April 26, 1944:
- "The Red Army captures Brno, Czechoslovakia, freeing Oskar Schindler's Jews.
- April 26-May 3: "Survivors of the concentration camp at Stutthof, Poland, are evacuated by sea to Lübeck, Germany, a journey of more than 300 miles.
Hundreds perish during the seven-day voyage."
"The collapse of the German war effort and the steady advance of the Allied armies drove major agencies of the Nazi government into a subterranean network of underground bunkers.
Adolf Hitler spent the final weeks of his life in a dank, 18-room bunker located directly under the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
"As the Red Army closed in, the Führer was a shadow of his former self.
His body was stooped and emaciated, and he could not prevent his hands and voice from shaking.
He suffered violent mood swings and forcefully rejected an opportunity to escape Berlin by plane.
"Before Hitler's demise, he expelled Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler from the Nazi Party.
He married his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, and dictated his last will and testament.
The final sentence of his political testament reads: 'Above all, I obligate the leaders of the nation and their following to a strict observance of the racial laws, and to a merciless resistance to the poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.'
"On April 30, 1945, sometime between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m., Hitler put a pistol to his head, bit into a cyanide capsule, and shot himself.
Braun, too, committed suicide.
The German POW seen below apparently felt little sorrow."
http://www.executedtoday.com/2012/04/26/1945-sigmund-rascher-feared-science/
Apr 26, 1945
It’s on this date in 1945 that Sigmund Rascher is supposed to have been summarily executed in Dachau.
If that’s what happened, it’s no more than Rascher deserved.
This doctor made his Nazi bones by forging a relationship with Heinrich Himmler (he married Himmler’s ex-mistress), and joining Himmler’s SS.
Rascher was doing cancer-cure experiments on animals, but once he had Himmler in his Rolodex he graduated to research on homo sapiens.
From 1941 to 1944, Rascher conducted some of the textbook ethical trespasses of Berlin’s human experimentation regime, using Dachau prisoners in:
high-altitude experiments to help fighter pilots, tested by subjecting prisoners to rapid de- and re-pressurization;
freezing experiments, tested by subjecting prisoners to freezing water or outdoor exposure, and then attempting by various methods to restore body warmth;
blood clotting experiments, tested by giving prisoners major gunshot wounds or other grievous bodily injuries, then monitoring how well a new drug slowed the bleeding.
Class act all the way. Rascher did publish some papers and deliver some conference presentations on aspects of his horrifying science, but in one of those little contradictions of the evil security state, the man was foiled in his bid for an advanced academic credential because much of the research was too secret for his peers to review.
In the end it was a much more mundane breach of ethics that did him in: Rascher and wife were arrested in 1944 for having actually kidnapped the children they claimed were their own.
They were stashed away in separate camps. For unclear reasons — perhaps because Rascher connected all this atrocious research back to Himmler, who was vainly trying to cut a peace deal with the West at this point, or maybe simply because Himmler was annoyed at the embarrassment his protege’s misconduct had given him — the bad doctor was summarily shot in his cell as the Allies bore down on Dachau.