Erwin Ding-Schuler

Erwin Oskar Ding-Schuler was a German surgeon and a Waffen-SS officer who reached the rank of Sturmbannfuehrer, born on 19 September 1912 and dead on 11 August 1945. He is recorded in medical history for the experiments he performed on inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp, an example of the abuse of medicine under National Socialism. He joined the Nazi party in 1932 and the SS in 1936, passed his medical state examination in 1937, and in 1939 became camp physician at Buchenwald and head of the division for spotted fever and viral research of the Waffen-SS Hygiene Institute there. Experiments on some 1,000 inmates, many of whom died, used poisons and infective agents including typhus, yellow fever, smallpox and cholera. He was arrested by American troops in April 1945 and killed himself in August.