A newly published academic study argues that one of the Nazi concentration camp system’s most consequential “mid-level” perpetrators was not a doctor or an SS commander, but a pharmacist who sat at the choke point of medical supply, shortages, and policy across multiple camps.
The article, published this month in the open-access journal Pharmazie by RWTH Aachen University researchers Madeleine Ritters, Dominik Gross, and Nico Biermanns, reconstructs the career of Herbert Siggelkow (1906–1976), described as the “chief pharmacist of the concentration camps.”
Drawing on archival records, interrogation transcripts, and SS documentation, the authors examine how pharmaceutical logistics and professional networks enabled systematic neglect, coerced experimentation, and killing within the camp medical system.
A career spanning Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and the camp medical bureaucracy
According to the study, Siggelkow joined the Nazi Party and SS in 1932 and later became a Waffen-SS pharmacist who served in key posts within the camp system. By 1942, he was placed in charge of the SS camp pharmacy at Dachau, and in 1943, he moved to Sachsenhausen, while also working closely with Dr. Enno Lolling, the chief physician of the concentration camps, within Office D III of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office structure overseeing camps.
The authors argue that this positioning mattered because pharmacy work in the camps was not limited to dispensing routine medicines. It also involved controlling disinfectants, instruments, and restricted substances, and it sat inside a hierarchy designed to prioritize SS personnel while prisoners were systematically under-supplied.
One of the paper’s central claims is that Siggelkow became one of the very few people with a systemwide view of medical scarcity across the concentration camp network, because he reviewed monthly pharmaceutical requisitions, helped determine which items could be supplied, and communicated substitutions or denials back through official channels.
A vantage point that translates into responsibility
In other words, while camp doctors and pharmacists saw shortages locally, the “chief pharmacist” function could see patterns across the entire apparatus. The study argues that this vantage point translates into responsibility, because it placed Siggelkow inside decision loops that normalized, processed, and enforced deprivation.
The study highlights an incident from Buchenwald in December 1944, when a large shipment of typhus vaccine, 11,000 doses, arrived at the camp pharmacy.
It says Siggelkow drafted a circular (issued formally under Lolling’s name) instructing that the vaccine was not to be used for prisoners in general, but “only for prisoners serving as prisoner physicians or orderlies, as well as for those assigned to especially exposed subcamps or labor details.”
For the authors, the episode illustrates how medical resources could be allocated in ways that protected camp operations and selected labor functions, rather than prisoners’ lives, even when supplies were available.
A photograph at Auschwitz and the professional network around mass crime
The paper also points to Siggelkow’s presence at Auschwitz-Birkenau in late summer 1944, preserved in a photograph from the inauguration of a new SS hospital at Auschwitz-Birkenau on September 1, 1944, held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).
The caption and surrounding discussion place him among camp medical leaders and SS medical personnel, portraying him as part of a multi-professional network rather than an isolated technician.
The authors’ broader argument is that understanding Nazi medical crimes requires looking beyond the most notorious physicians and commanders to the “division-of-labor” reality of how crimes were sustained, including through specialized professions that kept systems functioning.
The study situates Siggelkow’s biography within a wider historical problem: the high rate of Nazification among medical and pharmacy professions in Germany during the period. It cites earlier research estimating that 33.7% of nearly 22,000 pharmacists in 1940 were Nazi Party members, with even higher rates in certain cohorts, alongside similarly high membership among physicians.
In that context, the authors suggest, helps explain how a modern professional ecosystem could be folded into a regime of persecution and mass murder, not only through ideology, but through everyday administrative work, procurement, and compliance within hierarchical networks.