Rudolf Brandt
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Rudolf Hermann Brandt (2 June 1909 - 2 June 1948) was a German SS officer who served as Heinrich Himmler's Personal Assistant and Chief of Personal Staff. He oversaw the Nazi Medical Experimentation program and was involved in assembling a collection of 86 Jewish skeletons from concentration camp inmates.
Biography edit
Brandt was born in Frankfurt in 1909. He attended both the University of Berlin and the University of Jena while simultaneously working as a court reporter, practicing stenography in his spare time. He received a doctorate of law from the University of jena in 1933 and joined the Nazi Party and the SS. Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and one of the most powerful figures in the party, observed Brandt's skills in stenography and had him transferred to his staff.
In 1936 Brandt was appointed Himmler's Chief of Personal Staff, and in 1939 he was appointed Himmler's liaison with the Reich Ministry of the Interior. SS functionary Walter Schellenberg described Brandt as having been "Himmler's omnipresent registering, reminding and writing machine". Brandt was a member of the Ahnenerbe Nazi scientific society and was liaison officer to the society's managing director Wolfram Sievers.
As both Himmler's personal assistant and a member of the Ahnenerbe, Brandt was made responsible for the administration and coordination of medical experiments performed on concentration camp inmates. These included inmates being killed with injections of typhus and phenol, and the medical sterilization of Jews and others considered racially inferior. Brandt was also involved in assembling a collection of Jewish skeletons in order to scientifically prove the racial inferiority of Jews. At the direction of August Hirt, Brandt and Sievers sent Bruno Beger and Hans Fleischhacker to the Auschwitz Birkenau camp to select the Jews to be used in the collection. Beger and Fleischhacker selected 86 Jews from a pool of 115 Auschwitz inmates based on their stereotypical racial characteristics. The 86 selected were quarantined to prevent their anatomical features from being ruined during a typhus outbreak before being sent to the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, where they were killed in the gas chambers. Sievers then submitted a series of reports to Brandt detailing his attempts to preserve and deflesh the corpses.
Towards the end of World War II, Brandt was one of the members of Himmler's entourage who attempted to flee Germany with him to escape the approaching Allied forces. Brandt became separated from the rest of the group and surrendered to British troops on 21 May 1945. He was detained at the 31st Civilian Interrogation Camp and witnessed Himmler being brought in after his arrest two days later shortly before Himmler's suicide.
Brandt, his former colleague Sievers and 21 other Nazi medical personnel were charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, conspiracy and membership in a criminal organization at the Doctor's Trial in 1946. Brandt was charged with relation to his involvement in the Jewish skeleton collection and the medical experimentation program. Himmler's massage therapist Felix Kersten, who had used his connections to Himmler to save thousands of Jews from the death camps, testified in Brandt's defence that he had added names to Kersten's lists of people to be saved from the camps. Nevertheless, the court found that Brandt had been involved in the mass murder and medical experimentation of Jews. He, along with the rest of the defendants, was acquitted of conspiracy but convicted on the other counts. Brandt was sentenced to death and executed by hanging on 2 June 1948.