| HOLOCAUST MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS
During WWII a number of German doctors conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration and death camp prisoners without their consent. Unethical medical experimentation carried out during the Third Reich can be divided into three categories.
The first category consists of experiments aimed at facilitating the survival of Axis personnel. In Dachau, physicians from the German Air Force and from the German Experimental Institution for Aviation conducted high-altitude experiments, using a low-pressure chamber, to determine the maximum altitude from which crews of damaged aircraft could parachute to safety. Scientists there carried out so-called freezing experiments using prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia. They also used prisoners to test various methods of making seawater potable.
Dachau prisoner immersed in icy
water for hypothermia experiments |
A Gypsy prisoner from Dachau is a victom
of Nazi experiments to make seawater potable |
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The second category of experimentation was aimed at developing and testing pharmaceuticals and treatment methods for injuries and illnesses which German military and occupational personnel encountered in the field. At the German concentration camps of Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Natzweiler, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme, scientists tested immunization compounds and sera for the prevention and treatment of contagious diseases such as malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis. The Ravensbrueck camp was the site of bone-grafting experiments, and experiments to test the efficiency of the newly developed sulfa (sulfanilamide) drugs. At Natzweiler and Sachsenhausen, prisoners were subjected to phosgene and mustard gas in order to test possible antidotes.
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Medical personnel experimenting
on a prisoner at Buchenwald |
Victim of experiments
at Buchenwald |
Victim of tuberculosis experiment at
Neuengamme Camp |
The third category of medical experimentation sought to advance the racial and ideological tenets of the Nazi world view. The most infamous were the experiments conducted by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Mengele conducted medical experiments on twins. He also directed serological experiments on Gypsies, as did Werner Fischer at Sachsenhausen, in order to determine how different "races" withstood various contagious diseases. The research of August Hirt at Strasbourg University also intended to establish "Jewish racial inferiority". |
Dr. Josef Mengele |
Dr. August Hirt |
Carl Clauberg |
Horst Schumann |
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Other gruesome experiments meant to further Nazi racial goals were a series of sterilization experiments, undertaken primarily at Auschwitz and Ravensbrueck. There, scientists tested a number of methods in their effort to develop an efficient and inexpensive procedure for the mass sterilization of Jews, Gypsies, and other groups the Nazi's deemed racially or genetically undesireable.
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Josef Mengele preparing to
operate on a child prisoner. |
Children used in medical
experiments at Auschwitz |
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