The Holocaust: Experiments During The Holocaust

Nazi medical experiment: 1933 to 1945, the program of the Nazi regime included sterilization, euthanasia, and medical experimentation for the purpose of producing a population of “racially pure” Germans who were destined to rule the world. The medical experiments were conducted on prisoner of war and those that were considered racially valueless such as Jews. They were confined to concentration camps, exposed to high altitudes, freezing temps, malaria, poison spotted fever, and untested drugs and surgical procedures without anesthesia.

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.

Between 1939 and 1942, during World War II, Germans performed ethnic cleansing and medical experiments that would be remembered for decades to come. Known as the Holocaust, “people with disabilities, Jews, homosexuals, blacks, and others became the germs under the microscope to be eliminated in order to save the German volk” (Rubenfeld, 2011, p.517). During this time of death camps and protection of the German gene pool, German medical scientists performed medical experimentation that had grave consequences for those involved and raised ethical discussions (Benedict & Georges, 2006). This paper will look the consequences and ethical issues of the experiment but will also outline how modern research has benefited from such a horrific event.

While the Holocaust was going on, many Jews were captured. They were sent to a camp either to do hard labor, or die. There was one more place Jews could be sent to...The labs. People with deformities or unique traits were sent to a lab.

The date was September 1st, 1939. Nazi Germany had just invaded Poland, and World War II had officially begun. Now, most people know at least generally about the holocaust: a mass slaughter of other races, mainly Jewish people, by the Nazis during World War II. Most people have heard of concentration camps, and know that many Jews were killed in gas chambers, killed by forced labor, or starved to death. These are typical deaths that people hear about in concentration camps, however most people have no idea about the experiments that were conducted during the holocaust. These cruel experiments were performed on concentration camp prisoners during World War II, and have since been lost in history. Well it is time for these inhumane acts to be

The Holocaust was a horrific genocide that started in 1933 and proceeded to last 12 years. It included the killing of 6 million Jewish men, women, and children as well as gypsies and political prisoners (“Ravensbrück” 1). Many escaped, especially those who were more fortunate (Thomson, 5), however others were not as lucky. This event has been documented by millions of sources, however the medical experiments that were presented in Nazi camps and prisons in specific Ravensbrück prison are largely undocumented.

In addition to the fact that these experiments were deeply flawed on a moral level, they were also conducted in a poor professional manner. Absolutely nothing about these medical procedures could be considered safe or organized. There were hardly any regulations, guidelines, or producers set in place that were expected and executed in the same manner repetitively. As Richard Plant points out, none of the medications could be tested for potency or cleanliness, and none of the staff had access to materials that would let them check the patients hormonal blood levels before or after injections were given out. Samples that had been taken from the patients and sent to Prague for further examination often sat for so long that they became pointless and futile. Not to mention the fact that the staff would mislabel the samples so frequently that it was hard to truly test any of progress of the experiment. Records show different names on the roster of men enduring this treatment quite consistently, leaving a confusing paper trail and no way to fully document how many injections someone was given, how frequently they obtained them, or how they had effected their “illness”.

The Jews were used for experiments, which were common among the holocaust. Jews at Dachau were used to see different ways the German Army could survive, they tested things like submerging a person in icy cold water to see how there body reacted in hopes of finding a treatment for hypothermia. Or using different kinds of rooms or chambers with high and low pressured gas to see at what point a german aircraft flyer could parachute out of their “broken” aircraft. There were also medical experiments, trying to treat things such as illness and injury. They even had experiments on how they could change their racial beliefs and ideas, basically trying to change their minds. Many people died from these

They would completely submerged the jews under water until they would pass out or die. They also tried to find cures for contagious diseases and find a cure for mustard gas. The Nazis also would hold people under water till they passed out, random injections, and tying people to a bed with wet sheets and left them until their body warmed up the sheets. One of the most known experiments is the twin experiment. Doctor Mengele did many things about the twins. He would draw blood from the children everyday. The smaller children had their blood drawn from their necks which made them very weak. Dr. Mengele also dropped chemicals into the twins eyes trying to change the color to blue which left them blind for a short amount of time or forever. He would inject one twin with a disease but if that twin died the other would be injected the remaining twin with some sort of chemical directly into the heart causing the remaining twin to

The topic that I decided to research about for my project is the types of experiments the Nazis attempted on the Jews. The types of experiments are important because it represents the Jew’s lost of human rights.

The Nazis performed crude and inhumane experiments upon concentration camp inmates. These experiments were mainly characterized by several features: people forced against their will to become part of hazardous studies; most subjects experienced tremendous amounts of pain and suffering including mutilation; and the experiments were meant to test the human limits, normally resulting in the subjects deaths.

“The more we do, the less you seem to believe we are doing it” was stated by Josef In WWII. There were many medical doctors that did experimentation on Jews, gypsies, individuals of African descent, homosexuals, and any person defined as undesirable by the Nazi regime. During the WWII Holocaust Nazi Doctors Mengele, Herta, and Aribert used the concentration Camps for scientific experimentation in preparation for Hitler's final solution.

Lastly, the Jewish prisoners were sometimes tortured or experimented on as lab rats, displayed by the famous inhumane experiment to create conjoined twins carried out by Josef Mengele. Jewish people were put through great misery for the duration of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was a traumatic event for the Jews, but not only did it affect the Jews, it affected people from different minorities, people with disabilities, and so on. The lucky ones were able to escape to different countries, or hide in non-Jewish homes. Those who were not lucky were either killed on the spot, or sent to work in brutal concentration camps. Nazi medical experiments were one of the few ordeals to occur during the Holocaust. Dr. Josef Mengle performed many horrific experiments, one of them being on twins.