Utilitarianism: Land, Fuse, And Hornaday

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.

Elie Wiesel said, “for the dead and the living, we must bear witness” (citation). During the Holocaust, the Jews were treated terribly. Even though they were mistreated, and beaten several times a day, they still received food and water in small amounts. One of the main ambitions of Germans was to find ways to improve their performance in war, and to make their lives easier and more efficient altogether. The Nazi doctors found the most inhumane ways to do everything they did. Harsh treatment of the Jewish people existed through excessive forced labor, horrible living conditions, and many different kinds of medical

She describes how Nazi Doctors would conduct horrendous experiments on Jews, such as dissecting living people, without receiving any consent from them. She then explains that the Nuremberg code was later established to prevent such inhumane experiments. Since the code didn’t apply in America, researches like Southam and Mandel continued their experiments without informed consent. However, other doctors still found this to be immoral, and refused to participate in performing these experiments finding that, “Injecting cancer cells into a person without consent was a clear violation of basic human rights and Nuremberg code” (Skloot 132). Skloot compares the practice of American doctors to the inhumane experiments conducted on the Jews in Germany to have the readers see similarity between the immoral methods. Both practices did not receive consent from their patients. She uses research to find factual evidence about practices without consent that were made illegal in another country. By comparing the experiments conducted by American doctors to an extreme event, she leads the reader to develop the opinion that all practices without the consent of the patient are unjust. She includes the opinions of medical professionals to express their concern for these methods to the readers. A doctor from that time would have the greatest insight on the experiments that were being conducted and the practicality of them. The reader then sees it as logical that conducting potentially dangerous experiments without any consent is a violation of human rights.

“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.

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 more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it." This is a quote by the Angel of Death himself, a man who brought medical advancements and discoveries to the Nazi society. Throughout the Holocaust there have been many experiments for the better of medicine and the disregard of its patients. These experiments had no regard to the patient's' well being and partly due to the hate of the victims but mainly due to the medical breakthroughs that brought forth. The holocaust in retrospect was very beneficial to the medical and experimental society as a whole.

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

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.”

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.

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

The utter disregard for the life of human beings is exemplified so clearly in the second world war. Few, perhaps no events in modern times, not even during WWI, come close to horrors endured during the Holocaust. The Nazi party’s vision of a perfect and pure society stripped Jewish people, Roma people, gay people, mentally and physically disabled people, and many others of their lives.

During the Nazi Party’s rise to power, it held a strong influence on not only the German people, but as well as all of conquered Europe. It was able to coerce regular citizens into joining one of the most destructive genocides recorded in history by turning them into antisemites, and, in some regards, murderers. It is important to learn from history about the power a government has over the influence of their citizens, particularly in the field of medicine. The main purpose of this paper is to describe the Nazi party’s role in the development and research German medicine, specifically on: the physicians, that became loyal to the state rather than their patients; eugenics, in which the goal was to spawn a ‘master race’; human experimentation, which was done on whoever the state deemed undesirable; and, finally, racial purification, the elimination of individuals that the state believed lead a ‘life unworthy of life’.This paper does not note all of the experiments, victims, perpetrators involved or the locations in which the ‘medical’ atrocities were carried out. It will focus mainly on the idea of racial purification, specifically in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the main extermination camp, providing the accounts of several victims that were subject to the medical experiments, and addressing the medical community, specifically Dr. Josef Mengele, as perpetrators of the genocide of millions of people.

The Nazis made scientific contributions to the world in the Holocaust through their medical experiments and government initiatives, resulting from their military research experiments and the medical experiments conducted in concentration camps. The Nazis conducted their military research to aid the German military and its citizens. The medical experiments conducted at concentration camps, most of which, resulted in physical torture and death, had limited data and insufficient results. Widespread diseases in the Aryan race caused the Nazis to research possible vaccinations and immunizations against the disease. The ideas of eugenics and racial hygiene inspired doctors and physicians alike to conduct experiments proving the superiority

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

“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.