Ernst-Günther Schenck

Schutzstaffel (SS) Fascism and National Socialism 1904–1998 ○ Died

SS nutrition doctor who operated in the Reich Chancellery casualty station in Berlin's last days

Ordered out of Berlin in April 1945, he volunteered to stay and operated on the wounded under the Reich Chancellery, while the surgeon Werner Haase, weakened by tuberculosis, advised him from a cot.

Born in Marburg, he became a physician of internal medicine, joined the SA in 1933 and the Nazi Party in 1937, and worked in the party's public-health office. From 1940 he was nutrition inspector of the Waffen-SS. He helped set up the herb plantation attached to Dachau concentration camp, and in 1943–1944 he was responsible for nutrition trials on prisoners at Mauthausen, some of whom died of hunger oedema; a 1963 report condemned him for treating humans as guinea pigs. In April 1945 he volunteered to stay in Berlin and, with no surgical training, operated in the emergency casualty station under the Reich Chancellery alongside Werner Haase, meeting Hitler twice briefly. Captured by the Soviets, he was sentenced to death in 1949, commuted to 25 years, and returned to West Germany in 1955, where he was barred from medical practice and wrote memoirs and Patient Hitler.

Also known as: Egon-Gernot Scherberg