January 23, 1943, Pas-de-Calais, northern France. Snow fell on the ruins of a former textile factory, renamed on German military maps as “Field Medical Unit 19.” But there was nothing medical there. Only the biting cold, the smell of disinfectant mixed with dried blood, and the order that echoed through the corridors:  “Take off your clothes and kneel . ”

It was the phrase that started it all, uttered 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 didn’t see victims; he saw data. He recorded everything in his black notebooks: body temperature, resistance time, skin reaction. For him, science should not be limited by sentimentality.

The women were kept in damp cells in the basement. At 6 a.m., the sound of rifle butts banging on the iron doors woke them. Barefoot, they walked through the freezing corridors to the old fabric warehouse.

There Felker waited, alongside three German nurses who obeyed without looking up. And in a corner, always standing, was SS officer Klaus Ritner. Ritner never spoke. He only observed and took notes in a smaller notebook. His silent presence was the bureaucracy that validated the horror, turning Felker’s madness into an authorized procedure.

“Take off your clothes and kneel down . ”

Then the experiments began. Injections of live bacteria—tetanus, gangrene—to observe the infection. Small incisions without anesthesia. But the worst were the tubs of ice water. The women were submerged, strapped in, while Felker timed how long it took them to lose consciousness. Then he tried rewarming methods, often fatal.

The women learned not to scream. Screaming only attracted more attention. They bit their lips and endured it in absolute silence.

The bodies were removed at night. A nearby farmer began to notice a strange smell coming from an abandoned cellar, but in those days, investigating meant certain death. So he closed his windows and tried to forget.

In April 1944, as the Allies advanced, the unit was evacuated. The 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 work to build a parking lot on the site, workers discovered a sealed basement. Inside, they found dozens of human remains. And among the bones, fragments of diaries that repeated the same phrase:  “Take off your clothes and kneel . ”

Twenty years later, a French historian named Laurent Morau bought three black-bound notebooks at an auction in Munich. They were Felker’s diaries. The reading was chilling, not because of emotion, but because of the lack of it:  “Subject 7. Female. Estimated age 28. Immersion 4°C. Duration 22 min. Result: loss of consciousness at 18 min. Subject died during the night .” It was the banality of evil, recorded in precise cursive handwriting.

Morau searched for survivors. In 1989, three women responded to his ad.

Simone Lefèvre told her about the cold in the bathtubs. Marguerite Blanc recalled a young pregnant woman, fascinated by Felker, who subjected her to hypothermia tests until she lost the baby and died days later. Hélène Girard, who emigrated to Canada, confessed that 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 a name to these forgotten victims. One of them, Élise, a teacher, had managed to carve into her cell wall with a nail:  “My name is Élise, I existed . ”

But one question remained unanswered. What happened to Felker? He vanished. He was never brought to justice.

In the spring of 2003, 81-year-old Simone Lefèvre asked Morau to accompany her back. The place was now a gray, cracked asphalt parking lot. There was no plaque, no memorial.

Simone walked to the center, where she reckoned the warehouse had been. She stopped and looked at the historian. “For sixty years,” she said, her voice trembling but firm, “I have tried to forget. But forgetting is letting them win a second time.”

He took a small bouquet of wildflowers from his pocket, which he had picked along the way. Slowly, he knelt down; this time, not at a soldier’s command, but of his own free will. He placed the flowers on the asphalt.

“My name is Simone,” she whispered to the ground. “And Élise existed. We all exist.”

She got up, helped by the historian, and walked away from the parking lot without looking back. The cycle, at last, was complete.