In 1939, as war was about to sweep across Europe, Jews in Germany had already been pushed out of everyday life.

After more than 300,000 people were forced to leave their homes and flee, only about 200,000 remained.

In reality, they lived as if they no longer existed.

They were no longer citizens, had no jobs, and no place left for them in society.

in their own homeland.

They suddenly became strangers who were driven away.

And when World War II officially broke out on September 1st, 1939, that exclusion turned into a brutal campaign of destruction.

Within the ruthless machinery of fascism, children became the most vulnerable victims.

Why? Because in the eyes of those in power at the time, children could not carry weapons, could not perform heavy labor, and could not defend themselves.

They were considered worthless to the wartime needs of the regime.

The result was devastating.

By the end of the war, approximately 1.

5 [music] million children had been killed.

Some were taken from their mother’s arms and sent directly [music] into gas chambers.

Others were turned into subjects of painful and meaningless medical [music] experiments.

Within this landscape of blood and suffering, the Bullenhusa dam tragedy was not a random incident.

It stands as the clearest evidence of how far a state [music] can go when hatred blinds human judgment to the point where even innocent children are treated as something [music] to be erased.

To understand how such a tragedy could occur, we must look at what happened earlier [music] inside the laboratories of the Noyename concentration camp.

Blood fueled ambition at Noyename [music] and the children used as test subjects within the Nazi medical system.

Kurt Heismier was not a prominent figure.

He had no significant [music] research achievements, held no high academic position and remained outside Germany’s [music] leading scientific institutions.

In a regime where science was tightly bound to power and political status, that obscurity [music] became a dangerous motivation.

For Heismmeer, the war opened a path to compensate for personal failure through the most extreme means.

In the spring of 1944, Heismmeer [music] was granted permission by Eno Ling, the chief physician responsible for the entire concentration [music] camp system to conduct a series of secret experiments at [music] the Nuoname concentration camp.

This approval demonstrates that the experiments were not the actions of a lone individual, but were carried out within a framework [music] tolerated by the SS apparatus.

Heismmeer claimed that his objective was to [music] study the human body’s response to direct exposure to tuberculosis bacteria while also testing [music] a so-called antidote that he himself had developed.

In reality, the method [music] rested on no solid scientific foundation.

It disregarded all research standards, all safety [music] principles, and all concepts of medical ethics.

In the initial phase, Heismmeer [music] conducted experiments on approximately 30 Polish and Soviet prisoners.

The results quickly revealed failure.

Most of the subjects [music] did not survive long enough to produce any meaningful sequence of observations.

For a scientist, this [music] would have been a signal to stop.

For Heismier, it became a reason to change his [music] test subjects.

By mid 1944, he made a new demand to use Jewish children as experimental [music] subjects.

His reasoning was based on distorted biological and racial thinking.

Children were viewed as uninfected, easier [music] to control, and more suitable for observing biological responses.

In Heismeer’s [music] view, there was no fundamental difference between Jewish children and laboratory animals.

At the end of November 1944, [music] the selection process took place at the Avitz concentration camp.

It was carried out by Yseph Mangala who was already accustomed [music] to selecting children for deviant medical purposes.

10 boys and 10 [music] girls between the ages of 5 and 12 were separated from the camp through [music] a simple deceptive question.

Who wants to go see their mother? The 20 children came from Poland, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and [music] Slovakia.

Accompanying them were four female prisoners including one doctor and three nurses [music] assigned to care for the children during transport.

The journey from Ashvitz to Noingi [music] was carefully disguised.

The convoy was recorded as a transport of patients suspected [music] of having typhoid.

Jewish identification markings were removed.

The children were fed adequately [music] and were even given chocolate and milk.

This was not an act of compassion but a tactic [music] to deceive checkpoint inspections.

Upon arrival at Noengame, three of the accompanying adults were eliminated immediately by the execution of Wilhelm Dryman.

Only the prisoner Dr.

Paulina [music] Troki survived and later became a crucial witness.

At Noyunami, the experiments [music] were carried out under conditions of complete isolation.

The children were deliberately infected [music] with live tuberculosis bacteria by making cuts in the skin and introducing [music] the bacteria into the wounds.

They were then subjected to surgical removal of lymph nodes from under the arm to examine [music] the body’s reaction.

Each child underwent this procedure twice.

The children were required to raise their arms and be [music] photographed, not for treatment, but to serve as so-called scientific evidence.

For months, the children lived with high fevers, [music] severe exhaustion, and isolation.

They had no contact with the outside world, received no explanations, [music] and had no ability to understand what was happening to them.

To Heismayer, [music] the children were not patients.

They were tools for advancing his reputation within a system that reduced human beings to the level of laboratory animals.

What took place at Noingame [music] was not a scientific error.

It was the inevitable outcome of personal ambition protected by a power structure [music] willing to sacrifice every ethical standard.

Top secret [music] files and the order of elimination.

In early spring of 1945, the course of the [music] war left no room for illusion.

Allied forces were closing in on Germany’s major cities.

The concentration camp system in northern Germany faced [music] the imminent risk of being taken over at any moment.

In that context, the priority of the Nazi regime was no longer the continuation of [music] research projects, but the removal of all traces.

The experiments at Nooname, especially [music] the program carried out by Kurt Heismmeer, had become an obvious legal liability.

The Jewish children held there were not only victims, but living evidence of what had [music] taken place behind the camp fences.

As the war approached its end, their continued existence was unacceptable to the SS apparatus.

[music] The order came from the highest level of [music] the concentration camp system.

Oswald Pole, head of the SS economic and administrative main office, issued the directive to dissolve [music] Heism’s experimental unit.

This was not a routine administrative measure.

It carried [music] a clear instruction.

Leave no witnesses.

Under that [music] order, all Jewish children being held at Noingame along with those directly involved in their care and in supporting the experiments were to be eliminated.

[music] There were no exceptions.

No plans for transfer, no intention of long-term concealment.

It was a definitive decision reflecting the final logic of a collapsing system.

When a crime can no longer be protected, all traces of it must [music] be destroyed.

The order from Berlin was passed down to the camp level through Max Polly, the commandant of Noyong.

Paulie did not object, delay, or raise questions.

He fully understood the meaning of the order and the consequences of allowing anyone to [music] survive.

For Paulie, this was not a personal decision, but the final task to be completed before the camp was dismantled.

Paulie assigned [music] the execution of the order to Alfred Trabinsky, the camp doctor directly responsible [music] for the area where the children were held.

The choice of Trabinsky was deliberate.

He knew [music] the children’s condition, understood how to control and approach them without drawing attention, and more importantly had been involved in the process of concealment from [music] the beginning.

From that moment on, the fate of the 20 [music] children was sealed.

The decision was no longer hypothetical or subject to debate.

It was recorded [music] as part of the final chain of orders issued by the concentration camp system in northern Germany [music] as the SS apparatus shifted from operation to erasia.

What followed was not a spontaneous act in the chaos [music] of war, but the direct result of a structured order with designated responsibility [music] and a single objective to ensure that no one would be able to tell this story once the war ended.

deaths in the basement [music] of the Bullen Husa Dam School.

The location chosen for the elimination was [music] not a remote forest or an isolated prison, but a former school building on Bulanhusa [music] Dam in the Rothenberg sort district of Hamburg.

The building had been converted into a subcamp [music] of Nuongame situated away from public attention yet sufficiently enclosed to allow full control.

Shortly before midnight on April 20th, 1945, [music] a truck entered the school grounds.

On board were 20 Jewish children and six Soviet [music] prisoners.

There were no official documents and no intake records.

The transfer [music] was carried out quickly and silently as the final stage of a plan to erase evidence.

The Soviet prisoners were separated first.

They were taken into nearby rooms and executed by hanging by Ival Jou and Johan [music] Framm.

This was done swiftly to eliminate adult witnesses before turning to the children.

The 20 children were then led [music] down into the basement.

They were reassured that they would receive vaccinations against typhus, an explanation familiar within the context of the [music] camp system.

There was no screaming and no resistance.

The children [music] believed this was a medical procedure.

Alfred Trabinsky personally injected each child with a high dose of morphine.

The purpose was not treatment but to induce sleep [music] or a semic-conscious state and reduce their ability to react.

As the drug [music] took effect, each child was brought to hooks fixed to the basement wall and hanged.

Those who carried out the killings were Wilhelm Dryman and [music] Johan Fram.

During the process, Framm made a cold and mocking remark [music] while handling a 12-year-old boy, saying, “Put him to sleep.

” The remark was not spontaneous.

It reflected a level of indifference [music] that had become habitual.

That same night, the four caregivers who had accompanied the children, [music] one doctor, and three nurses, were also killed to ensure that no direct witnesses to the experiments remained.

Afterward, another group of Soviet [music] prisoners, approximately 30 men, was brought to the school.

Six attempted [music] to escape.

Three were shot on the spot.

Three managed to get away.

The remaining [music] prisoners were hanged, completing the clearing of the site.

The following morning, [music] Trebinsky returned to the basement to confirm the deaths.

He ordered all of the children’s clothing, shoes, and toys to be burned.

This was not done [music] for sanitation, but to erase every sign that the children had ever existed there.

When the sun rose over Hamburg, the Bullenhoosa Dam school [music] appeared outwardly calm once again.

There were no signs of fighting and no records.

Only an empty space remained where 20 lives had been erased from the world in absolute [music] silence.

Justice and accountability after the war.

After the war, the paths of those responsible for the Bullenhusa dam tragedy did not unfold in the same way.

Some disappeared for many years.

Others were brought before justice almost immediately.

This disparity reflects a postwar reality.

Justice arrived unevenly, but in the end it still reached the key figures.

[music] The architect of the medical experiments, Kurt Heismier, was not arrested immediately after 1945.

He fled to East Germany and continued to practice as a pulmonary physician, living for many years as an ordinary citizen.

It was not until 1959 that his past was exposed through investigations into medical experiments in concentration camps.

In 1963, Heism was arrested.

3 years later, in 1966, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Throughout the investigation and trial, his attitude remained unchanged.

He did not acknowledge the prisoners as complete human beings but regarded them only as research subjects.

In contrast to Heismayer, those who directly participated in the massacre at Bulan Husadam were brought to trial much earlier.

Beginning on March 18th, 1946, the British military court in Hamburg opened proceedings concerning crimes connected to Neuengame and its satellite camps.

The central focus of the trial was the night of April 20th, 1945.

During the proceedings, Alfred Trazinsky presented a defense that shocked the court.

He claimed that if he had refused to carry out the order, the children would have died anyway, and that one could not execute children, but could only murder them, and that they were only Jews.

This argument was not intended to deny the act, but to justify it through the internal logic of the system he served.

On May 3rd, 1946, the court sentenced Alfred Trabinsky, Max Pley, Wilhelm Dryman, and Adolf Spec [music] to death by hanging.

In July 1946, the same sentence was also imposed on Johan Framm and Evil Jao.

All of the sentences were carried out in October 1946.

The executions were conducted by Albert Pierre Pua, the official British executioner in numerous war crimes cases.

Until the final moments, the condemned showed no signs of remorse.

In his last words, Trabinsky continued to use religious language to evade personal responsibility, demonstrating that his ideological fanaticism had not diminished.

Justice in the Bullenhusa Dam case arrived late for some and early for others.

Yet in the postwar legal record, the case is documented clearly.

This was not an act that spun out of control amid chaos, but an organized crime carried out under orders with identifiable individuals held responsible.

For many years after the war, the tragedy at Bulanhusa Dam nearly disappeared from public memory.

This was not due to a lack of evidence, but because the victims were children who left no records, had no voice, and left no survivors to testify.

Had this story been forgotten, it would have marked the final victory of those who attempted to erase all traces of the crime.

The truth was gradually restored through the persistent efforts of journalist Ga Schwabberg and his wife Barbara Husing.

Through investigation, archival cross-checking, and the tracing of surviving witnesses, they were able to establish the identities of the 20 Jewish children murdered at Bullenhusa Dam.

Names that had been erased from history were returned not as anonymous numbers but as human beings with childhoods, national origins and families.

This tragedy did not originate from a single aberant individual but from the convergence of personal ambition, extremist racial ideology and a power structure that allowed such acts to proceed without oversight.

When children are defined as objects and ethics are replaced by administrative efficiency, crime becomes procedure.

Today the 20 children of Bulanhusa Dam are commemorated in many countries.

The former school has become a memorial site.

[music] Flowers, small pairs of shoes and name plaques do not only recall their deaths but also the responsibility of later generations to ensure that this story is not repeated in silence.

As a historian, I believe the greatest responsibility of education is not merely to transmit painful memories, but to cultivate the ability to ask questions.

Who made the decisions? On what assumptions were those decisions based, and who was excluded from the sphere of protection by those assumptions? When such questions cease to be asked, history begins to slip beyond control.

Bulanhusa dam poses a question that is not limited to the history of Nazi Germany.

What happens when science is detached from ethics [music] and when society accepts that there are people deemed unworthy of protection? That question remains unresolved for as long as memory itself must be safeguarded through truth and responsibility.