The Holocaust: Medical Experiments In The Holocaust

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Along with Josef Mengele, other medical doctors joined the Nazi party and performed wicked medical experiments inside and outside concentration camps. Some other medical practitioners include Dr. Karl Brandt, Dr. Herta Oberheuser, Dr. Carl Clauberg, and Dr. Horst Schumann. These doctors not only performed experiments to help Germany’s military, they also experimented ways to advance their belief that the Aryan race is superior to all others. These doctors executed many unreasonable and vile experiments on the innocent victims of the Holocaust.

Of these doctors, Dr. Brandt was Adolf Hitler’s personal physician and was in his inner circle. Born in Alsace, he became a medical doctor in 1928, but found it difficult to make a living as a new …show more content…

Herta Oberheuser. Although there is very little information on Dr. Oberheuser’s early and personal life, there is a lot of documentation of the experiments she performed at the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps. She killed children by injecting oil and evipan into their veins, while the patient being fully conscious until their death, and the time until death being between three and five minutes. Then, she dissected their limbs and removed their vital organs to have them sent to Berlin for examination. She focused on deliberately inflicting wounds on patients and rubbing them with objects such as rusty nails, ground glass, dirt and sawdust to resemble a wound on the battlefield. Oberheuser removed sections of bones, muscles and nerves and performed bone transplantation without the use of anesthesia to study bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration. As a result of the operations she performed, many of her patients suffered intense agony, trauma, permanent disability, and death. In the Nuremberg Medical Trials, Oberheuser was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She was released in 1952 and became a family doctor in Germany, but when an ex-inmate from Ravensbrück recognized her, the controversy ended in her medical license being revoked. After the pain and torture she inflicted, she thought she could finally help people in need, but the world thought …show more content…

Of these doctors who performed sterilization, the most notorious are Dr. Carl Clauberg and Dr. Horst Schumann. Dr. Clauberg was born in Germany and participated in World War I as an infantryman. He later became the doctor-in-chief at the University gynaecological clinic in Kiel. He became a zealot to Nazism and entered the NSDAP in 1933. In 1942 he asked Heinrich Himmler, a critical Nazi leader, for the opportunity to sterilize a profusion of people for his experiments. Clauberg was granted this opportunity and moved to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and a portion of one of the blocks at the camp was put to his disposal for his experiments. Thousands of Jewish and Gypsy women had acid liquids injected into their uteruses without anesthesia by means of finding a cheap and efficient way to sterilize women (ushmm.org). These injections caused horrible pain, bursting spasms in the stomach, bleeding, inflamed and seriously damaged the victim’s ovaries, and then they were sent to Berlin for examination. Clauberg’s experiments often killed his patients, and if they did not die during the procedure they were put to death so he could perform autopsies on them. When the Russian army was about to capture the Auschwitz camp, Clauberg escaped to the Ravensbrück concentration camp to continue

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