Are Nazi Experiments Cruel Or Inhumane?

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.

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.

“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

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

Nuremberg Code of 1947 was written after the Second World War, in which German physicians who participated in the Nazi concentration camps were prostituted for unethical human experiment. ("Nuremberg Code", n.d.) The Nuremberg code of 1947 contain ten points about proper consent, how the study should positive impact on population, the need for pre-existing knowledge, the avoidance of any harm or suffering to the participants and concluding the study if injury or risk for death occurs, if the risk exceed benefits the study needs to stop, the freedom to leave the study at any time if the participants are unable of continuing, and lastly, the staff must stop the study if they believe conditions are dangerous. (Post, 2004) Although the Tuskegee study started before the Nuremburg code of ethics were established, the Tuskegee study continue until 1972 in which the researchers ignored the Nuremburg code and continue with their unethical study. The researchers failed to properly inform the participants of the study and to obtain proper consent. Furthermore, the researchers cause harm to the Tuskegee participants by not providing them the proper treatment for their illness and not allow the participants to leave the study when they weren’t able to continue. Thus, unethical behaviors continue even when guidelines were provided to the researchers and the researchers failed to

For example, the British Army tested on the Irish and the natives to see the effects of mustard gas on different skin colors. The United States tested infectious diseases on the army by contaminating them via injection. None of these incidents brought upon changes in laws or regulations. Only one main research abomination caused a set of rules to be established. It was 1947; German doctors conducted experiments on the concentration camps’ population. Experiments were often deadly or highly debilitating. After the war was over, these doctors were prosecuted. These trials came to be known as the Nuremberg Trials which allowed for the Nuremberg Code to be created and enforced world-wide. This code states that any subject who participates in an experiment must give voluntary consent and that it is absolutely essential for any medical trial to continue. This was a break-through in moral codes. However, in this day and age we still manage to see researchers finding loop holes in order to bypass this code. More scrutiny of testing rules must be applied.

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.

Nazi experiments and its Japanese counterpart (Unit 731) were unethical because it involved the abuse and torture of a subjugated people. In the case of Germany it was Jews, Pols, and the disabled who were exploited for nefarious reasons against their will. In Japan, it was the Chinese and residents of other Sino-Japanese countries that were abused, tortured, and maltreated.

During World War II Nazi Doctors played a key role in the mass genocide of millions of Jews, Gypsies, and those who were mentally and physically handicapped. The primary motivations of the Nazi doctors were most likely provoked by fear and safety at the cost of the cleansing the Aryan race of those who were considered impure. Motivations including peer-pressure and self-preservation are very likely to have increased the ability for the Nazi doctors to ignore one of the most basic components of moral and ethical code (do not kill others), as well as being able to ignore the Hippocratic oath all doctors swear by, to experiment on the poor dying bodies of the victims of the Holocaust. In order to murder thousands of Jews, Gypsies, and those who

Disabled Germans were killed in gassings. Midwives, physicians, and guardians of children with severe birth defects were supposed to register the defected child while three expert physicians would decide whether the child lived or died, usually not even seeing the child in person. This was all part to create the “master Aryan race.” 5,000 children were killed in the clinics and state hospitals they were brought to once registered. The Nazis wanted to keep the Euthanasia Program (the program Hitler was using to kill these helpless children) a secret, so the Nazis sent the children’s families made up ways of how their child died. In October of 1939, Hitler started Operation T-4, which was where adult men and women who were “incurable” were moved to carbon monoxide chambers and gassed. 70,000 of these innocent people were lost (Final Solutions).

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.

There have been many experiments in the past that have acquired useful research furthering the advancement of society all over the world that allow humans to understand more about what was previously unknown. However, there have been many tests done in unethical ways that are conducted with sinister tests that view the lives operated on as just data in an experiment. Examples of this are; the Tuskegee untreated syphilis experiment where the US government infected African Americans with syphilis and did not treat them with medicines to see if that would be a better resolve, the irradiation of African American cancer patients during the Cold War conducted by the pentagon to see effects of radiation on humans without their consent which led to multiple deaths from radiation poisoning, and the “doctor’s Trial” which was occurring in Nuremberg, during the same time as the Guatemala syphilis experiment, where 23 German physicians participated in Nazi programs to euthanize and/or medically experiment on concentration camp

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