Herta Oberheuser was born on 15 May 1911 in Cologne, then part of the German Empire Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in January 1933. From 1935 Oberheuser joined the League of German Girls, and her activities were to provide medical assistance to female participants in youth shows and spartakiads who were overloaded with exercise.
The League of German Girls was the female section of Hitler Youth. These organizations, led by Baldur von Schirach, were the primary tools that the Nazis used to indoctrinate young people with Nazi ideology, thus shaping the beliefs, thinking and actions of German youth.
Boys and girls were taught to be both racially conscious and physically fit in order to build a new future for Germany and were often present at Nazi Party rallies and marches.
Since the Hitler Youth and its female section the League of German Girls were considered fully Aryan organizations by Nazi officials, premarital sex was encouraged in their ranks.
At the 1936 Nuremberg Rally, where there were some 100,000 participants of youth organizations present, 900 girls between fifteen and eighteen years of age returned home pregnant.
In 1937 Oberheuser joined the Nazi Party. The same year she received her doctorate and then decided to train as a dermatologist. She started to work at the Dermatology Clinic in Düsseldorf as an assistant physician and obtained specialist title in dermatology in 1940.
The Second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
Soon after, Herta’s father became ill and the Oberheuser family again ran into financial difficulties. Herta decided to help her parents financially and since there were no satisfactory earning opportunities at the clinic where she was working, she began to look around for other employment.
In 1940 a chance to earn well came her way. She learned from a professional medical journal that the SS was looking for a female doctor for a women's training camp near Berlin. She applied, and after three months of training, in December of that year, she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women's camp established by the Nazis.
Ravensbrück camp was staffed both by SS men, who served as guards and administrators, and by 150 women, who served as supervisors. These female supervisors were either SS volunteers or women who had taken the job for the good pay and working conditions.
In the camp, Oberheuser worked under the site physicians Walter Sonntag and Gerhard Schiedlausky who performed experiments on concentration camp inmates. They extracted their healthy teeth without the use of anesthetic and the preferred method of killing was by injecting petrol and phenol directly into the prisoners’ veins. They also experimented with the prostitutes interned in Ravensbrück, using them as “lab rats” in search for a cure for gonorrhoea and syphilis.
Since her colleagues could no longer stand the conditions of the experiments, Oberheuser gradually took over more and more of her colleagues' functions, thus ensuring that the experiments were carried out.
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