A Study On Nazi Medical Experiments

Many brutal atrocities were committed during the Holocaust by the Nazi party against anyone they viewed as “unpure”. This included the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Afro-Germans, Slavs, communists, the handicapped, and the mentally disabled. These groups were targeted, stripped away of their rights and citizenship, and then sent to concentration camps. Some of these camps were death camps; created for the sole purpose to annihilate these groups of people, mainly the Jews. At these camps, the prisoners were tortured, starved, brutally killed, and experimented on. In this research paper, I am going to discuss some of the medical experiments that were

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.

The art of medicine and curing diseases was not always approached in a scientific way. In fact, many advances occurred between 1919 to 1939, after technological advances allowed scientists to apply the scientific method to medical research. At this time, the ethics of using patients as test subjects either for new medicines or as samples for further testing were not considered. An extreme example of this was the Nazi’s using concentration camp inmates – including children – to run painful and invasive experiments. More modern examples are not so easy to identify as unethical, however. While amputating a leg to develop methods to deal with fractures and war wounds is obviously unethical, harvesting cells to develop a vaccine is not so clear cut, as the disadvantage to the patient is hard to identify. Coming from the various Nazi testing and especially the Nuremberg testing and trials, another code of ethics was developed, called the Nuremberg Code.

She describes how Nazi Doctors would conduct horrendous experiments on Jews, such as dissecting living people, without receiving any consent from them. She then explains that the Nuremberg code was later established to prevent such inhumane experiments. Since the code didn’t apply in America, researches like Southam and Mandel continued their experiments without informed consent. However, other doctors still found this to be immoral, and refused to participate in performing these experiments finding that, “Injecting cancer cells into a person without consent was a clear violation of basic human rights and Nuremberg code” (Skloot 132). Skloot compares the practice of American doctors to the inhumane experiments conducted on the Jews in Germany to have the readers see similarity between the immoral methods. Both practices did not receive consent from their patients. She uses research to find factual evidence about practices without consent that were made illegal in another country. By comparing the experiments conducted by American doctors to an extreme event, she leads the reader to develop the opinion that all practices without the consent of the patient are unjust. She includes the opinions of medical professionals to express their concern for these methods to the readers. A doctor from that time would have the greatest insight on the experiments that were being conducted and the practicality of them. The reader then sees it as logical that conducting potentially dangerous experiments without any consent is a violation of human rights.

Through the ages, men have been able to find cures for catastrophic diseases through scientific research. Thanks to these advances, men have been able to prolong the life span of people, or provide better quality of life in cases in which a cure of various maladies has not been possible. To achieve such progresses, scientists have made use of prior knowledge, new theories, and technology obtaining numerous prodigious outcomes. Unfortunately, there have been many who have used questionable means for such ends. The German Max Clara is another case of a man with power and knowledge of science, who has misusing them. This paper aims to briefly identify principles and standards that would have been violated these days according to the existing APA Code of Ethics. Finally, ethical implications of making a moral judgment on past actions by researchers regarding human experimentation are discussed.

Embryonic stem cell research is important for further development in the medical field. It strongly supports the idea that every life has value, an idea known as human dignity. Human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, and thus, are all equal. The idea of radical equality before God leads us to think no less of someone regardless of their physical appearance, religious beliefs, cultural background, or anything else. It is through virtues such as charity, mercy, and justice that our human dignity is preserved. By living through these virtues and realizing how to effectively instill them within us, we are able to live a virtuous life. This paper argues that although issues involving embryonic stem cell research are controversial, research in this area is typically permissible for further development in the medical field when looking to preserve human dignity. In order to defend this thesis, this paper will be structured into three sections as followed: the description of embryonic stem cell research, the development of a moral lens, and the moral argument and analysis of this case.

The Holocaust was a terrible event that will never be forgotten. One of the worst events that happened was the experiments done on Jews. The experiments done on Jews during the Holocaust, such as freezing experiments, genetic experiments, and experiments on organs, were inhumane and unjustifiable.

“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.

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:

The Nazi Doctors of World War 2 had to face the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg, Germany after the war. The reason for the trial is because the Doctors in the Nazi Party had contributed or played a part in genocide while following Hitler. Adolph Hitler was the German politician and leader of the Nazi Party during the years from (1933-1945.) The doctors had performed unreasonable medical experimentations on reluctant concentration camp prisoners.

Gottfried, Ted, and Stephen Alcorn. Deniers of the Holocaust: who they are, what they do, why

The doctors would cut off limbs and see if the Jew’s could handle what happened to their body. Josef mengele would do the experiments to twins along with many other doctors they were trying to see how twin were made so they could increase the prefect race faster. Even though these were crude experiments they help german know a whole lot more about the human body and what it can handle and what it can't and the almost found out to make twins but they never did.

Forced sterilization of people during the holocaust remained another major issue. Many people died due to the procedures for sterilization (Friedlander 30). Also, the Nazi’s did not only sterilize Jews, they sterilized the mentally ill and those of mixed race (Forced Sterilization). Although the Nazi’s conducted this horrible event, they were not the only one, nor the first.

The Nuremberg Doctors Trial of 1946 is the preeminent case recognizing the importance of medical ethics and human rights specifically about human research subjects. The defendants in the trials include Nazi leadership, physicians, and investigators prosecuted for conducting unethical and inhumane medical experiments on civilians and prisoners of war resulting in extreme pain, suffering, permanent injury and often death. The Nuremberg Code, borne of these trials, establishes ethical guidelines for human experimentation to ensure the rights of subjects in medical research. Herein, this writer will first identify and discuss ethical dilemmas presented in the Nuremberg case followed by three

“The Nazi Doctors,” by Robert Jay Lifton focuses more on the impact that science and medicine had on developing the Nazi practice of mass murder. Lifton Argues that the most dangerous part of medicalizing death was the belief that the doctors were killing Jews in order to heal the society. Lifton goes on to argue that the reason the race had deteriorated was due to the mixing with the Jews, he describes the jews to be somewhat a cancer of the society. Mentions that scientific racism began the marginalization of jews and once they were put in death and concentration camps doctors saw to a large portion of the killing.