The Pros And Cons Of German Concentration Camps

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.

“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.

History is like a huge puzzle. People can keep find missing pieces to the story as they learn more about it. The Holocaust was one of those moments in history that has lead our minds to curiosity about why such a thing would occur at some point in time. For example, concentration camps. Concentration camps are one of those moments in history that make people’s jaws drop because of how flabbergasted they are to even hear of such a thing. Once you hear about one fact about the Holocaust and concentration camps you want to know every little detail about it to try and analyze what was happening and how it happened. Concentration camps in the Holocaust were a turning point in history because it lead to the deaths of millions of people.

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, 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.

Six million Jews being murdered and three rows of barbed wire fences, these were what took place in Jewish concentration camps and Japanese Internment camps but were these camps the same? Japanese Internment Camps were used to hostage Japanese- Americans because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Everyone who looked Japanese was being put in these camps. On the other hand there were Jewish Concentration Camps that Hitler held to murder Jews who threatened his government and for many other reasons. In these camps there was a lot of torture that went on. Japanese Internment camps were essentially the same as Jewish Concentration Camps because there was no general welfare provided, individuals had to give their loyalty to the government, and people

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.”

Millions of people lost their lives in the holocaust, a portion of them dying at the hands of corrupt doctors. During the holocaust, over 200 doctors stationed at various concentration camps performed violent, inhumane medical experiments that took hundreds of lives.(United) Experiments were done to further the Nazi beliefs, as well as the performing doctor's own career. For example, experiments benifiting soldiers, and genetic experiments supporting the government's views increased their ranking in Nazi society and allowed the physican special treatment. Similarly, information learned about diseases and medicines could be sold to pharmecutical companies for a profit. (www.auschwitz.org) Consequentally, many of the doctors only cared about

Understanding the events of the Holocaust requires consideration of numerous socio-political and economic factors in interwar and WW2 Europe. One particularly important area of exploration is the role played by physicians working for the Reich. Examining their behavior, justifications for murder, and relationship to the state provides insight into the moral and ethical foundations of the society which allowed a genocide that ended in the death of millions. In the context of the concentration camps they abandoned both their humanity and their ethics as doctors to become murderers and torturers for state science. Multiple factors, including ideology, socialization, and psychological adaption allowed Nazi doctors to throw away the fact that

The Nazi’s took Jews to concentration camps where they had many weapons. For instance, they had gas chambers. The Nazi’s used the gas chambers to trick the jewish into thinking they were going to take showers. But what the Nazi’s actually did was take the people who were old, children and very sick people to gas them out. Another way they would torture the jews was with the cremation chambers. The Nazi’s would burn people alive if they were ill or older. Also, when they were walking to different concentration camps, the Nazi’s would shoot whoever stopped walking. What’s worse than the weapons is the causes.

Throughout the course we have considered various states of exception and the institutions that have accomplished dehumanizing the people imprisoned. I will be discussing three institutions that have either been concentration camps or have established torture to a great extent. The Nazi concentration camps, Soviet Union Gulags, and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp each have or have had their own way of establishing power over the people detained, all have used different methods of control to demonstrate authority, however, each dehumanized people because they had the capability to do so.

The concentration camps started in 1933 when President Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor in the twentieth century. The first concentration camp was named Dachau, just outside of Munich, while Hitler was chancellor of Germany and overpowered Germany. Dachau was built in March 1933. It was established by the National Socialists also known as the Nazi government. This camp held about 5,000 prisoners. There were about 20,000 camps. In the end of the war, only twenty-two main camps and thousands of smaller camps remained around Germany and many other countries that Hitler controlled.

1.) The Nazi medical experiments included injecting individuals with viruses and gasoline, making them ingest poisons, and submersing them in ice water (Protecting Human Research Participants, 2008).. Although their experiments were inhumane the medical field has benefited from the medical experiments that were conducted. Dr. Josef Mengele was a geneticist that was know as the "Angel of Death" at the Auschwitz concentration camp. He is very well known for his studies on his twin experiments. He also would conduct experiments that he would hope to change the individual's eye color by injecting certain chemicals in their eyes (Bulow, 2015).

The Nuremberg Doctor’s trial of 1946 involves human experimentation performed by the Nazi doctors. These physicians were accused of conducting torturous “experiments” with concentration camp inmates. During these studies, physicians conducted treatments that were not permitted and caused severe injuries to the participants, and in some cases, participants died as a result of this. Prisoners were left to freeze to study more on hypothermia. Later, during December 9th, 1946 to August 20th, 1947 representatives establish a Nuremberg trial to prosecuted these doctors for the atrocities that they committed and 23 out 15 were found guilty. As a result, the Nuremberg code was created to

During World War II, a number of German physicians conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent. Unethical medical experimentation carried out during the Third Reich may be divided into three categories. The three categories consisted of experiments aimed at facilitating the survival of Axis military personnel. The second category of experimentation aimed at developing and testing pharmaceuticals and treatment methods for injuries and illnesses which German military and occupation personnel encountered in the field. While the third category of medical experimentation sought to advance the racial and ideological tenets of the Nazi worldview (https://www.ushmm.org).