Bullenhuser Damm

[1][2] During heavy air raids in the Second World War, many areas of Hamburg were destroyed, and the Rothenburgsort section was heavily damaged.

In October 1944,[4] a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp was established in the school to house prisoners used in clearing the rubble after air raids.

On the night of April 20, 1945, 20 Jewish children, who had been used as human subjects in medical experiments at Neuengamme, along with their four adult caretakers and six Soviet prisoners, were injected with morphine and suspended from their necks to die on the basement walls of the school.

The names, ages and countries of origin of the victims, who'd transited through the Neuengamme concentration camp, were recorded by Hans Meyer, one of the thousands of Scandinavian prisoners released to the custody of Sweden in the closing months of the war.

Another component of his experimentation was based on pseudoscientific Nazi racial theory that race played a factor in developing tuberculosis.

[7] The medical experiments on tuberculosis infection were initially carried out on prisoners from the Soviet Union and other countries at the Neuengamme concentration camp.

Twenty Jewish children (10 boys and 10 girls) from Auschwitz concentration camp were chosen by Josef Mengele and sent to Neuengamme.

After a two-day trip we arrived at Neuengamme at ten o'clock at night.The children were injected with live tuberculosis bacilli, and they all became ill. Heissmeyer then had their axillary lymph nodes surgically removed from their armpits and sent to Hans Klein at the Hohenlychen Hospital for study.

The collapsing western front and imminent approach of British troops prompted the perpetrators to murder the subjects of the experiment to cover up their crimes.

[citation needed] The children, their four adult caretakers and six Soviet prisoners were brought by truck to the Bullenhuser Damm School in the Hamburg suburb of Rothenburgsort.

The school had been taken over by the SS to house prisoners from Neuengamme used to clear rubble from the surrounding area after Allied bombing raids.

That same night, about 30 additional Soviet prisoners were also brought by lorry to the school to be executed; six escaped, three were shot trying to do so, and the rest were hanged in the basement.

Trzebinski, Neuengamme commandant Max Pauly, Dreimann, Speck, Jauch and Frahm were convicted and sentenced to death.

Two of those directly responsible for the children's suffering and murder, Kurt Heissmeyer and Arnold Strippel, escaped and remained at large.

He was tried for the murders of 21 Jewish inmates committed on November 9, 1939, as retribution for the failed assassination of Adolf Hitler at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich by Georg Elser.

In 1967 the prosecutor, Helmut Münzberg, dropped the charges for lack of evidence, stating that Strippel had not acted cruelly as "the children had not been harmed beyond the extinction of their lives".

Kurt Heissmeyer returned to his home in Magdeburg in postwar East Germany and started a successful medical practice as a lung and tuberculosis specialist.

The text aroused controversy because it omitted mention of the Soviet victims and did not state that the children were Jewish or give any information about their personal identity.