Medical Experiments of the Holocaust Essay

The Holocaust was one of the twentieth century's greatest tragedies that were made possible by anti-Semitism, the indifference of other nations, isolationism politics, and outright fear.

     Throughout history the Jewish people have been scapegoats; whenever something was not going right they were the ones to blame. From Biblical times through to the Shakespearean Era, all the way to the Middle East Crisis and the creation of Israel, the Jews have been persecuted and blamed for the problems of the world. The most horrifying account of Jewish persecution is the holocaust, which took place in Europe from 1933 to 1945 when Adolf Hitler tried to eliminate all the people that he thought were inferior to the Germans, namely the Jews, because he wanted a pure Aryan State.

Experiments were done on prisoners for many different reasons. They were done to push the Nazis agenda that the Aryan race is the dominant race, and that they should be the only race. This idea is also known as eugenics. Some experiments were done in attempt to find a way to multiply the Aryan race faster by performing experiments on twins. They wanted to make sure that Aryans were the only ones reproducing because they thought they were the dominate race. To enforce this, they did experiments that would insure this idea through sterilization for males and females. They were trying to find new medicines to cure different diseases and conditions for the Aryan race. They wanted to find a way to make the Aryan race stronger and healthier and a way to multiply their race more quickly, because they believed that they were the superior race.

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.

The Holocaust was an terrible event that happened from 1933 to 1945. Approximately eleven million people were killed by the Nazis. A genocidal policy was passed by Adolf Hitler after he became the leader of Germany in 1933. His goal was to get rid of all the Jews in Europe and those who are considered in his "undesirable" list. As countries such as Italy, Japan, and Austria units with Germany and became the Axis Powers, they started invading and taking over other countries around them in Europe. I believe there are reasons that can explain why we still study about the Holocaust today.

The freezing and hypothermia experiments were tested upon males to test the conditions of the warriors suffered out in the fields. Tons of German soldiers died of freezing temperatures or were paralyzed by cold injuries. They only used healthy men in these experiments, though, because the week men would not be equal to the soldiers.

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

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 patients were usually placed under sun lamps and the heat was so much that it would burn their skin; one young homosexual victim cooled over and over again and then revived with the lamps until he was pouring with sweat; he soon died one evening after continuous test sessions.

The Holocaust was a terrifying and horrific feat in our worlds past as no one seemed to want to help the Jews escape there mass onslaught led on by the Nazi forces throughout WWII. They were rounded up like animals and treated as slaves going to camp after camp waiting their turn in the gas chamber. Did anyone know what was happening? Did people try to escape? These are just some of the many questions brought up by skeptics and some historians.

The doctors of the holocaust were some of the most brutal humans known to man. These doctors performed a wide range of experiments sometimes there was no point to them but to just kill innocent humans. Which is why the doctors will always be remembered for their brutal experiments, the reasons behind them, the results of those experiments, and the consequences they faced after the holocaust.

This essay examines the involvement and actions of the doctors of the Holocaust. Using examples of experiments performed by the doctors, interviews with some of the doctors, and other evidence found during my research, I will argue that the doctors acted of their own free will and not because the Nazi government made them.

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.

It was called the Hypothermia experiment. These were conducted in the Dachau concentration camp between August 1942 and May 1943. It was performed to find out the best way to treat hypothermia victims. It was targeted for German air force pilots who were shot down in the North sea. The people used where male civilian prisoners from different religions and nationalities as well as Russian prisoners of war. Their participation was usually forced, but occasionally people "volunteered" in response to promises, rarely fulfilled, of release from the camp or commutation of the death

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Though use of the term itself