“Close your eyes”: what the female prisoners endured before the Nazi doctors…

“Close your eyes”: what the female prisoners endured before the Nazi doctors…

When Marguerite Baumont first heard the phrase, “Close your eyes and don’t scream,” she did not yet know that these words would be repeated hundreds of times in the following weeks, always on the same monotonous and clinical note, always before the pain began. It was March 12, 1943, and she was standing in a cold, white-walled room inside Block 10 of Ravensbrück, the largest women’s concentration camp in Nazi Germany.

Around her, ten other women trembled in silence, barefoot on the icy cement floor. They all wore the same torn striped uniform. All of them had numbers tattooed on their left arm, and all of them had been chosen that morning during the selection that took place in the main courtyard of the camp. An SS guard had walked between the rows of exhausted prisoners, observing hands, teeth, and the curvature of backs, noting numbers on a metal board as one chooses cattle for slaughter.

Marguerite was 23 years old and came from Lyon, where she had studied medicine at the university before the German occupation transformed France into a territory of fear and denunciation. The daughter of a respected surgeon and a literature professor, she had grown up surrounded by anatomy books and symbolist poetry in a home where reason and beauty coexisted in delicate balance.

When war broke out and the Germans marched through the streets of her town in June 1940, Marguerite felt something break inside her—not from despair, but from a silent indignation that would soon turn into action. In 1941, she joined the French Resistance, not as an armed combatant, but as something equally dangerous: a clandestine medical assistant.

She hid wounded soldiers in damp cellars, treated bullet wounds with improvised instruments, and taught young nurses to operate without anesthesia using only morphine stolen from abandoned pharmacies. For 18 months, she lived in hiding, changing her address every week, sleeping at the homes of strangers who risked their own lives to protect those fighting against the Reich.

But in January 1943, on a night of heavy snow and cutting wind, the Gestapo invaded the farm near Chambéry where Marguerite was caring for three French paratroopers wounded during a sabotage operation. Someone had denounced them. The doors were broken down at 4 a.m., and shouts in German echoed through the corridors.

Marguerite tried to hide the medical documents, but it was already too late. She was dragged out of the house, thrown into a military truck with the wounded soldiers and the farm owner—a 60-year-old man who would be shot three days later. She was taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon, where she spent 72 hours being interrogated in windowless rooms where the electric light never went out and the questions never stopped.

They wanted names, addresses, escape routes, and resistance contacts. Marguerite said nothing. She only repeated her name, her profession, and her hometown. On the third day, the interrogators gave up. She was classified as a highly dangerous political enemy and put on a freight train heading north towards Germany, to Ravensbrück.

Arrival at Ravensbrück

The camp was located 90 kilometers north of Berlin, in a region of dark forest and frozen lakes where winter seemed never to end. When Marguerite arrived in February 1943, Ravensbrück was already home to more than 10,000 women from all over occupied Europe. Polish, Russian, French, Czech, Germans considered traitors to the Reich, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Romani, lesbians, communists, aristocrats, peasants, teachers, and mothers of families—all shared the same hunger, the same cold, and the same silent terror that hung over the wooden shacks where they slept piled up like animals.

Marguerite was assigned to work in munitions factories, where she spent twelve hours a day assembling grenade components with injured and bloody hands. The food was a thin soup of rotten cabbage served once a day. The cold was so intense that some women died during the night; they simply stopped breathing in their sleep, and their bodies were removed the next morning as if they had never existed.

But at the beginning of March, something changed. During the morning roll call, when all the prisoners lined up in the courtyard for the daily count, a team of SS doctors arrived at the camp accompanied by high-ranking officers. They did not wear the dirty uniforms of ordinary guards, but immaculate white blouses under thick wool coats. They carried leather briefcases and clipboards. They conversed with each other in technical German, using medical terms that Marguerite recognized from her years of study.

They walked slowly between the rows of women, observing, noting, and selecting. When one of them stopped in front of Marguerite, she felt the weight of the clinical gaze run over her body, as if she were nothing more than a collection of organs and systems to be catalogued. The doctor had greying hair, gold-framed glasses, and an expressionless face that could have belonged to any respectable university professor.

He observed her hands, turned her palms upwards, and examined the skin beneath the dirt and injuries. Then he wrote something on his notepad and continued without saying a word. That afternoon, 18 numbers were called out over the camp loudspeaker; number 24,867 was among them. Marguerite was led with the other selected women to an isolated block at the northern end of the camp, separated from the main barracks by a double barbed wire fence.

The Horrors of Block 10

The Slow Death Block

Block 10 of Ravensbrück was not officially recognized in the camp’s administrative records. In bureaucratic documents archived in Berlin, it appeared only as a “special medical sector,” a vague designation that deliberately concealed its true function. But all the female prisoners in the camp knew what this building represented. They called it the “slow death block” because the women who went in rarely came out the same way, and many did not come out alive.

The block had been established in 1942 under the direct supervision of Heinrich Himmler, Supreme Commander of the SS, and Dr. Karl Gebhardt, SS Chief Physician and Himmler’s personal surgeon. Officially, its goal was to conduct advanced medical research for the benefit of the German armed forces. In reality, it was a human experimentation laboratory where German doctors carried out procedures that violated all the fundamental principles of medicine, ethics, and humanity.

Marguerite underwent her first procedure on March 18, 1943, six days after her selection. She was taken alone to a smaller room inside the block, a room that resembled a disturbing combination of a doctor’s office and an operating room. The walls were tiled, white, and impeccably clean. In the center was a metal table with leather straps for the wrists and ankles. A tray of surgical instruments was placed nearby: scalpels, forceps, glass syringes, test tubes, and bottles containing liquids of various colors.

Two doctors entered. Both wore white coats over their uniforms. The older doctor was about 50 years old, with greying hair combed back, gold-framed glasses, and an expression of professional concentration that could have belonged to any respectable surgeon in any hospital in Europe. The younger doctor was blond, perhaps 35 years old, and carried a clipboard on which he noted observations in meticulous handwriting.

Neither of them spoke to Marguerite. Neither asked her name or explained what was going to happen. They simply gestured for her to lie down on the table. When she hesitated, an SS guard standing at the door took a step forward, and Marguerite understood that resistance was useless.

She lay down, and the leather straps were tightened around her wrists and ankles. The older doctor tore open the sleeve of her uniform, exposing her left arm. He examined the skin for a moment, feeling the muscle as if he were assessing the quality of a material. Then he took a large syringe, filled it with a clear liquid from an unlabeled bottle, and slowly injected it into Marguerite’s forearm muscle.

The pain was instantaneous and intense. It was not just the prick of the needle, but a deep burning sensation that spread through the arm like liquid fire. Marguerite gritted her teeth, remembering the order: “Don’t scream.” The younger doctor noted something on his clipboard. The older man observed Marguerite’s arm for a few seconds, then injected more liquid into another spot on the same arm.

They waited, timed, and noted. After 10 minutes, they untied the straps and indicated that she could leave. No explanation, no words. Marguerite was brought back to a small cell in Block 10 itself, where she would remain isolated from the other prisoners in the camp. There, she began to feel the full effects of what had been injected into her arm.

The Gangrene Experiments

The pain gradually increased over the following hours. The arm swelled, and the skin became red and hot to the touch. The following morning, there was a visible infection, and the flesh around the injection sites began to necrotize, becoming dark and giving off a putrid odor. It was then that Marguerite understood what was happening.

As a medical student, she immediately recognized the symptoms of gas gangrene. The German doctors had injected bacteria of the genus Clostridium directly into her muscle tissue to study the progression of the infection. It was a common disease among soldiers wounded in battle, especially those whose wounds were contaminated with dirt and metal fragments. The German doctors wanted to better understand how the disease developed, how long it took to kill, and what treatments could be effective. But instead of studying corpses or using animal models, they simply infected healthy women and watched them become ill.

During the following days, while the infection consumed her arm, Marguerite was examined daily by the same doctors. They measured the temperature of the infected skin, photographed the progression of necrosis, and collected fluid samples for microscopic analysis. Everything was meticulously recorded on standardized forms with official SS stamps. At no point did they offer treatment. They were just observing, taking notes, and waiting.

When the infection reached a critical stage and Marguerite began to develop a high fever and delirium, they finally intervened—not out of compassion, but because they needed more data. They applied an experimental drug, a sulfanilamide compound that was being tested for military use. They wanted to see if it worked against advanced gangrene. It worked partially. The fever subsided, and the infection stabilized, but the necrotic tissue remained—a dark and disfiguring scar that Marguerite would carry for the rest of her life, a physical mark of what she had survived.

The Birth of the Secret Diary

It was during her days of fever and pain, lying alone in a cell in Block 10, that Marguerite Baumont made a decision that would change everything. She decided that if she survived, she must leave a testimony of what was happening there. She perceived that it was all carefully concealed, that there were no outside witnesses, and that the doctors were working with the certainty that their crimes would never be discovered. But Marguerite had been educated to believe in the power of words, in the value of documented truth.

She knew that if she managed to write—if she managed to preserve a testimony—perhaps one day the world would know what really happened inside those white walls. The problem was that the prisoners in Block 10 had no access to paper, pens, or any writing materials. Everything was strictly forbidden.

But Marguerite began to observe. She paid attention to small oversights and minimal opportunities. She noticed that doctors sometimes left used forms on the tables after examinations. She noticed that there were pencils in the pockets of the hanging blouses. She realized that if she was careful and patient, she could steal small pieces of paper and fragments of broken pencils, hiding them all in the seams of her uniform.

And that is exactly what she did. For weeks, with trembling hands and under the constant risk of being discovered and executed, Marguerite began to write. She wrote at night in the almost complete darkness of her cell, using the minimal light that entered through a slit in the door. She wrote in tiny print to save space, using abbreviations only she understood, documenting every procedure, every injection, and every woman she saw being taken to the experimental rooms.

She recorded the dates, the physical descriptions of the doctors, the types of substances injected, and the symptoms she observed in herself and in other prisoners. She described experimental surgeries performed on Polish women, in which pieces of bone were removed from their legs to simulate war wounds. She documented deliberate infections, tissue transplants between incompatible prisoners, and pain resistance tests. She always began each entry with the same phrase that marked the start of each experimental session: “Close your eyes and don’t scream.”

Marguerite was not the only French woman in Block 10. There was also Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a journalist from Paris who had been captured while distributing resistance leaflets. There was Geneviève de Gaulle, niece of General Charles de Gaulle, who would survive the experiments and later testify at the Nuremberg trials. There was Germaine Tillion, an ethnologist who kept mental records of everything she witnessed, memorizing names, dates, and procedures, and who, after the war, would publish one of the most detailed accounts of Ravensbrück. These women formed a silent network of resistance within the experimental block itself. They shared information, supported each other in moments of greatest despair, and each in her own way preserved the memory of what was happening.

The “Rabbits” of Ravensbrück

But the experiments continued. In April 1943, a new group of doctors arrived at Ravensbrück, this time specialists in orthopedic surgery from the University of Berlin. They were interested in bone regeneration and nerve transplantation. They selected 74 Polish women, mostly young and healthy political prisoners captured for belonging to the Polish Resistance. These women became known as the “Ravensbrück Rabbits” because they were treated literally like laboratory rabbits.

Doctors performed complex surgeries without adequate anesthesia, removing pieces of bone from legs, cutting nerves, and transplanting tissue from one woman to another. The stated objective was to develop surgical techniques to treat wounded German soldiers on the Eastern Front. But the method was pure, scientifically documented torture.

Marguerite witnessed the suffering of the rabbits. She saw them being transported back to the cells after the surgeries, unconscious or moaning in pain with bandaged and bleeding legs. Some developed infections so severe that they had to have their legs amputated. Others simply died of shock or septicemia. And even those who survived remained permanently mutilated, unable to walk, dependent on improvised crutches made of pieces of wood.

Marguerite wrote about each of them. She documented their names, their stories, and what they had endured. They knew that many would not survive and wanted to ensure that at least their memory would be preserved—that someone in the future would know that they had existed, that they had suffered, and that they had resisted until the end.

A Desperate Concealment

And then, in July 1943, something happened that would change the fate of Marguerite and her secret diary. One of the SS guards of Block 10, a young German woman named Irma Grese—known for her exceptional cruelty, even among the SS—began to suspect that some prisoners were hiding something. She ordered a complete inspection of all the cells. She turned over the mattresses, tore up uniforms, and searched in every crack and every hole.

Marguerite knew that if the diary was discovered, she would be executed immediately. So she did the only thing she could do. She swallowed the last pages she had written, destroying weeks of work, but preserving the rest hidden in a double seam of her uniform’s belt—a place that Irma Grese’s hasty search did not reach. That night, Marguerite vomited blood and ink, but the secret remained safe.

In the autumn of 1943, the war began to turn against Nazi Germany. The defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa signaled that the Reich was not invincible. But inside Ravensbrück, medical experiments not only continued but intensified. It was as if the German doctors were racing against time, trying to complete their research before the regime collapsed. New protocols were implemented, new procedures were tested, and the number of women selected for Block 10 increased dramatically.

The Hypothermia Trials

Marguerite Baumont, now with her left arm permanently disfigured by experimental gangrene, was subjected to a second series of tests. This time, the doctors were interested in studying human resistance to extreme temperatures. She was placed in a bathtub of ice water with blocks of ice floating around her body while thermometers measured the drop in her core temperature. The doctors timed how long it took her to become hypothermic. They noted when she started to tremble uncontrollably and when she lost consciousness.

Then they removed her from the water and tested different methods of warming her: blankets, heat lamps, and immersion in hot water. Everything was measured, everything was recorded, and everything was done with the cold precision of a legitimate scientific study. Except that the subject of the research was not an informed volunteer, but a prisoner who had no choice, whose life had value to these men only because of its usefulness as a source of data.

The hypothermia sessions lasted for hours. Marguerite remembered the sensation of the cold penetrating her eyes, how her body ceased to respond to her commands, how her vision blurred, and how her mind drifted to strange places between consciousness and unconsciousness. She remembered the voices of the doctors calmly discussing above her, talking about subjects and specimens as if she were not a person, but an object of study.

And she remembered the excruciating pain of the warming process, when the blood began to flow again in her numb limbs—a pain so intense that it almost surpassed that of the cold itself. Each session left her body weaker, her extremities marked with frostbite that never fully healed. Her physical resistance gradually diminished until she feared she would no longer be able to survive the next experiment.

The Bureaucracy of Torture

During those terrible months, Marguerite continued to write in her clandestine diary whenever possible. She had developed a personal code to save space and make it difficult to understand if discovered. She used initials instead of full names, abbreviated medical procedures, and drew small symbols to represent different types of experiments. But the content was clear enough for anyone with medical knowledge to understand what was being described. And what Marguerite was documenting was a horrible truth: human experimentation at Ravensbrück was not the work of a few uncontrolled doctors, but a systematic, bureaucratically organized program, officially approved by the highest levels of the Nazi regime.

The experiments were categorized by research areas. There were the studies on bacterial infections conducted by Dr. Karl Gebhardt and his team, focused on gangrene, tetanus, and other common diseases in war wounds. There were the orthopedic studies led by Dr. Fritz Fischer, which involved experimental surgeries on bones and nerves. There were the studies on forced sterilization conducted by Dr. Carl Clauberg, who was testing mass sterilization methods intended for use on populations considered undesirable by the regime. And there were still experiments with experimental drugs, poisons, and chemicals whose effects doctors wanted to better understand before using them on a large scale.

Each category had its own protocols, standardized forms, and documentation methods. Each experiment generated reports which were sent to Berlin, where they were reviewed by medical committees and possibly published in German scientific journals. Not to mention, of course, that the subjects were concentration camp prisoners. The majority of the German medical community was aware of what was happening. Some doctors were ethically opposed, but few had the courage to speak out publicly. Most simply looked away. It was rationalized by saying that it was necessary for the war effort, convinced that the prisoners were enemies of the Reich and therefore did not deserve the same ethical protections that German citizens would receive.

Glimmers of Humanity and Defiance

Marguerite observed how this system worked with terrifying efficiency. Every morning, the doctors arrived at Block 10 with their leather briefcases, their immaculate white coats, and their professional expressions. They consulted their lists, selected the prisoners for the day’s procedures, and worked methodically from room to room, as if they were making their rounds in an ordinary hospital. There were fixed schedules, lunch breaks, and academic discussions about the results obtained. Everything was organized, structured, and standardized. And it was precisely this normality—this transformation of horror into bureaucratic routine—that made everything even more monstrous.

But not all Germans at Ravensbrück were monsters. There were exceptions, small glimmers of humanity amidst the institutional darkness. A German nurse named Gerda, who worked in Block 10, sometimes left small pieces of bread hidden in the prisoners’ cells. She never spoke directly to them, and never risked being seen showing compassion. But these small gestures meant the difference between dying of hunger and having the energy to survive another day.

Marguerite would never forget the face of that woman, the way her eyes sometimes betrayed a deep sadness when she had to attend the proceedings without being able to intervene. Years later, during the post-war trials, Marguerite would testify in favor of Gerda, explaining that not all those who wore the German uniform were willing accomplices to barbarity.

There was also a young SS guard who was simply called Hans, who sometimes looked away when the prisoners committed minor infractions. He never smiled, and hardly ever spoke, but Marguerite had noticed that he seemed uncomfortable with what was happening in Block 10. One day, while she was being escorted from one room to another, she tripped and fell, too weak to get up immediately. Hans waited a few seconds longer than necessary before shouting an order, giving her time to get back on her feet, preventing her from being beaten by the other guards for being slow. It was a tiny gesture, almost insignificant in the ocean of cruelty that surrounded them. But for Marguerite, this moment represented something important: proof that even in the most dehumanizing systems, there remained individuals capable of preserving a fragment of their humanity.

In December 1943, Marguerite witnessed something that would profoundly mark her. One of the Polish rabbits, a 19-year-old girl named Wanda, was selected for particularly brutal surgery. The doctors intended to remove a large portion of the bone from her leg to study bone regeneration. But Wanda simply refused to walk to the operating room. The guards tried to drag her away by force, but she resisted, clinging to the bars, shouting that she would rather be executed immediately than be mutilated in this way.

Other prisoners began to shout in solidarity. For a few minutes, there was chaos in Block 10, with women’s voices rising in protest against what they could no longer bear in silence. The response was immediate and violent. Irma Grese entered with several armed guards. Wanda was beaten until she lost consciousness, then dragged into the operating room and operated on anyway.

The Legacy of Resistance

But what happened that day was significant in a way that no one expected. Some of the other rabbits began to organize themselves, making pacts among themselves that they would resist, that they would refuse to walk voluntarily towards the experimental rooms, and that they would force the doctors to drag them—to make it clear to any future witness that this was not consensual, not voluntary, but pure violence.

Marguerite wrote about that day in her diary, describing not only the horror of what had happened to Wanda, but also the extraordinary courage these women demonstrated in choosing to resist, even when resisting meant more suffering. In the weeks that followed, the rabbits’ silent resistance took different forms. Some hid their post-operative symptoms to delay follow-up examinations. Others memorized the names of the doctors, their physical descriptions, and the details of each procedure, creating mental archives that they hoped to be able to share one day if they survived.

Some found ways to communicate with each other despite the isolation, developing a system of knocking on the walls—a simple but effective code that allowed them to know who was still alive, who had been taken away for a new experiment, and who had disappeared during the night. This solidarity was their only weapon against the systematic dehumanization they were subjected to. It allowed them to remember that they were still people capable of making choices, still worthy of respect and compassion.

Marguerite became a kind of link between different groups of prisoners in Block 10. Because she spoke several languages and had medical knowledge, she could often understand what the doctors were discussing, anticipate what procedure would be carried out, and discreetly warn the other women when possible. She also shared her knowledge of how to treat infections with the limited means at her disposal, teaching others how to clean wounds with stolen boiled water, how to recognize the signs of septicemia before it was too late, and how to improvise bandages from torn pieces of cloth. These small acts of mutual care, these moments of human tenderness amidst the horror, became a form of resistance as important as any physical sabotage could have been.

The Final Concealment

And then, in January 1944, news arrived from the Eastern Front which would change the dynamics of the camp. The Red Army was advancing rapidly through Poland. Berlin was beginning to plan evacuations of concentration camps. Documents began to be burned. Evidence began to be destroyed. SS officers at Ravensbrück received orders to eliminate incriminating records and, if necessary, to eliminate witnesses.

Block 10 became an even more dangerous place because all those there knew too much, had seen too much, and posed a risk to the doctors and officers who feared they might eventually be tried for war crimes. The atmosphere changed in a palpable way. The doctors became more nervous, more hurried. Some experiments were accelerated; others abandoned halfway through. Documents began to disappear from the offices.

Marguerite saw boxes filled with files being transported to the camp’s ovens, where they would be reduced to ashes. She understood that the executioners were trying to erase all traces of their crimes, to rewrite history before it was even fully written. This realization strengthened her determination to preserve her diary, to keep alive the testimony that so many people were trying to destroy.

Marguerite realized that time was running out. If she wanted to preserve her diary, she would have to find a way to hide it somewhere where it could be retrieved later, even if she did not survive. She spent weeks observing the camp, searching for a safe hiding place. She studied the guards’ routines, the times when surveillance was less strict, and the areas of the camp that were rarely inspected.

She considered different options: burying the diary in the ground, hiding it in the latrine, slipping it into a crack in the exterior wall. Each option had its risks. The floor might be unearthed during future works. The latrines were cleaned regularly. The outer walls were visible and accessible to the guards.

Finally, during an unsupervised moment while being transferred from one area to another, she managed to hide the diary inside a hollow wall in one of the old barracks that were being decommissioned. She wrapped the fragile pages in a piece of waterproof cloth stolen from the infirmary, sealed it with melted candle wax, and pushed the package inside a hole between the bricks, then covered the hole with improvised mortar made of earth and ash.

It was a desperate gamble, but it was the only chance that these words would survive, that the truth would not be entirely erased by those who had every interest in seeing it disappear.

That night, lying in her…