Nazi Medical Experiments

A concentration camp is a place where P.O.W (Prisoners of War) were placed usually used for criminals or people with types of religions that the army was against (e.g. Jews etc.) The primary purpose of these camps was the methodical killing of millions of innocent people. The concentration camps were administered since 1934 by Concentration Camps Inspectorate which in 1942 was merged into SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt and were guarded by SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV). The first concentration camp first erected in Germany by the Nazi party and Hitler when he was announced and or

“We were very frightened of the experiments. They took a lot of blood from us. We fainted several times, and the SS guards were very amused with us” (Lagnado 66). Josef Mengele was an infamous Nazi doctor at Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. He performed grotesque medical experiments on humans using his knowledge in eugenics and twin studies.

The purpose of these trials were to bring Nazi War criminals to justice. The International Military Tribunal was representing 23 nations and they put the Nazi War criminals on trial. Before the trials even began, Hitler had committed suicide leaving his partner in crime, Goering, to face the charges, but he too had also committed suicide. During these trials, 22 of the Nazi War leaders were charged with waging of war of aggression, the “crimes against humanity”, mass murder of 11 million people. People who were executed were also burned at the concentration camp, Dachau, where many of their victims lives were taken.

Some were even hung upside down just to see how long it would take them to choke to death. Other experiments included injecting horse urine into the prisoner’s kidneys, starvation, and exposing these people to extreme, lethal, amounts of radiation. The workers, scientist, and doctors who carried out these experiments called the prisoners used as test subjects “logs” to separate any type of emotional feelings or remorse they may have for what they were doing to these poor

One...Two…, he counted.” (Weisel 65), which shows us how the Nazi’s would beat the Jewish people within the concentration camps. During the time that Elie was in Buna, Idek made Elie lie stomach down on a box and he whipped Elie and gave him 25 lashes. This was very cruel in that Idek punished Elie for knowing something that he knew about, but should not have

Nazi Germany thought of disabled people as “life unworthy of life” so they created the Euthanasia Program “The Euthanasia Program was the first mass murder in Nazi Germany” “The term Euthanasia means literally good death” “It usually refers to the induement of a painless death for a chronically or otherwise suffer.” “In the spring and summer months of 1939, a number of planners began to organize a secret killing operation targeting disabled children.” “As early as 1939, the Nazis began to kill tens of thousands of disabled, retarded, and mentally ill Germans.” In January 1934 Nazi started to sterilize people by law because of their race, by secret order, outside the previsions of the law. On July 14 1933 the Hitler cabinet promulgated the

A lot of horrible experiments were constructed during World War 2, but the most horrifying were those by Dr. Mengele. Dr. Josef Mengele was a physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. He was notorious for the selection of victims to be killed in the gas chambers and for performing deadly human experiments on prisoners. His experiments were very gruesome as well as deadly. Dr. Mengele was born March 16, 1911 and died at the age of 67 on February 7, 1979.

The Nazi’s strong beliefs of what was right for the ‘conservation’ of their country (and Nordic race) was what ultimately led to the suicides of numerous Nazi party members and generals (as well as civilians) nearing the end of the war. The Nazi’s knew that they had pushed too hard in pursuit of what they considered to be ‘reasonable’ patriotic ideals and they feared they would be tortured or put on trial and in turn hanged (as many Nazi war criminals were at the Nuremberg trials from 1945-46) for the roles they played in the genocide of the Jews and a multitude of other war crimes. So it is clear that the Nazi’s and the Japanese kamikaze soldiers strict patriotic ideals did eventually led to their ultimate

The two main experiments they performed on the prisoners were medical experiments and an experiment to find a “cure” for homosexuals. The medical experiments took place in a chamber where they would take Jews, gypsies, and mentally ill prisoners and intentionally infused them with various infections, against their will, to test out vaccinations and to find treatments for contagious diseases. These tests resulted in hundreds of deaths. Buchenwald was also apart of the pink triangle, which was when any homosexuals entered the camp, they would put a pink upside-down triangle on their sleeve to indicate their “kind”. In 1944, Dr. Carl Vaernet, Danish physician, claimed he had found a “cure” for homosexual inmates by performing a series of experiments through hormonal transplants.

According to "dosomething.org", eleven million people were killed during the Holocaust included in that number about one million children were killed. There is a common misconception that the people who died in the concentration camps died of the gas chambers, but a portion of the eleven million were also experimented on. These experiments were especially gruesome because the SS doctors had the ability to kill and maim their test subjects. A plethora of these doctors would have their own special area of study, one Nazi doctor named Carl Clauberg worked with infertility and artificial children. The worst of the evil SS doctors is believed to be Josef Mengele, this man conducted experiments on children and although he used methods of calming to make the children feel more comfortable, he did not care if they lived or died.

The Nuremberg Trial was the moment in history when sixteen German physicians were found guilty of crimes of war, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy for their actions during World War II. The trial led to the implementation of the Nuremberg code: a set of principles created to improve the ethical and moral treatment of research participants. Multiple criminal actions were taken by physicians during the war. Coleman quotes the trial transcripts when stating the physicians, “…took a consenting part in… medical experiments without the subjects’ consent…in the course of which experiments the defendants committed murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhuman acts.” (Coleman et al. 17).

The human experiments performed on prisoners in the concentration camps during the Third Reich in order to further the regime’s agenda reveal the issue of medical ethics of doctors; the atrocities performed were recognized at the Doctor’s Trial, which set the standards of ethics for future human experiments globally through the creation of the Nuremburg Code. Before examining the human experiments conducted in concentration camps, it is important to look at how the importance and ideology of physicians had altered during the Third Reich. There were various motives for physicians to join and support the Nazi regime, as Michael Kater explains in his article “Hitler’s Early Doctors: Nazi Physicians in Predepression Germany. In his article, Kater examines the motives for physicians to support the regime, and gives a brief historical analysis of their role during this time. Kater explains the central reasons behind supporting the Nazi regime, “All of them, however, were or became stern nationalists who railed against the shameful outcome of the war, subscribed to anti-Semitism and interrelated, novel racial-hygienic theories, and were staunchly anti-Marxist and secretly afraid of a total “socialization” of the German system of

Before Hitler built his nefarious camps, he started off by murdering Germany’s mentally and physically disabled. This program was called the “euthanasia” program. The term “euthanasia” means “good death”, however, it’s the term for a secretive murder program in the Nazi context. This program was created two years before the commencement of the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler began this process in attempt to cleanse his race of genetic burdens.

Others died from barbaric medical experiments or gassings. The medical experimentation and its research was commanded by Josef Mengele who was also known as the “Angel of Death”. He performed many torturing, inhumane experiments on detainees such as injecting serum in the eyeballs of children to study eye color which caused those children extreme pain and injecting chloroform in the hearts of twins to see if both would die at the same time and in the same fashion. The bodies of all the prisoners held at Auschwitz were parched in