Medical Procedures During The Nazi Rule

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.

“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

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:

During the Holocaust, the Nazis carried out many unethical medical experiments on patients without regard for their survival. Prisoners were forced to be subjects in various studies against their will. The Nazis’ victims went through indescribable pain as they were forced through high-altitude, freezing, tuberculosis, sea water, sulfanilamide, poison, and transplant experiments. Through these tragic Holocaust experiments, scientists and doctors discovered treatments used today for high-altitude sickness, hypothermia, contagious diseases, dehydration, poisoning, and war wounds.

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

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.

A new bureaucracy, headed by physicians, was established to kill anyone deemed to have a “life unworthy of living.” The Nazis referred to the program’s victims as “burdensome lives” and “useless eaters.”

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 ).

During the Holocaust, many innocent people were killed at the hands of the Nazis. Although this was a horrific event, some people suffered a fate even worse than death, medical experimentation. Most of the time, these medical experiments resulted in the death of the subject, but some lived. Even though they survived, they were almost always left in excruciating agony and most of the time disabled. The doctors who performed these experiments showed absolutely no mercy and tortured, mutilated, and murdered men, women, and children.

all in an effort to rid the German race of it unwanted members. "Medicine and science had played crucial roles both in fostering of Nazi ideology and in implementing the final solution." (Caplan) While medicine and science were being utilized, they had taken on a very different form. They were not treating individuals, but torturing them.

The Nazi German State with the influence of Nazi physicians had politicized biological causes in every aspect of life in Germany. It began by the sterilization of unfit Germans so that they would not procreate(sterilization law), it was evident in physical education to strengthen both mind and body (Mein Kampf)and took off with the medicalization of Jews. This speculation of “racial degeneracy” became “scientifically” justified in 1935 by Dr. Edgar Schulz of the Office of Racial Policy claiming in his article that Jews had higher rates of “insanity, feeblemindedness, hysteria, and suicide” than non-Jews. This was not blamed on the structure of society but rather blamed on the belief that Jews were an impure mix of Negro and Oriental” blood. These claims of racist science, would, along with medicine be used to justify the extermination of Jews (198). In other words, the classification that began with those who were inferior to the Aryan race and/or deemed unfit, feebleminded, or racially impure led to state intervention of family planning through the use of sterilization. Furthermore, Nazi physicians would blame biological causes on Jews as a form of dehumanization because they were seen as diseased, yet no one spoke up nor defended the Jews during this transition of power, leaving them vulnerable to

Holocaust: Medical Experiments During the Third Reich between 1933 through 1945, The Nazis not only stripped Jews and other minorities groups of their dignity and possessions but their humanity. The medical experiments that were conducted during the Holocaust were absurd and inhuman. Many Jews and minority groups suffered the wrath of the Nazis. Doctors performed unethical procedures that let many to their death.

Doctors and Experiments of the Holocaust 6 million Jews, 2.7 million Soviets, 1 million Poles, half a million Gypsies, and a quarter of a million disabled and innocent people were all murdered and killed during the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a terrible and awful time in history, and often times we try to push it away and forget about all the innocent people that were killed. The doctors such as Josef Mengele and the experiments that he performed on concentration camp prisoners and kids were a big part of the Holocaust, and many of these people and children were tortured, dissected, and killed. Dr. Josef Mengele was known as the cruelest and evil doctor during the Holocaust. He was oftentimes referred to as the “Angel of Death.”

The Holocaust in World War II is one the many cases of genocide. Millions of people were killed, or injured during the war. People were held in places called concentration camps. In the camps, people were dehumanized. They were treated like animals, and hurt. Sometimes they were even put through unethical treatments and medical experiments. Medical experiments are often talked about during times of war, as most of the time they are unethical, and a crime against humanity, as in the case of the experiments during the Holocaust. The medical experiments, and the trials that followed were the first trials for the crimes against humanity. The medical experiments of the Holocaust were a horrendous crime against humanity because they needlessly slaughtered