Anna Winterstein

Anna Winterstein was born on 18 May 1921 in Hornstetten. While living in Bad Herzfeld, Germany, she was captured as a forced labourer and sent to Kassel.

On 27 March 1943, she was deported from Kassel to Auschwitz, where she was assigned the prisoner number Z5815. On 2 August 1943, someone at the SS Hygiene Institute in Rajsko, a subcamp of Auschwitz, removed sections of ulcers from her mouth for microscopic analysis. It is unclear what happened to these microscopic slides. This analysis was ordered by camp physician Josef Mengele (1911–1979) for his research on the disease noma, also called cancrum oris. It is believed he was trying to find what caused this disease, which became very prevalent in Auschwitz due to poor sanitation and a lack of nutrition. Noma causes mouth ulcers that get progressively worse, causing gangrenous tissue in the mouth, leading to the jaw wearing away, an inability to breathe, and is fatal in most cases. There is no known cure for noma, so it is not known how she survived this illness, it is possible that she did not have noma but was misdiagnosed but experimented on, nonetheless.

On 19 April 1944, Anna Winterstein was transported from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück, where she received the prisoner number 36133. From Ravensbrück, she was transferred to Schlieben as part of an Arbeitskommando (forced labour detachment) on 17 August 1944. She was then sent to Altenburg, a subcamp of Buchenwald, likely as one of the forced labourers who helped build the subcamp. This was extremely hard labour for any person, but especially so given her forced involvement in this experiment, and her possible illness.

Once the Altenburg subcamp was established, Anna Winterstein was sent to the HASAG Werke factory in Taucha, which manufactured tanks and other weapons. On 11 October 1944, she was transported back to Auschwitz. Just days after her arrival, on 29 October 1944, she was sent again to Ravensbrück, likely due to the advancing front lines of the war.

It is unknown what happened to her after this transfer, as there is no record of her arrival in Ravensbrück. Poor record keeping was common towards the end of the war, along with disjointed transportation orders, making it difficult to trace her fate. It is likely that she was part of a death march from Ravensbrück, and it seems she did not survive, as no records of her exist after the liberation of the camps.

Anna Winterstein is the only known survivor of the “noma experiments,” but it remains unclear why she was transported from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück when all other victims were killed. It is also uncertain how she managed to endure the extremely harsh forced labour after surviving noma, a debilitating illness that generally left even survivors severely weakened and highly vulnerable to other diseases rampant in the concentration camps.