence of the SS officer. He never touched anyone. He never gave orders. He simply observed and took notes. His name was Klaus Ritner, and he was responsible for documenting every event for his reports. He carried a small black leather notebook and wrote with a fountain pen, always standing, always silent, always with the same cold expression, as if he were witnessing a routine surgical procedure and not an atrocity.

Ritner embodied something more insidious than Fulker himself. Fulker was the scientist. Ritner was the bureaucrat. He didn't get his hands dirty, but his presence legitimized everything. He was the official witness, the guarantor of administrative legality, and it was precisely this bureaucratization of horror that made it all possible.

Without Ritner, Fulker would have been nothing more than a mad doctor. With Ritner, he was an authorized researcher, and it was precisely this authorization, this systemic permission, that made Nazi evil something more dangerous than mere individual violence. The German nurses who worked under Fulker's orders had varied reactions. Some refused to look the prisoners in the eye.

Others developed a mechanical rigidity, executing orders with robotic precision, as if emotional disconnection were their only chance of survival. One of them, Greta Hoffman, kept a diary. In it, she wrote: “I no longer know who I am. I have become someone else. A person holding a woman’s hands while the doctor amputates her fingers.”

“A person who no longer cries. A person I no longer recognize in the mirror.” This diary was found decades later, hidden in the beams of an abandoned house in Lille. Greta was 24 years old when she was assigned to Unit 19. She had studied to be a pediatric nurse. She dreamed of working with children, but the war had decided otherwise.

From then on, she spent her days witnessing the torture. In her diary, she recounts how she tried to escape through her thoughts. She recited poems. She recalled songs from her childhood. She imagined herself elsewhere. But this only partially worked, because her hands were still there, holding the instruments, and her eyes still saw everything.

And her presence, however passive, made her complicit, and the victims tried to protect themselves in every way possible. Some created small mental rituals, counting to a thousand, reciting prayers, remembering the faces of children they might never see again. Others simply cut themselves, entering a state of emotional detachment close to death.

But the body does not forget. Even when the mind tries to escape, the body records every pain, every humiliation, every violation, and it never disappears. In July 1943, a prisoner, a young woman of about 25, identified only by the number 19, managed to carve a message into the wall of her cell using a rusty nail.

The message read: “My name is Elise. I existed.” When the ruins were explored in 1978, the message was still there, covered in moss but legible. It was photographed, cataloged, and is now in a Parisian museum, part of a permanent exhibition dedicated to forgotten war crimes. Elise was a schoolteacher in a small village near Arras.

She had been arrested for refusing to denounce a Jewish family hiding in their cellar. She was twenty years old. She loved Rimbaud's poetry and played the violin. She dreamed of traveling to Italy after the war. She never did. She died in that cell three days after carving her name into it. But that name survived, and today, it is all that remains of her.

Despite everything, some survived, not because they were spared, but because their bodies were preserved through an act of kindness. When the camp was evacuated in April 1944, ten women were still alive. They were transferred to other camps where they disappeared in the chaos of the war's end. Some were liberated by the Allies in 1945.

Others died soon after, broken both physically and psychologically. And the few who managed to return home never spoke of what they had experienced, at least not publicly. For who would believe them? Post-war society wanted nothing to do with such horrors. People wanted to rebuild, forget, and move on.

And the women who survived those camps carried within them an undeserved shame. A shame imposed by a world that preferred to ignore. So they remained silent. They buried their memories, tried to rebuild their lives. But some scars never heal. And the question no one dared ask was: "How many other places like this existed?" How many other women disappeared in silence? The answer is terrifying.

When Allied forces liberated France between 1944 and 1945, thousands of Nazi documents were captured, cataloged, and archived. But not everything was preserved. Many documents were deliberately destroyed by the Germans themselves before their retreat. Others simply vanished, lost in the chaos of the postwar period, and some were deliberately concealed because they contained truths that no one—neither the Allies, nor the French, nor even the Germans themselves—wanted to see revealed.