The Doctors of Struthof
by Serge Janouin-Benanti
Translated by Eva N. Siskowski Boatwright
Here is a book that stares straight into the abyss of medicine gone monstrously wrong—and insists we keep looking. Serge Janouin-Benanti’s historical novel If These Are Men… – The Doctors of Struthof reconstructs, with patient, almost forensic care, how eminent physicians from the University of Strasbourg turned the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp into a laboratory for “research” that stripped people of their humanity. Built from archives, survivor testimony, and court records yet told with the momentum of a novel, it’s accessible, gripping, and deeply unsettling. The English translation by Eva N. Siskowski Boatwright is clear, calm, and unobtrusive—exactly the tone a story like this needs. “This novel was inspired by true events,” the book declares up front; the promise is kept on every page.
What the book covers
Serge Janouin-Benanti organizes the story into three interlocking portraits, each centered on a real doctor whose career converged at Struthof: Eugen Haagen, August Hirt, and Otto Bickenbach. The table of contents telegraphs their arcs with bitter irony—“Ready to Do It All Again,” “If these are men, I am the worst kind of filth,” and “It All Depends on the Value of the Race.”
We begin in Strasbourg on November 23, 1941, as SS-Captain Johannes Stein inaugurates the Reich-run medical school with a faculty chosen as much for ideological purity as for scientific pedigree. Among the stars is virologist Eugen Haagen, already internationally known for vaccine work, now angling for even greater glory in wartime. The set-up is deceptively decorous; behind the scenes, access to the nearby camp is being negotiated, and the definition of “patient” is about to be rewritten.
From there, the narrative alternates between doctors plotting experiments, SS power brokers opening doors, and prisoners being reduced to “material.” The Struthof complex (including its Schirmeck annex) becomes the novel’s grim stage. An appendix at the end supplies maps and photographs—gate, barracks, crematory, even portraits of the physicians—which makes the reading experience almost documentary: you finish some chapters shaken and then flip to a photo that confirms, yes, this happened.
The three doctors, three projects—one camp
Eugen Haagen: A vaccine, a vacancy of conscience
Haagen’s section is the most chilling precisely because his motives seem so conventionally “scientific.” He wants to create a live-agent typhus vaccine, and the camp offers what animal trials do not: human bodies he can inoculate, infect, and record. Early test runs at Schirmeck are narrated with an exactness that turns your stomach—“vaccinations,” temperature logs, and then deliberate infection. When a camp pharmacist asks if this isn’t dangerous, Haagen’s assistant Dr. Gräfe snaps the book’s thesis into one line: They aren’t detainees, just Poles. And Poles aren’t human beings.
The logistics harden from there. November 1943: a convoy of Sinti and Romani prisoners is delivered from Auschwitz, many already broken by transport; Haagen rejects most as “unfit” for trials, demanding men closer to the health of German soldiers so his data will “have meaning.” The ones he accepts are inspected, run like horses, and separated into “able” and “unfit.” The sequence is told partly through the eyes of a young Sinto, Karl Kreutz, whose inner mantra—“must not get hit, must not get sick, must see Lyuba again”—cuts through the clinical language with the plaintive human voice the doctors pretend not to hear.
When inoculations come, the procedure is terrifyingly banal: cuts to the forearm, a thick yellow paste, orders to keep the arm still, and then fevers that roar toward 40°C and death. The “experiment” fails by Haagen’s measure (protection is poor), but the calendar moves on, and with it a steady pressure to produce results. In July 1944 another outside doctor, Arnold Dohmen, joins him for a week of trials, with deaths reported later at Nuremberg; the SS had already started shredding evidence. Haagen, mindful of patrons, is nudged by Himmler’s office to properly credit SS agencies alongside the Luftwaffe in his preprints—proof, if any were needed, of how completely the machinery of state had fused with the machinery of medicine. He even requests 200 new prisoners for August; by then he admits he still has not weakened his vaccine enough, but will at least “test the dosage” on living bodies.
Serge Janouin-Benanti follows Haagen beyond 1945, which gives the book its bitter aftertaste. Tried in France, he receives a life sentence (Christmas Eve, 1952), then twenty years on retrial, then amnesty in 1955. He marries his longtime assistant Brigitte Crodel and returns to publicly funded research—never repentant, never remorseful. The quiet, devastating irony is that the man who so serenely logged other people’s fevers would die in 1972, at his desk, writing a book on human viral disease.
August Hirt: Skulls, gas, and a scholar’s self-annihilation
If Haagen embodies the seduction of “pure science,” August Hirt represents the ideological anatomist whose curiosity about “racial types” becomes a death sentence for those he classifies. Hirt rails that his institute owns skulls of every people “from five continents,” but none from Jews—an absence he treats as a scientific emergency. From complaint to project, the slope is quickly greased. He calculates how many “specimens” he’ll need, drafts criteria, and leans on SS channels to obtain prisoners, all while dreaming of technological breakthroughs (an electron microscope on order) that will elevate his name.
The book does not sensationalize the most infamous episode—the murder of 86 Jews for Hirt’s “collection”—so much as it patiently reconstructs it: the transfers from Auschwitz in August 1943; the holding barracks; the clinical humiliations and injections performed by a visiting SS doctor; and then the killings in Struthof’s small gas chamber. The aftermath lingers: corpses routed through Strasbourg’s Institute of Anatomy, tattoos cut away to obliterate identity, and one hospital employee, Henri Henrypierre, who copied the tattoo numbers into a notebook and swore “to avenge them.” That list would help identify the victims years later, even as courts handed down scandalously light sentences to some of the men who abetted the project.
Hirt’s section ends not with a courtroom but a forest clearing in June 1945. Faced with what he has done, what he will be called to answer for, he convinces himself there is only one way to remain the man he imagines himself to be. The suicide is written in a register both restrained and harrowing. “If Jews were men,” he thinks, “he would be unforgivable.” The pistol shot rings like an evasion—and a confession.
Otto Bickenbach: Poison gas and the new “ethic”
The third portrait, Otto Bickenbach, is of a clinician whose wartime claim to fame is an antidote to phosgene. He starts, as the others do, with animal trials and ambition. When access to Struthof stalls, he writes directly to Heinrich Himmler—a bureaucratic faux pas that might have ended him had Himmler not liked the subject. Bickenbach grandstands (even exposing himself to a small dose of phosgene under self-protection) to prove his devotion, and the doors open. His gassing experiments will be conducted in or near the Struthof infirmary and gas chamber; he insists the “material” resemble robust soldiers, and an SS doctor, Richard Krieger, assures him he’ll get what he needs.
What makes this section unforgettable is the moral reasoning Bickenbach hears from above. When Dr. Karl Brandt (Hitler’s personal physician and architect of the Nazi euthanasia program) visits Struthof, he delivers the new catechism with terrifying candor: the old medical code was “written by Jews to protect the weak”; the new order demands hardness for the health of the Volk. Serge Janouin-Benanti quotes at length, not to shock, but to show how thoroughly language can be bent to serve murder—how easy it becomes, once you accept the premise, to call killing a therapy.
Bickenbach’s team includes Helmut Rühl, a doctor who persuades himself he is only a “tiny cog.” In August–September 1944, as the Allies draw near and the SS grow jittery, Rühl tries one last visit to the camp and is turned away; he will surface again after the war, his name mis-spelled in files, his career improbably thriving until Romani organizations drag parts of the story back into court. Serge Janouin-Benanti doesn’t linger on vengeance; he documents how easily atrocity can be bureaucratized and then—almost—forgotten.
How it reads (and why you won’t put it down)
The achievement here is tonal. Serge Janouin-Benanti never kitsches up the horror nor editorializes over the top; he simply shows. A dean drafts a speech about “compassion,” then hires SS stalwarts; a genius virologist obsesses over dosage curves as men shiver themselves to death; an anatomist catalogs measurements and complains about “gaps” in his collection; a clinician hears a new ethic and nods along because it flatters his work. The banality is the point. The prose (and translation) are lucid, almost cool, which keeps you from looking away—and makes the flashes of individual life, like Karl Kreutz’s stubborn will to see his fiancée again, burn all the brighter.
It also helps that the book moves. Scenes are short; chapters end on the consequences of a memo or the arrival of a train; and the bureaucratic alphabet soup (Ahnenerbe, RSHA, SS ranks) is always anchored to a human result. When you want to check a place or a face, the appendix is there: photos of the camp under snow after liberation; images of Haagen and Hirt; the list of eighty-six murdered for Hirt’s “collection”—a roll call that restores names to the numbers Hirt tried to erase. It’s an unusual but effective blending of narrative and dossier.
What stays with you
Three ideas linger long after you close the book:
- How quickly a “means” becomes a “right.” Haagen tells himself human trials are faster and more “meaningful” than animal ones; Bickenbach that antidotes require exposure; Hirt that anatomy needs skulls. Each doctor starts from a premise that sounds like a research design and ends with a pile of the dead. The novel is a sustained demonstration of how scientific language can anesthetize conscience—provided the state and the culture supply the sedative of dehumanization.
- How systems abet forgetting. Courts are convened, yes, but amnesties are granted; secretaries burn files; a conscientious hospital worker’s notebook sleeps in dust for decades; even a perpetrator’s postwar promotion reads like a dark joke. The book’s closing pages on identifications, trials, and postwar fates are bleak without being hopeless: individual acts of memory still cut through.
- How the victims resist erasure. The most humane passages are, deliberately, the most ordinary: a new uniform that doesn’t fit; a bowl of soup that is “robust” by camp standards; men pushed to run while an assistant counts off “ein, zwei.” These details recover persons from “material.” You read with a gathering awareness that every “subject number” in a table was once a son, or a fiancé, or simply someone with a pulse and a fear of the cold.
Who should read this (and why)
This is not a book only for historians of the Holocaust or readers of courtroom drama. It’s for anyone drawn to stories where ordinary professional roles—teacher, researcher, administrator—are tested by the worst incentives a society can offer. Serge Janouin-Benanti writes for a wide audience without diluting the record, and the translator keeps the language direct, unfussy, and readable. If you’ve ever wondered how people who took the Hippocratic oath could do what they did, this book supplies a painstaking, scene-by-scene answer. It also, implicitly, asks what it would take to prevent something like it from happening again.
Why you’ll want to keep turning pages
- It’s built like a thriller, sourced like a dossier. You feel the clock ticking in 1943–44, the turf wars among SS directorates, and the scramble for “results,” even as documents and photographs in the back matter ground the story.
- It restores names. The inclusion of lists and images—for example, the identified victims of the “Hirt collection”—keeps the narrative from becoming a blur of faceless suffering.
- It follows through. Postwar chapters refuse tidy catharsis; they track trials, amnesties, and the long arc of remembrance, right down to a murderer dying comfortably decades later.
A few moments you won’t forget (without spoilers)
- The first selection at Struthof, when a terrified young man tries to run “like a German soldier” to pass an exam that will, he hopes, keep him alive. It reads like a perverse entrance test where the reward is more suffering—and it’s told with an intimacy that will claw at you.
- The day a senior Nazi physician calmly rewrites medical ethics to a colleague’s face, recasting “mercy” and “utility” in a way that makes your blood run cold.
- The revelation that a single notebook of tattoo numbers—copied in secret by a hospital worker, at risk to his life—eventually re-humanizes the 86 Hirt tried to anonymize. You feel, for a moment, the stubborn, saving power of paperwork.
The bottom line
If These Are Men… – The Doctors of Struthof is a taut, devastating account of three physicians who swapped medicine for murder and called it progress. It’s also a rare hybrid: a novel that reads with the urgency of fiction while anchoring each scene to historical record, right down to the faces in the photographs. Whether you come to it for history, ethics, or simply a powerful story well told, you will finish it thoughtful, angry, and—crucially—alert. Read it, and then press it into someone else’s hands. Books like this won’t let denial have the last word.
Notes on sources within the book: The opening claim that the novel is “inspired by true events,” the Strasbourg setting, and Haagen’s prewar scientific stature are presented in the book’s front matter and early chapters. The Schirmeck trials and Dr. Gräfe’s dehumanizing line come from Haagen’s section; the Auschwitz-to-Struthof transfers, selection scenes, and inoculations are documented in the same arc. Postwar outcomes for Haagen, Hirt, and associates—as well as the identification of the 86 murdered Jews—are covered in the later chapters and the appendix of photos and lists.
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