11/21/2025
“Strip”—What the German Soldiers Did Next Was Horrifying…
On January 23, 1943, in Pas-de-Calais, northern France, snow fell over the ruins of an old textile factory, renamed on German military maps as “Field Medical Unit 19.” But there was nothing medical about it. Only the biting cold, the smell of disinfectant mixed with dried blood, and the order that echoed through the halls: “Take off your clothes and kneel.”
That phrase started it all, spoken with clinical coldness. Within those gray walls, French women—nurses, teachers, Resistance messengers—were stripped of their names and their humanity.
The man in charge was Dr. Ernst Felker, a methodical physician from Berlin. With thin glasses and always-clean hands, Felker saw not victims, but data. He recorded everything in his black notebooks: body temperature, time to exhaustion, skin reactions. To him, science should not be limited by sentiment.
The women were held in damp cells in the basement. At 6 a.m., rifle butts thudded on iron doors to wake them. Barefoot, they walked the icy hallways to the former fabric warehouse.
There, Felker awaited, along with three German nurses who obeyed without raising their eyes. In one corner, always standing, was SS officer Klaus Ritner. Ritner never spoke. He only watched and took notes in a small notebook. His silent presence was the bureaucracy that authorized the horror, turning Felker’s madness into a sanctioned procedure.
“Take off your clothes and kneel.”
Then the experiments began. Injections of live bacteria—tetanus, gangrene—to observe infection. Small cuts without anesthesia. But the worst were the freezing water tubs. Women were submerged, strapped in, while Felker timed how long it took them to lose consciousness. Then he tested rewarming methods, often fatally.
The women learned not to scream. Screaming only drew more attention. They bit their lips and endured in absolute silence.
Bodies were removed at night. A nearby farmer began noticing a strange odor from an abandoned basement, but investigating at that time meant death. So he closed his windows and tried to forget.
By April 1944, as the Allies advanced, the unit was evacuated. Documents were burned. Felker, Ritner, and the notebooks disappeared. The 17 surviving prisoners were transferred to other camps, lost in the chaos. The factory fell silent.
For decades, no one spoke of the place. The story of those women was buried with their bodies.
In 1978, during construction for a parking lot on the land, workers discovered a sealed basement. Inside were dozens of human remains. Among the bones, fragments of diaries repeatedly wrote the same phrase: “Take off your clothes and kneel.”
Twenty years later, a French historian named Laurent Morau bought three black-covered notebooks at an auction in Munich. They were Felker’s diaries. Reading them was chilling—not because of emotion, but because of its absence:
"Subject 7. Female. Estimated age 28. Immersion 4°C. Duration 22 min. Outcome: loss of consciousness at 18 min. Subject died overnight."
It was the banality of evil, recorded in precise cursive.
Morau searched for survivors. In 1989, three women responded to his call.
Simone Lefèvre spoke of the cold in the tubs. Marguerite Blanc remembered a young pregnant woman, fascinated by Felker, who was subjected to hypothermia experiments until she lost her baby and died days later. Hélène Girard, who had emigrated to Canada, confessed she recited Baudelaire poems in her mind during torture to “remain human.”
In 1999, Morau published “The Silence of the Women of Pas-de-Calais.” The book shook the world, finally giving names to these forgotten victims. One of them, Élise, a teacher, had managed to carve into the wall of her cell with a nail: “My name is Élise, I existed.”
To be continued
