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Claus Schilling (1871-1946) is not a name that I had heard of and he sits very uncomfortably in medical history, though it is one that deserves remembering for the darkest of reasons. A German tropical medicine specialist born in 1871, Schilling built his reputation on malaria research in Italy before the war. That early work was legitimate enough, but his career took a grotesque turn under the Nazi regime when his skills were redirected towards human experimentation at Dachau concentration camp.

In 1942, by then in his seventies and retired from normal academic life, Schilling was encouraged by Heinrich Himmler to continue his malaria studies, but now using prisoners as unwilling test subjects. The barracks at Dachau were adapted for this purpose, and over the next three years thousands of inmates were deliberately infected with malaria parasites so Schilling could observe the progress of disease and trial treatments. The authorities were told me Schilling that his experiments would be legitimate and avoid suffering, but I can’t imagine the Nazis would have stopped him if he had told them the truth.

The conditions were absolutely brutal for those chosen to be his patients. Prisoners were exposed either through bites from infected mosquitoes or by being directly injected with parasites. Once ill, they were given a variety of drugs, some experimental, others known to be ineffective, in order to measure responses. Many suffered agonising fevers, complications or long-term debilitation. It is estimated that around 400 prisoners died as a direct result of these experiments, though the suffering of survivors is harder still to quantify.

Schilling himself seemed to justify the work as a contribution to military medicine, I assume actually convincing himself of that. Malaria remained a problem for troops in southern Europe and North Africa, and his argument was that the research might save German soldiers’ lives. But the cost was borne entirely by the prisoners, who were stripped of choice, consent or dignity. It was medical science twisted beyond recognition, an exploitation of knowledge for cruelty rather than healing. When the war ended, Schilling was arrested by American forces. At the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial held between 1946 and 47, his actions were laid bare alongside those of other physicians who had abused their positions under the Nazi system. Found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, he was sentenced to death. Schilling was hanged in Landsberg Prison in May 1946, aged 74, one of the relatively few who lost their lives for what happened at Dachau.

There really wasn’t much compassion or understanding to him, he spoke in English when he told the war crimes trial:

“I have worked out this great labour. It would be really a terrible loss if I could not finish this work. I don’t ask you as a court, I ask you personally to do what you can; to do what you can to help me that I may finish this report. I need only a table and a chair and a typewriter. It would be an enormous help for science, for my colleagues, and a good part to rehabilitate myself.”

It seems to me that this type of behaviour is the most challenging of all the atrocities that took place during the Second World War. A medical doctor, who I assume had been trained to alleviate pain, had instead gone down another route and dehumanised people for his experiments. He doesn’t appear to have been a Nazi in terms of joining early or showing political interest, he just got swept along with the hate of the Nazi regime and became a war criminal. I’m not sure I understand how what appeared to be a mild-mannered doctor managed to end up being one of the worst war criminals of his generation.

Although there is one recreated dormitory building at Dachau, all of the former dormitory buildings on the left and right of this rather stately looking poplar lined main avenue (known as Camp Road) have gone with only their footprints remaining. The long rows of prisoner accommodation that once stretched across the roll-call square are now reduced to just these outlines on the ground, faint concrete or gravel borders marking where walls once stood. Walking down here in the rain, it was hard to really imagine just how noisy and unpleasant this area would once have been.

These footprints are the remains of the camp’s other dormitories, the majority of which were demolished after liberation. Their traces are preserved not as reconstructed facsimiles but as bare, skeletal floor plans so visitors have to use their imagination to contemplate the scenes that once unfolded here. The choice not to rebuild them all was deliberate as to reconstruct twenty-odd barracks would have risked creating something that looked too complete, too much like a functioning place rather than a memorial.

From 1942, medical experiments used to take place here at Barracks 1, although by 1943 they were using prisoners to supply the medical care. Initially, the medical barracks was well-equipped and had the facilities that it needed, but that situation didn’t last long and they were soon struggling to get hold of medical supplies. There’s a hollowness to all of this now, but there’s enough left to be able to understand the scale of what went on here, architectural order and human chaos.

Here’s what the scene looked like in 1945, shortly after the American liberation.

There’s one accommodation block at Dachau, although it’s not original but it still tells a harrowing story. The first set of barracks built in the 1930s have long since been demolished, erased as part of the camp’s post-war dismantling. What stands in their place was put up in the 1960s as part of the memorial site’s efforts to give a sense of the living conditions without pretending that the wood and nails themselves date back to the darkest years. It is, in other words, an interpretation based on plenty of evidence rather than an untouched relic.

The decision to rebuild was controversial at the time, not least because it risked accusations of falsifying history. But the curators argued, and still argue, that leaving the ground bare would rob visitors of any real sense of what life looked and felt like inside. The result is a set of reconstructed barracks, faithful to the original dimensions, where one can move from one dormitory style to another and see how the regime altered living space over the course of the war.

Inside, there are three types of dormitory arrangement, staged in sequence. The first represents the early years of the camp, when conditions were already harsh but still allowed something resembling order with neatly aligned beds, lockers, and a sense of regimented, almost military discipline. It wasn’t comfortable by any modern measure, but it was structured, a vision of a barracks meant to break individuality but still keep the veneer of control. At the time the intention was still to operate as a form of prison and although the Nazis strongly disliked their political opponents and weren’t afraid of killing some, the arrangement wasn’t designed to be a mass killing machine.

The washroom facilities.

The second reconstruction shows how the accommodation degraded as prisoner numbers grew. Here the beds are closer together, storage space has vanished, and the atmosphere is more obviously oppressive. It is a space designed not for discipline but for crowding, with privacy and dignity stripped back even further. The physical closeness illustrates what documents and testimonies often describe, namely overcrowding that was deliberately allowed to spiral.

The third dormitory shows the final stage, when conditions collapsed entirely into rows of bunks crammed together with little more than straw and blankets. It is the starkest of the three, stripped of any pretence of order and with no living space supplied as had previously been the case. This space is meant to demonstrate the extreme overpopulation of the camp in its later years, when disease and exhaustion became as much a part of the environment as the walls and ceilings. The contrast between this room and the first is brutal, and that is very much the point.

The reconstructed barracks are not there to trick anyone into thinking they are standing in untouched history. Instead, they function as a visual and spatial narrative, walking visitors through a steady decline in living conditions, from rigid control to chaos. By building them in the 1960s, the memorial’s designers created a tool to teach rather than a relic to worship. They remain one of the most immediate, unsettling parts of the site, not because of their authenticity, but because they distil the story of degradation into something that can be seen and felt in the space of a short walk.