SS Medical Corps
The SS Medical Corps first appeared in the 1930s as small companies of SS personnel known as the Sanitätsstaffel. After 1931, the SS formed a headquarters office known as Amt V, which was the central office for SS medical units.
In 1945, after the surrender of Germany, the SS was declared an illegal criminal organization by the Allies. SS doctors, in particular, were marked as war criminals due to the wide range of human medical experimentation which had been conducted during World War II as well as the role SS doctors had played in the gas chamber selections of the Holocaust. The most infamous member, Doctor Josef Mengele, served as a medical officer at Auschwitz under the command of Eduard Wirth of the Auschwitz medical corps. Eduard Wirth was "organizer-in-chief" of selections, which he often attended himself. Josef Mengele also made the daily gas chamber selections of people as well as conducted many experiments at the camp. After the trial of members as to crimes against humanity, it was determined that in the territory of the Krasnodar Territory of the USSR about 7,000 civilians were killed by gas poisoning.
Read more about this topic: SS Officers, SS Special Purpose Corps
Famous quotes containing the words medical and/or corps:
“Mark Twain didn’t psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn’t put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.”
—Samuel Fuller (b. 1911)
“There was nothing to equal it in the whole history of the Corps Diplomatique.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)