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Nazi medical experiments
Medical experiments in the holocaust essay
Nazi medical experiments
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After hours of performing a back braking surgery, the doctor takes a few steps back to gaze at the creation before him. Severed limbs are carefully stitched to the test subject on the medical table. Arms, legs, and ties cover the body of the Jew, and the doctor eyes dance with amusement at the human before him. Hours later, the test subject emerges from slumber only to be swallowed by the immense pain controlling his figure. The doctor listens to the screams that fill the void of the test lab, and suddenly, the cries fall to a dead silence. The doctor is overtaken by rage as his experiment has yet again filled, but he strolls through the concentration camps because he has an endless supply of test subjects before him. During the Holocaust, it was normal for Nazi doctors to perform experiments on individuals living in concentration camps. Nazi doctors performed experiments that consisted of miscellaneous, inferior races, and statistical date in order to prove their thesis on certain matters. To begin with, during the Holocaust, Nazi doctors performed miscellaneous experiments to purposely inflict pain onto their test subjects. The unethical part of the experiments was that the doctors deliberately caused pain in order to bring amusement to their everyday lives. According to Poisuo, Herta …show more content…
Since the German race was dominant, Nazi doctors conducted numerous experiments on Jews, Gypsies and many more individuals to study their DNA to further understand German dominance. During the Holocaust, “…Nazis developed racial health policies that began with the mass sterilization of “genetically diseased” persons and ended with the near annihilation of European Jewry” (“Nazi Racial Science”). The ultimate goal was to rid Europe of Jews because they were considered inferior, and many experiments were conducted by multiple doctors to achieve this
the other modern element in Nazi policy was their commitment to the ‘science’ of race.”
"Medical Experiments ." 10 June 2013. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . 18 March 2014 .
According to A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust, the Roma (Gypsies) and African-Germans were attacked because of their ethnicity. These two groups fell into the category of being “asocial” and too undesirable. The gypsies had pre-existing prejudices against them before Hitler’s rise which he just expanded on by creating laws against them. They had their civil rights taken away. Many were deported or sent to forced labor camps, and murdered. In 1933, the "Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Defects," was put into effect which gave doctors and physicians the ability to take away the choice and ability for the Roma and others to reproduce. The Romani and Negroes were considered minorities with “alien blood” so they were no longer allowed to marry those of the Aryan race (“Sinti and Roma”). The Gypsies and African-Germans foreign appearance, and customs were viewed as a threat to the “superior” race. They were under extreme scrutiny and judgment by researchers and scientists. They were measured, tested and became part of experiments to p...
When looking at the holocaust, it is widely known the devastation and pain that was caused by the Nazis; however when inspecting the holocaust on a deeper level, it is evident that the Jews were exposed to unimaginable treatment and experimentation often overlooked in history discussions. When looking at “Night”, Elie Wiesel was helped by the doctors in the camp when his foot was severely infected; although this is not the experience he had, many Jews were mistreated and even killed by the doctors. Many Nazi doctors that were assigned to Jewish patients were later found to have exposed the patients to horrific medical experiments and unnecessary treatments that commonly led to their death.
The T4 program was not the beginning of Germany’s effort to reach a super race. Leading up to the war Hitler enacted the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases” in the year of 1933. The law called for the sterilization of anyone that had any hereditary illnesses. The list of hereditary illnesses included: “schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile disorders, therapy resistant paralysis and syphilitic diseases, retardation, encephalitis, Huntington’s chorea and other neurological conditions.” (History Place) This law was enforced by opening 200 genetic health courts that would analyze the medical records of individuals and decide if they were to be sterilized or not. The sterilization of people usually involved the use of drugs, x-rays, or uterine irritants. Dr. Horst Schumann did a lot of these experiments with sterilization at Auschwitz, where he would take a group of men/women and would expose them to x-rays. Most of his experiments with x-rays were disappointing but he kept using this method. After he subjected his subjects to x...
Epstein shows the process that the majority of Jews were being put through, such as the medical examinations, medical experimentations, gas chambers and crematoriums. Medical examinations were used to determine if the Jews were healthy enough to work. Dr. Mengele used the Jews as “lab rats” and performed many experiments such as a myriad of drug testing and different surgeries. The gas chamber was a room where Jews were poisoned to death with a preparation of prussic acid, called Cyclo...
...ny brought in Africans to help fight the war and some of these Africans married German women and had children. These children were labeled as ‘Rhineland Bastards.’ ‘Hitler said he would eliminate all the children born of African-German descent because he considered them an “insult” to the German nation’ (Non-Jewish Victims). The Nazi Party set up another secret group to ‘sterilize’ the children in hospitals. They would pull kids out of school and sometimes, without their parents’ knowledge. In all, there were only about 400 children ‘sterilized’ throughout the holocaust.
Dr. Irving Macione devoted his life towards protecting people and especially children from poisonous substances. When his son was three years old, he accidentally drank a poisonous substance and died, so he began to research and test new drugs to test for how much a person had to digest for it to be fatal. While Dr. Macione was researching one such drug, he came across a note in an archive about an experiment done about poisons in Germany, back in 1941. He looked up the experiment and discovered that it was a study on how poisons affect the body, but it was done by a Nazi doctor in a Poland concentration camp. The Nazi doctor would put different amounts of poison into the inmates' food and watch how they would react to it. Doing an experiment like this today wouldn’t be allowed because it’s not ethical, but Dr. Macione wanted to know if it was still permissible to use the data because it was already done.
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...
The Nazi’s perpetrated many horrors during the Holocaust. They enacted many cruel laws. They brainwashed millions into foolishly following them and believing their every word using deceitful propaganda tactics. They forced many to suffer doing embarrassing jobs and to live in crowded ghettos. They created mobile killing squads to exterminate their enemies. Finally, as part of “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question”, they made concentration and killing camps. Another thing the Nazi’s did was to use eugenics as another mean to micromanage the population. What is eugenics, you might ask? It’s the field of scientific study or the belief in genetically improving qualities, attributes and traits in the human race and/or improving the species as a whole—usually done by controlled/selective breeding. Those with positive, desirable, and superior traits are encouraged to reproduce and may be given monetary incentives by the government to have large families. Those with negative, undesirable, or inferior traits may be discouraged from having offspring. They may be sterilized, or undergo dangerous medical procedures or operations with high mortality rates. I chose this topic because it appealed to me and seemed interesting. In the following paragraphs, the tactics, methods, and propaganda the Nazi’s used will be exposed.
The screams of the men and women could be heard. People can read about The medical experiments of the Holocaust through articles and journals around the world. The Medical experiments of the holocaust were performed by specific scientists on unwilling subjects for reasons that could be considered both necessary and unnecessary.
The treatment of Jews and other minority groups by the Nazi’s can be described as actions that could only be done by a totalitarian state. Hitler believed in eugenics, the idea of improving a race by selective breeding. Nazi ideology of the Jewish race was severe anti-Semitism and pure hatred. The Nazi policy towards the Jews has been said to be the most brutal and horrific example of anti-Semitism in history.
In December 1946, the War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg indicted 20 Nazi physicians and 3 administrators for their willing participation in carrying out the harmful research on unwilling human subjects. Thus, Nuremberg code was the first international code for the ethics to be followed during human subject research. It was permissible medical experiments implemented in August 1947. The code also provides few directives for clinical trials (3). Syphilis study at Tuskegee in 1974 was the most influential event that led to the HHS Policy for Protecti...
Some of the earliest recorded instances of unethical human experimentation occurred in the 1700’s when doctors tested vaccines on their slaves, often without informing them of the dangers involved. Edward Jenner who was a pioneer in inoculation against smallpox and has been called the “Father of Immunology”, tested smallpox vaccines on neighboring children and even his own son. In his most famous experiment he injected an eight year old boy with pus scraped from the blisters of a milkmaid infected with cowpox and then later on two differ...
...umerous medical criminals. Jews already had an unbearable life, but the experiments that went on were not only inhuman, but pure evil, for very little patients survived these horrific events. Those who did were left with permanent injuries.