Introduction

In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben argues that precisely in the moment when liberal democracy had succeeded in guaranteeing rights and formal liberties, the figure of homo sacer emerged as an actualization of a mere capacity to be killed as bare life. The Jew imprisoned in the concentration camps of the Nazis is the paradigmatic example of homo sacer—the one who cannot be sacrificed or put to death via ritual practices, such as a trial or capital punishment; yet he or she may nevertheless be killed by anyone without committing homicide.

In addition, according to Agamben, those prisoners in concentration camps who bore “the black triangle (i.e. Gypsies; this symbol of the genocide of a defenseless population [that] ought to be remembered alongside the yellow star)” are an example of homines sacres (plural of homo sacer) (Agamben 1995: 155). In this chapter I remember those Roma and Sinti who in the summer of 1944 were transferred from the Auschwitz concentration camp to the Dachau concentration camp for the sole purpose of being exposed to deadly medical experiments.

Those mostly forgotten “gypsies” who were put into the concentration camps without having committed any crime and without trial were not only marked with the black triangle, which meant “asocial” and was sewn onto their clothes, but as Agamben points out, they were also marked with a Z—standing for Zigeuner (gypsies), which was tattooed on their bodies next to the prisoner number. This double marking exposed those classified as “gypsies” to an unconditional capacity to be killed both as “Asoziale (asocials, black triangle)” and as “racially inferior (gypsies, Z)” (Schmidt 1996: 129).

The medical experiments on Roma and Sinti in the Dachau concentration camp expose the figure of homo sacer in a double sense. First, here the politics of life—the experiments were carried out to make seawater potable to save the lives of men in the German air force (Luftwaffe) who found themselves in an emergency situation on the high seas—turned into a politics of death for a defenseless population (DÖW, Sig.: 22848). The seawater experiments, whose examination is at the core of this chapter, took place towards the end of the war, and with that marked the end of the “applied research” in the Dachau concentration camp, which was initiated by the German air force (Luftwaffe).