Otto Bickenbach (born 11 March 1901 in Ruppichteroth in the Rhineland, died 26 November 1971 in Siegburg) was a German internist and professor at the

University of Strasbourg The University of Strasbourg (french: Université de Strasbourg, Unistra) is a public research university located in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, with over 52,000 students and 3,300 researchers. The French university traces its history to the ea ...

. He joined the

Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...

on 1 May 1933. Between June and August 1943 in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, Bickenbach and his assistant, Helmut Rühl, conducted a series of tests by poisonous gas in gas chamber experiments with

phosgene Phosgene is the organic chemical compound with the formula COCl2. It is a toxic, colorless gas; in low concentrations, its musty odor resembles that of freshly cut hay or grass. Phosgene is a valued and important industrial building block, espe ...

. More than 50 prisoners, mainly gypsies transferred for medical experiments from

Auschwitz Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...

, were murdered in the course of these experiments.

After the war

Otto Bickenbach was arrested on the 17th of March 1947 and summarily deported to France to face trial. In the following interrogation, Bickenbach and his associate Eugen Haagen denied responsibility for the experiments and stated they were solely following the orders of Heinrich Himmler. Even so, it became clear that Bickenbach and his associates had free rein when it came to the methodology behind the experiments, and their parts in the crimes were found satisfactory enough to take them to trial. In January 1954, Bickenbach was sentenced to a life sentence of forced labour but was pardoned following a retrial in 1955, being found repentant and ideologically sound by a military court in Metz. Bickenbach returned to Germany and there established his own medical practice, his return to medicine cemented by support from the medical board in Cologne who in 1966 came to the verdict that he had not violated his professional ethics despite his actions during the war.CERTIFICATE IT 15/62 see Ernst Klee:''People Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. Who was that before and after 1945.''Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2005, , p. 48

References

1901 births 1971 deaths People from Siegburg Physicians in the Nazi Party Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp personnel Romani genocide perpetrators 20th-century Freikorps personnel {{Germany-Nazi-politician-stub Recipients of French presidential pardons