Dr. Hans Münch: The Good Man of Auschwitz

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This is the nightmare I live with. This is how today’s protagonist describes the haunting memories of his experience at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, 50 years after the events of World War II. But this man was a doctor, not a gaunt prisoner or harrowed survivor; he was, in fact, an SS medical officer—one of the many Nazi doctors who worked within the industry of death that the concentration camp served as the backbone of. Unlike many of his more infamous peers, this man went down in history as a good doctor, a good man who did his best to save human lives or, at minimum, to preserve a sliver of dignity for the camp’s prisoners. His name was Hans Wilhelm Munch, also known as the “Good Man of Auschwitz.”

Hans Munch was born on May 14, 1911, in Freiburg in Breisgau, Baden, then part of the Second German Reich. His parents were Ernst and Matilda Munch. Hans inherited from Ernst an interest in science, and after graduating from high school, he took up medicine, studying at the universities of Munich and Tübingen. In 1933, Hitler and the Nazi Party were in power and gradually exerting influence over every aspect of life. As Hans progressed in his medical studies, he considered gaining formal party membership as a prerequisite to have and keep any future job. In later interviews, Hans Munch stated that he tolerated Nazi ideology but never actively supported it. He was somewhat enthused by the patriotic rhetoric and recognized that the German economy and welfare of the middle class had improved since the Nazis took power. His family was even less enthusiastic about National Socialism; his father Ernst was indifferent, while his mother Matilda was strongly opposed.

To Hans’s own admission, they never took it seriously. To the future Dr. Munch, the anti-Semitic propaganda was little more than empty words and bombast. He could never believe that the Nazis would actually take violent, systematic actions against German Jews. For these reasons, in 1934, Hans joined, without much conviction, two Nazi youth organizations: the National Socialist Mechanized Corps and the National Socialist Union of Students. It wasn’t until May of 1937 that Hans became a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, and even then, it happened almost by chance. As Hans completed his studies, he entered a scientific competition to find a local alternative to agar-agar, an imported substance derived from red algae used in labs as a culture medium to study bacteria. Hans won the competition, and his entry was accepted as a dissertation thesis. Moreover, he received further praise and recognition from the party itself.

While completing his medical internship, he was given a leadership position in a bacteriological department, supervising scientific teams producing the new culture medium. In exchange, he had to join the Nazi Party, as Munch later declared he had run out of reasons not to join. On September 1, 1939, the long dark night of Europe began as German troops crossed the border into Poland. Many doctors had been drafted into the armed forces, but as Hans became Dr. Munch, he was labeled indispensable. He was not drafted, and military authorities asked him to stay in Germany to replace other physicians who had been sent to the front.

During the early months of World War II, Dr. Munch was in a small countryside hospital in Bavaria, acting as a replacement for an absent medical officer. While stationed there, he met and married his wife, also a fellow doctor, against her wishes. In early 1941, Hans volunteered to join the armed forces. His motivation lay in patriotism as well as feelings of guilt; a young man had a comfortable position in a countryside hospital while older doctors were dying on the frontline. Hans was still indispensable, though, and his application was rejected. He then tried to seek help from his sister or secretary at the office of the General Staff. She arranged a series of meetings with various officers and ministry officials, but with little result. Dr. Munch remained stuck in Bavaria until one day in Munich, he ran into an old school friend, Dr. Strasberger. Strasberger told Hans that he was doing well as he had secured a non-specified job with the government. When Munch told him about his difficulty in joining the military, the old friend advised that he volunteer for the Waffen-SS rather than a regular army. Strasberger was an SS officer himself and was actually part of the staff of Reinhard Heydrich, the second in command.

Munch was delighted about the encounter; the Waffen-SS were the fighting unit of the organization. Joining them would mean helping fellow troops at the front. In other words, he could fulfill his duty as a patriotic German. At that time, he did not suspect—or at least he claimed he did not suspect—that the Waffen-SS could also be involved in the administration of the concentration camps. Moreover, Munch had little knowledge of the camps, or again, so he claimed. He admitted that he knew about Dachau and other camps in northern Germany, but he was allegedly unaware of the extent of the atrocities being perpetrated. When his application was accepted, Munch was told that he would initially be posted near Krakow in Poland.

After completing his SS officer training in June of 1943, the Nazis kept their promise: Hans Munch was posted to the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS in Rzeszów, near Krakow. This institute performed all hygienic and bacteriological laboratory work for the local SS, Wehrmacht, and police units. Its lab analyzed samples of blood and other fluids to detect cases of typhus, malaria, and syphilis. It also managed growth cultures for a variety of bacteria in order to develop antibiotic treatments and vaccines. Because of his experience with bacterial cultures, this was a logical assignment for Dr. Munch. He later realized that the Hygiene Institute was assigned regular shipments of beef to be used in the bacterial cultures; the meat, however, was often seized by SS officers for culinary purposes. The lab technicians had to make do with other materials to replace the confiscated beef; typically, it was human flesh coming from the corpses of prisoners—resistance fighters, dissidents, homosexuals, religious minorities, Roma, Sinti, Jews—in other words, undesirables whose dead bodies could be provided in industrial quantities by a structure located some four kilometers from Rzeszów, in a place called Oswiecim, better known by its German name, Auschwitz.

The Rzeszów laboratory was one of many satellite facilities of the larger Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, which were dedicated to medical, chemical, and pharmacological work. The Hygiene Institute’s main task was to control outbreaks of infectious diseases at the camp as well as to trial new medicines. Other facilities and medical teams were purposefully dedicated to dangerous, unethical experimentation on human subjects. The most infamous case is that of the “Angel of Death,” Dr. Joseph Mengele, whose biography we’ve already covered on this channel. Mengele was particularly notorious for his trials on identical twins, the so-called perfect specimens; one could serve as a control subject while the other endured the experiments.

Such was the environment that welcomed Dr. Munch, a decent man with little interest in Nazi ideology and with no ambitions of advancing his own career at the expense of unwilling test subjects. Munch later stated that after visiting the main camp for the first time with his wife, both were shocked. His wife refused to take lodgings in Rzeszów and returned to Germany. Could Hans have done the same? In a later interview, he claimed that SS officers and soldiers did not have a choice to leave Auschwitz once they had been assigned to it. This was disputed by the interviewer, Dagmar Ostermann. As an Auschwitz prisoner, she was forcibly drafted as a clerical helper into an administrative office within the camp. There, she processed several requests of SS personnel who would rather go to the front than serve at Auschwitz. So if he had the chance to leave, why did he stay? Dr. Munch claimed that after his initial months at the institute, co-workers and prisoners themselves asked him not to leave, as he was needed there.

So why did they need him? Because very early on, Dr. Munch behaved like one of the only real human beings on the German side of the camp—like a real doctor, more loyal to the Hippocratic Oath than to the Third Reich. The Hygiene Institute was staffed by some hundred prisoners, mostly Jewish and Polish, with previous experience in medicine and lab research. They worked at Rzeszów essentially as skilled slave labor under Munch’s direct supervision. As they joined the institute, these workers would be marched in and mistreated by SS guards. Munch was the only one who took time to meet each one in person, shaking their hands and welcoming them to the institute. The simple act of civility put him under the spotlight of his superiors. One prisoner, Dr. Louis Michels, also worked with him daily and described Munch as friendly. He showed personal interest in people and never humiliated anyone; he seemed oddly out of place.

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Looking after the staff at Rzeszów was one of the reasons for Munch to stay. The other was related to the infamous Block 10. This was a ward where the chief medical officer at Auschwitz, Dr. Edward Wirths, studied new diagnostic methods for cervical cancer—useful research, but carried out on subjects without their informed consent. Since April 1, 1943, Block 10 was also the theater of sterilization experiments. Here, Dr. Carl Clauberg sought a method for sterilizing unsuspecting women. He devised a technique of injecting a caustic substance into a patient’s uterus over the course of what she thought was an ordinary gynecological examination. A camp survivor described these experiments: “A white substance was then injected into my uterus. The syringe was about 30 centimeters long. Such injections were done to me three times with breaks of three or four months. After each injection, I had a terrible burning sensation in my abdomen.” Dr. Clauberg was assisted by a nurse, Sylvia F. A., a Jewish prisoner from Slovakia. Dr. Munch, who worked occasionally in Block 10, described her as being about 20 years old, tall, and very beautiful. More importantly, she was Clauberg’s right hand and demanded absolute respect, as she selected which women would be sent to the gas chambers at Birkenau.

When Clauberg was moved to another post, some 25 young women were still in Block 10. Their function was now to provide saliva samples to the Hygiene Institute in Rzeszów. But eventually, Munch’s superiors asked him to terminate the collection of saliva. As innocuous as it sounded, the cessation of saliva samples was a death sentence for those women. Now that they were not involved in experiments any longer, they were going to be gassed. Dr. Munch could not accept that. During a sleepless night, he devised a plan. He concocted a new experiment requiring these women as participants—a clinical trial to assess the efficacy of a new vaccine against granuloma, an infection of the gums. The project was approved, and he was able to save the young women of Block 10. He warned them, “You must tell everyone that these experiments are very painful and disagreeable so that the headquarters people do not get wind of anything.”

This was one of many instances in which Dr. Munch designed new harmless trials or extended pre-existing experiments to ensure test subjects would not march to the infamous showers of the camp. He found ways to help prisoners more directly as well. An official court document later stated he was helpful in the frame of his possibilities and even risked his own safety. For example, Dr. Munch helped women prisoners meet their husbands in secret. He succeeded in exempting at least two inmates from the punishment battalion, and he ensured the transfer away from Rzeszów of an SS guard against whom the prisoners had complained. Prisoner and colleague Dr. Michels became very ill with appendicitis in the summer of 1944. Munch visited him frequently as he was convalescing, ensuring that Michels had a full recovery. After five weeks, Dr. Michels returned to the institute, but he was very weak due to a lack of food. On his first day back, Munch approached him and, with great secrecy, pulled something out of his pocket. It was an item he had smuggled to help Michels with his recovery—a nice sausage. Munch ordered Michels to eat and have some rest, intervening when an SS guard grumbled that the prisoner was not on duty.

Later that summer in 1944, Dr. Munch was required to expand his normal duties. Auschwitz had just received a great influx of Jewish prisoners from Hungary. It was then that all medical personnel on the site were drafted to take part in the infamous selection process, colloquially known as ramp duty. This is when doctors examined prisoners as they stepped off transport trains and decided who would work, who would be used in experiments, and who would be sent directly to the gas chambers. The chief medical officer at Auschwitz, Edward Wirth, insisted that all doctors participated in ramp duty, but Dr. Munch would not participate in this arbitrary selection—a thinly disguised power trip presiding over the life and death of thousands of innocent men, women, and children. Dr. Wirth may have had authority over doctors at Auschwitz, but Munch formally reported to Paul Reichel, the head of all hygienic institutes headquartered in Berlin. Munch contacted him and told him, “I cannot do it. I will not do it, regardless of the consequences.” His boss understood; after pulling some strings with the camp commander, he had Munch exempted from the selection process. More importantly, there were no direct consequences, proving again that inside Auschwitz, an SS officer was the only person who was ever treated with any shred of respect or humanity.

In January of 1945, SS authorities began the evacuation of Auschwitz as the Red Army pressed closer from the east. All the Jewish prisoners working at Rzeszów received the news that they would be transferred to an unknown destination. The lab workers were reluctant, suspecting that they were going to be sent on a death march. Headed by Dr. Michels, they decided to talk to Munch. He shared their concerns and even suggested helping them in a daring escape attempt. He would procure SS uniforms and walk them through the gates of Auschwitz to freedom. Eventually, they agreed it was safer to join the transport column than escape toward the Swiss Alps. Dr. Michels survived the late stages of the war and wrote about his last goodbye with Dr. Munch. To prove his goodwill, he gave them a revolver and ammunition in case they had to shoot their way out. He shook hands with each of them and wished them early freedom. That was the last he saw of him. Dr. Munch was also evacuated; he spent two months in Dachau and then returned home to Bavaria. But he wasn’t able to hide the fact that he had been a doctor at Auschwitz.

Hans was eventually arrested by the Allied occupational authorities and interned in an American POW camp. From there, he was transferred to Krakow in 1946. He was to sit on the bench of the accused at the first Auschwitz trial from November 24 to December 22, 1947. Forty-two former staff from the concentration camp were put on trial. Twenty-three of the defendants were sentenced to death; 21 of them were hanged on January 28, 1948. Two had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, and eighteen defendants were found guilty and sentenced to various terms in prison. Only one out of all of them was acquitted and released: Dr. Hans Munch, the righteous doctor, the good man of Auschwitz.

During the trial, the main charge against him was that he had injected prisoners with malaria-infected blood. It was alleged that he had caused dramatic fever by injecting an unknown agent into his human guinea pigs. But many former prisoners came out in support of Munch. Dr. Louis Michels and other surviving Jews sent their testimonies to Munch’s former boss, Paul Reichel. The Krakow court acknowledged how Munch had refused to carry out the selection process and how he had helped prisoners with bogus experiments. It emerged that he had never inoculated malaria and that his injections were intended to treat rheumatism rather than cause it. On December 22, the court acquitted him with the following motivation: not only because he did not commit any crime of harm against the camp prisoners, but because he had a benevolent attitude toward them and helped them. He did this independently from the nationality, race, religious origin, and political conviction of the prisoners.

After the trial, Munch returned to Germany and began working as a practicing doctor in Ralshütten, Bavaria. For many years, neither Munch nor his wife spoke to their children about his experience at Auschwitz. All they knew was that he had been on trial but that he had been acquitted. His son Dirk later said, “I think my father was somewhat paralyzed. He could not talk very much to his children about what he saw and felt.” In the decades after the end of the war, Dr. Munch became a sought-after witness and expert. His opinion was consulted by prosecutors, journalists, and survivors to shed light on the atrocities perpetrated at Auschwitz. For example, in 1955, Dr. Carl Clauberg, the torturer of Block 10, returned to West Germany. Right after the war, he had been arrested by the Soviets and kept