Deaths in Bayer's anesthetic drug experiment emerge in a letter that turns the deaths of 150 women into a failed procurement result and a request for replacement subjects. Read by Angelus Thomsen in Frithuric Burckl’s office at the Buna-Werke, the report makes the machinery of exploitation visible in its most chillingly ordinary form: a pharmaceutical company, a negotiated price, an unsuccessful experiment, and another order.

The letter and the experiment

The scene begins with Angelus Thomsen drinking synthetic coffee in Burckl’s office at the Buna-Werke. The letter before him was written by Bayer’s chief personnel officer, addressed to Paul Doll, and came from Bayer, a pharmaceutical firm described as a subsidiary of IG Farben. Its administrative tone is strikingly composed. It reports that a transport of 150 women arrived in good condition, but that no conclusive results could be obtained because all of them died during the experiments. It then asks Doll to send another group of the same size at the same price.

The letter does not explain the women’s identities, their consent, or what happened to them individually. Its language instead makes their arrival and deaths part of a transaction: the group is counted, its experimental usefulness assessed, and a replacement requested. The absence of conclusive results does not interrupt the process. It becomes the reason to repeat it.

The experiment concerned a new anesthetic. Burckl explains that Bayer had overdone the dose, treating the immediate cause of death as an obvious technical mistake. Yet the report gives no dose, medical findings, or account of how the deaths occurred. What it does record is their totality: all 150 women died, and the company still framed the result as a problem to be solved by sending more subjects.

Price, repetition, and responsibility

Thomsen responds by asking how much a woman costs. Burckl answers that the price was 170 Reichsmarks each: Doll had wanted 200, but Bayer negotiated the figure down. The exchange places bargaining over human beings alongside the experiment’s medical purpose. The amount is not incidental detail; it reveals that the women had been assigned a sale price and that the buyer and seller could dispute it even as the experiment ended in mass death.

Burckl calls Bayer’s conduct indicative of a faulty attitude. His objection is not presented as a defense of the women’s rights or a demand that the experiments stop. Instead, he asks whether they all died at once or received the same dose, or whether deaths came in batches or one by one. Those questions expose the lack of learning behind the experiment: if the deaths varied over time, the company had opportunities to recognize and correct its errors, yet, in Burckl’s account, it repeated them. His criticism thus identifies recklessness while remaining framed in terms of procedure and avoidable failure.

The request for another 150 women makes that failure cyclical. The first group’s deaths did not end the experiment or prompt the company to reconsider using prisoners. Bayer’s response, as reported in the letter, was to ask for a replacement group at the same price. Responsibility is distributed among the company that conducts the tests, the camp authority that supplies the women, and Doll, who sets a price. The scene offers no single dramatic order of execution; it shows lethal violence passing through an ordinary chain of correspondence and negotiation.

The camp’s administrative logic

The exchange belongs to a wider world in which people are sorted, counted, assigned, and processed. In another camp operation, Doll prepares a large force of guards and staff for a train’s arrival, while invoking a rule of thumb that roughly 1,000 people travel on each train and as many as 90 percent may be selected for one side. Elsewhere, he insists that skulls be carefully counted. These are not details of Bayer’s experiment, but they echo the same institutional habit: human beings become quantities to be allocated or enumerated.

The handling of bodies after killing extends that logic beyond death. The Sonderkommando prisoners, under Szmul’s authority, remove gold teeth and hair, take rings and earrings, hoist bodies to the furnaces, grind the ashes, and send the resulting dust away by truck. Their coerced work is described as a process carried out with numb indifference. This separate account does not establish what happened to the women who died in Bayer’s experiments; it does show the larger camp system’s capacity to turn human remains into successive tasks and outputs.

Doll’s own justifications deepen the contrast between administrative order and moral reality. He presents himself as a normal man and argues that kindness to Jews would be cruelty to Germans, replacing ordinary moral distinctions with a calculation of positive and negative outcomes. In another conversation, he declares agreement with the Reichsführer-SS against pampering prisoners. Against that background, Bayer’s letter appears not as an isolated technical mishap but as an instance of a political and institutional environment where the deaths of prisoners can be discussed as a defective procedure or a failed use of resources.

Narrative significance

The episode gains force from the gap between the letter’s calm business language and what it reports. The women arrived in good condition; the experiments yielded no conclusive results; all the women died; another group was requested. The repeated administrative phrases do not soften the violence. They show how a lethal act can be made to resemble routine procurement, with the human cost reduced to a number and a price.

Burckl’s criticism complicates that exposure. He recognizes that Bayer is repeating mistakes and that treating a workforce as disposable can be counterproductive; elsewhere he recounts a worksite clash in which a prisoner, a prisoner-of-war, and a Kapo were injured or killed, delaying the movement of cables. His perspective challenges waste and operational inefficiency, but the letter scene does not show him demanding an end to the experiments. The distinction matters: criticism of the way violence is managed is not the same as rejecting the violence itself.

By letting Thomsen encounter the report and ask the price of a woman, the narrative makes the commercial calculation audible without supplying a consoling resolution. The experiment’s result is not scientific knowledge but a request to repeat the test with another group. That ending exposes the governing contradiction: an institution may describe its work in terms of expertise, procedure, and productivity while making the lives of its captive subjects expendable.