Eduard Wirths As A Doctor

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.

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.

“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.

Mengele. Dr. Mengele was a German officer at Auschwitz and was often referred to as the “Angel of Death” (Gutman, 2). He is known for his horribly unethical experiments performed on prisoners and immense number of bodies killed in Auschwitz. Mengele treated the majority of his patients ruthlessly, with no remorse, and as objects for his destruction. He was also known for his bad temper and was seen beating prisoners with metal poles, burning them alive, and shooting them. The only patients he treated less horrifically were twins, which he found to be enticing. Mengele would provide them with clean clothes and regular meals in order to strengthen them, and once they were healthy he would perform horrific surgeries on them (Schmittroth, 315). How Dr. Mengele treated the prisoners in Auschwitz would have an extensive influence on the difficulties they had

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:

Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eye­wit­ness Account by Dr. Mik­lós Nyis­zlI is a non-fiction mem­oir of a Jew­ish Hun­gar­ian med­ical doc­tor who per­formed alongside Dr. Josef Mengele in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz from 1944-45 to conduct “research” on Jews. This book is a lot to swallow and doesn’t beat around the bush, it’s straight to the point.

     As a society we place those in the medical profession on a pedestal. They are people to be looked up to and admired. In many ways they are Gods, right here with us on earth. People put the hope and faith in doctors hoping they can perform miracles. Throughout history, doctors have indeed preformed many wonders. There were, however, some doctors that betrayed this belief and peoples trust. These doctors could be found in concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau. These doctors committed unspeakable acts against the Jews and other minorities, believing that they were conducting helpful experiments. Following the holocaust, however, they were punished for their

While Elie Wiesel is surely right in his statement, it is not the job of only holocaust survivors, but of all people, to make sure that the horror of the Holocaust are never forgotten. One part of the Holocaust, however, is often overlooked by the general public; The Nazi Medical experiments conducted on the prisoners of the concentration camps. Acknowledging the atrocity of these experiments,

There were many doctors used during the holocaust including Dr. Josef Mengele, Dr. Carl Clauberg, Dr. Herta Oberheuser, and Dr. Karl Brandit to be some of the main ones that performed horrific experiments. These doctors performed some of the most horrific experiments known to mankind. They did many experiments including freezing/hypothermia, genetics,

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

It is interesting to note that Nazis were cunning enough to choose locations that were far from the public eye because they probably knew to a certain degree that although the Nazi party had massive support, that could all go out the window if the German people found out cruel experiments and executions being conducted. Another thing to note is that it seems as though mentally disabled Germans were the guinea pigs for how the Nazis would experiment on and execute the Jews later on. Doctors weren't really needed at these institutions, they were only really there to maintain the illusion of a scientific and medical program. However they did have another task, which was to come up with reasons for the cause of their patients' deaths. They would send out letters to victims' families. It seems these Nazi doctors were very methodical in order to cover up what they were doing but it would turnout that weren't as clever as they thought they were. The families of the victims would notice inconsistencies with the official cause of death and later on public protests would cause Hitler to order the gas chambers be dismantled in August

Roberto Esposito, the author of the nonfiction book Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, argues that medicine played a great role in Nazi ideology and practice. He suggests that the genocide carried out in the concentration camps was the result of “the presence of a medical ethics that was perverted into its opposite.” He also mentioned how most of the killings were “medically indicated” and carried out by the doctors at the camps.

The doctors who examined the incoming prisoners and sorted them also worked in these hospitals performing medical research on the ill. This medical research was mostly placing the Jewish prisoners in ice water baths then monitoring them until they died. This research was mostly used to prevent hypothermia if German Pilots ever ended up being stranded in the ocean. Some of the experiments performed by doctors often had no research purpose at all, such as experiments involving eye color changing using chemical droppers and the surgical sewing of children together to create siamese twins. Auschwitz was the largest death camp with 20,000 Jews being killed a day and 39 subcamps.

At extermination camps, the Nazis conducted many medical experiments on the prisoners that resulted in many deaths. Between 1939 and 1945 medical research projects involving cruel and often lethal experimentation on human subjects were performed. These projects were supported, well-known organizations in the Third Reich and were categorized into three fields: research intended at cultivating the endurance and rescue of German troops, testing of medical techniques and medications, and experiments that pursued to approve Nazi cultural belief. More than seven thousand victims of these cruel medical experiments have been acknowledged. Targets of the experiments included Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, and Catholic priests (Medical Experiments ).