What Really Happened in the Concentration Camps

Lessons can be learned through experiments but at what cost? Steven Pinker, a experimental psychologist, once said, “If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.” This quote by Pinker gives a great idea what could happen when people get literate and conduct experiments that they will do to learn more. The Nazi’s wanted to learn more about the human body. During the Holocaust, the experiments that they performed were the most wicked and dehumanising crimes in history.

While being in Concentration Camps, Jews had no control over anything. Some Jewish inmates were selected to do various experiments. They did not volunteer for these experiments. They were chosen. They had to participate in the experiment or they would be killed. In addition, if they were picked, most experiments resulted in death or a permanent disability and not many survived. The Jews also had no idea what they were in for as the experiments were for the Nazi doctors who wanted to learn how they could help better their army and learn about illness and injury treatment through these often gross and volger experiments. The Nazi’s condiucted over 30 different experiments. There were only 7,000 Jewish victims documented that were killed, but there were many more people that died from these experiments. One of the worst and most known experiments were the twin experiments. Of the 1,000 pairs of twins that were experimented on in these concentration camps, only about 200 survived. Forty years later, only a few twins that were experimented on could be found in the United States.

Even though most of these experiments did not end great, they did have some benefits. One of the mostl known Nazi doctors was Jo...

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... on the males genitals or castrate them. “Thousands of Jews who were sterilized suffered untold mental and physical anguish” (6). All in all thousands of Jews suffered many different ways with all the experiments and most of them ended tragic for the Jews.

Works Cited

"Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine." Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.

"Medical Experiments." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, Web. 25 Mar. 2014.

"Mengele's Children: The Twins of Auschwitz." About.com 20th Century History. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.

"The Nazi Doctors." The Nazi Doctors. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.

"Nazi Medical Experiments." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 10 June 2013. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.

PBS. PBS, Web. 06 Apr. 2014