Medical Experiments During The Holocaust

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.

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.

The second section of Beverly Chalmers book, Birth, Sex and Abuse, deals with sexuality among Germans and sexual abuse among Jewish women. Chalmers provides interesting information on how the Nazi’s banned homosexuality, birth control, and feminist organizations (Ibid 145). Chalmers outlines that the goals of the Nazi party by repressing sexuality like homosexuals and feminist movements was to promote pronatalist policies like reproduction so women could bear more children for the superior Aryan race. Chalmers’ extensive study of brothels in concentration camps interested me because I did not realize the SS allowed prostitution inside concentration camps and the majority of these women were Germans because Jewish women were not allowed to be prostitutes due to the Rassenschande laws. Chalmers’ study of German women in brothels broadens the traditional study of the Holocaust because rather than always focusing on non-German women’s experiences it allows people that study the Holocaust to examine how German women were affected by the Holocaust in

“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.

Disease was one of the effect that affected the Jews in the holocaust. “One of the disease that caused the Jews to get sick was typhus” (“Typhus”). That shows how the Jews were living in poor conditions which caused people to get ill. “There are three different types of Typhus; epidemic/louse-borne typhus caused by rickettsia prowazekii ,murine typhus caused by rickettsia typhi and scrub typhus caused by Orientia tsutsugamushi”(Typhus) . In Auschwitz II Birkenau camp , there was no running water and unsanitary equipment which caused the spread of diseases”(Auschwitz:The Camp of Death).This shows how the Jews did not get clean water to drink and what they drink and eat were contaminated and infected. The contaminated water made more jews infected

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

Mengele – The doctor violated this principle simply by harming his subjects. Dr. Mengele performed numerous experiments to include surgical procedures without anesthesia, collection and harvesting of tissue samples, and murdering subjects to facilitate a post-mortem examination (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ND). Dr. Mengele’s experiments demonstrated no beneficence for his subjects.

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

     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

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.

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

Main ethical violations in clinical research that contribute to the abuse of subjects include paternalism, informed consent, lack of ethical supervision and the avoidance of legislation in relation to the ethics of health care and research. Human rights has been widely violated throughout history as seen in multiple events. As early as the 1930’s, researchers involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, withheld information and treatment from a large group of African American men with syphilis. Following this tragic event, Nazi concentration camps were established. German scientists conducted research with the involvement of the prisoners. Disfigurement, disabilities and death were often the results of the Nazi human experimentation. During the creation of the atomic bomb, the United States government sponsored the research of the involvement of subjects being exposed to radiation without their informed consent. In addition, James Watson and Francis Crick obtained their data of x-ray