Medical Experimentation During the Holocaust

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Recommended: Medical experiments done on Jews during the Holocaust

Imagine being forced outside naked in the bitter cold conditions, forced to stay outside until your arms, when struck with a stick, emitted a sound resembling the sound that a board would when struck {NY Times: Japan}. Then imagine having boiling water forced into your internal organs, in an attempt to warm you, but the boiling heat of the water instead kills you. This is just one of the horrible “medical” experiments that was performed in the Holocaust. But the thing that most people don’t know is around the same time that this horror was occurring, the American government and Japan were performing just as gruesome and horrid experiments on others. The Holocaust, the most famous of the three that I am comparing, was a tragedy and the number of deaths is just horrid to think about. When you think about medical experiments during this heinous time period, a name stands out. Josef Mengele. The name even sends shivers through me. If you do not know who he is, you are lucky. He, by himself, performed the most horrendous "experiments" on the helpless people that were his victims. These gruesome experiments fall into three categories: Military Research, Pharmaceutical Research, and Racially Motivated Research. Military research were what the Nazi doctors considered a “military necessity”. These inhumane acts included of freezing experiments where the defenseless prisoners were submerged into tanks of ice water for hours everyday and watched as they shivered to death, in order to discover how long German pilots that were shot down could survive the frigid waters of the North Sea. Another experiment was the high altitude experiments, where the victims were placed into a decompression chamber to simulate conditions of high altitudes, then... ... middle of paper ... ...008. Web. 13 Feb. 2014. . Kristof, Nicholas D. "Unmasking Horror -- A special report.; Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity." Unmasking Horror: n. pag. The New York Times. Web. 13 Feb. 2014. unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html?src=pm&pagewanted=1>. Cohen, Baruch C. "Nazi Medical Experimentation: The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments." Nazi Medical Experimentation: n. pag. Jewish Virtual Library. Web. 13 Feb. 2014. . "Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment | Infoplease.com." Infoplease. © 2000–2013 Pearson Education, publishing as Infoplease. 14 Feb. 2014 .

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