Nazi Human Experimentation

The horrific experiments of Dr. Mengele demonstrate the cruelty of the Nazi’s during the holocaust. Most of the world today knows of Dr. Mengele of having been the doctor of death for being responsible for killing more than 6 million Jews.

My report will deal with the ways the prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp were executed, and also the medical experiments that took place. Accurate statistics were not kept, but the estimation of deaths that took place at Auschwitz ranged from 1.5 million to 4 million. Jews were the largest number of people who were killed. Poles and Soviet prisoners were also killed.

The medical experiments of the Holocaust were horrific acts with possible advancements in medicine, that go unnoticed due to current hospitals using ill-effective techniques, the EPA letting phosgene toxins infect workers, and some newspapers and agencies disregarding the use of the advancements. It is widely known, that the Holocaust was a horrible event during World War II, where Nazis would massacre Jews in a variety of ways, ranging from a firing squad to being buried alive. Horrible atrocities that ended in five million, to as many as six million Jewish deaths, among many more prisoners the Germans convicted. However, what is less known is how many of these deaths were used in medical experiments to advance medicine and medical practices.

Auschwitz was one of the largest and first concentration camp during WW2 and next to Auschwitz were two other death camps that were named Auschwitz ll and lll. At Auschwitz, there was a total of 8 gas chambers and 4 of them can hold up to 2,000 prisoners (Mostly Jews) at a time. There were 11 million people murdered in the Holocaust and it estimated that 6 million Jews were killed and one in six was killed at Auschwitz.

During the holocaust prisoners of concentration camps were faced with evil, torture and death every day. Some of the prisoners in these camps were selected for Nazi medical experiments. Nazi doctors performed several different human experiments on prisoners throughout the Holocaust. A specifically horrific experiment was the twin experiments. This experiment was performed by Dr. Joseph Mengele and several of his assistants in Auschwitz. He is known for performing some of the most inhumane experiments during the holocaust.

“I will remember that there is an art to medicine as well as a science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife and the chemist’s drug.” (Louis Lasagna). However, the doctors of the holocaust didn’t care, and used the victims as guinea pigs for the results. The medical experiments performed during the Holocaust had horrific outcomes for those experimented upon.

The chapter on Nazi medical experiments in Chalmers’ book is one of the most fascinating chapters because it examines the different types of techniques that the Nazi’s used to sterilize men and women. Chalmers explains that women were particularly subject to medical experiments because the Nazis were obsessed with destroying inferior races and wanted to perfect the art of sterilization so no more undesirable elements would be born (Ibid 123). However, both men and women were subject to Nazi medical experiments like medical injections, X-Rays, and chemicals, which resulted in burnt skin, abnormalities, and death. Among these experimentations many chemical companies, doctors, and University professors supported the experiments being done on

Many claim that doctors were only advancing science, and others claim the horrid acts that were committed were done because of the hatred towards the Jewish people. Regardless of which fact is inevitably true, both situations caused cruel and inhuman treatment to the Jews, and ultimately led to their deaths at the camps. A civilian doctor named Carl Clauberg was famous for his sterilization experiments. The procedure involved injections to the cervix to destroy the fallopian tubes, and then often the victims were gassed and left for dead (Winik 9). When the Jews arrived on transports, Nazi doctors immediately determined who would be gassed and who would go to a work camp (Winik 8). In Auschwitz, Nazi doctors presided over the murder of most of the one million victims of that camp. “Doctors consulted actively on how best to keep selections running smoothly, on how many people to permit to remain alive to fill the slave labor requirements” … “and on how to burn the enormous numbers of bodies that strained the facilities of the crematoria (Gutman 303). In the book, “Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp,” Yisrael Gutman offers a summary of the events that took place at Auschwitz:

These experiments were not only full of hate but also used for the advancement of medicine and effective treatment of the patient. Some were just out of fascination and believed they were for the better of the Aryan race. Injecting prisoners with chemicals, raising and lowering body temperature, and comparing the vitals of twins under extreme conditions are just three ways doctors of the Holocaust used prisoners for medical advancement. Since that age and time we have strived to move forward from that period and time and focus more on the patient's well being rather than the

The ignoble experiments of the nazi regime included exposure to freezing/ hypothermia, tests on the genetics of an individual, exposure to infectious diseases, undergoing of interrogation and torture, most effective and inexpensive methods of killing/ mass genocide, exposure to conditions resembling high altitude, pharmacological tests, sterilization of an individual, the undergoing of different surgeries, and inflicting traumatic injuries on the patent undergoing the experiment. The experiments done by nazis on prisoners were in an effort to find ways to cure burns, hypothermia, infections, and ways to mass exterminate the jews in the most cost efficient way possible.

I am going to be writing about all of the experiments performed during the holocaust. A few aspects I will be covering are: why the scientists did the experiments; who the scientists were; and what kind of experiments they were doing on the jews. A lot of the experiments were very cruel and inhumane.

The Holocaust was a very tragic event in all of history. Some Germans tried to put the chaos to a halt. Most Germans didn’t care at all; they thought Hitler knew what he was doing and that he was a good leader. Most Germans were clueless of what was happening in the concentration camps; they didn't know the pain and suffering Jews went through. They chose to not care. They could’ve saved lives’ but they chose to believe that Jews are bad. But some Germans chose to fight for what is right and tried to help Jews survive the Holocaust.Some of these people saved thousands’ of lives.

all in an effort to rid the German race of it unwanted members. "Medicine and science had played crucial roles both in fostering of Nazi ideology and in implementing the final solution." (Caplan) While medicine and science were being utilized, they had taken on a very different form. They were not treating individuals, but torturing them.

The Nuremberg Doctor’s trial of 1946 involves human experimentation performed by the Nazi doctors. These physicians were accused of conducting torturous “experiments” with concentration camp inmates. During these studies, physicians conducted treatments that were not permitted and caused severe injuries to the participants, and in some cases, participants died as a result of this. Prisoners were left to freeze to study more on hypothermia. Later, during December 9th, 1946 to August 20th, 1947 representatives establish a Nuremberg trial to prosecuted these doctors for the atrocities that they committed and 23 out 15 were found guilty. As a result, the Nuremberg code was created to

Without the Nuremberg Code there was many contradictories in the field of science that was cruel to humanity. For example, many experiments done in the Nazi Experimentations were completely unnecessary and resulted in tons of deaths. An article about the sun lamp experiment states, “The victims were placed under sunlamps which were so hot they would burn the skin. One young homosexual victim was repeatedly cooled to unconsciousness then revived with lamps until he was pouring with sweat. He died one evening after several test sessions” (“Medical Experiments”). This experiment wasn’t justified with any reasonable explanation for why it was done. They should of stopped when he went unconscious the first time instead of continuously torturing him by repeating the procedure. Another time the Nazi scientists went to far was with the twin cases. The article later says, “After three weeks of tortuous medical examinations they were taken to the dissection laboratory. Using