Nazi human experimentation
[1]At Auschwitz and other camps, under the direction of Eduard Wirths, selected inmates were subjected to various experiments that were designed to help German military personnel in combat situations, develop new weapons, aid in the recovery of military personnel who had been injured, and to advance Nazi racial ideology and eugenics,[2] including the twin experiments of Josef Mengele.
[4] After the war, these crimes were tried at what became known as the Doctors' Trial, and revulsion at the abuses perpetrated led to the development of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics.
The Nazi physicians in the Doctors' Trial argued that military necessity justified their experiments and compared their victims to collateral damage from Allied bombings.
Rascher published an article on his experience of using Polygal, without detailing the nature of the human trials, and set up a company staffed by prisoners to manufacture the substance.
[9] On 12 August 1946, a survivor named Jadwiga Kamińska[10] gave a deposition about her time at Ravensbrück concentration camp, describing how she was operated on twice.
Both operations involved one of her legs and although she never describes herself as having any knowledge as to what exactly the procedure was, she explained that both times she was in extreme pain and developed a fever post-surgery but was given little to no aftercare.
[26] In a letter from 10 September 1942, Rascher describes an experiment on intense cooling performed in Dachau where people were dressed in fighter pilot uniforms and submerged in freezing water.
[27] The freezing and hypothermia experiments were conducted for the Nazi high command to simulate the conditions the armies suffered on the Eastern Front, as the German forces were ill-prepared for the cold weather they encountered.
Many experiments were conducted on captured Soviet troops; the Nazis wondered whether their genetics gave them superior resistance to cold.
[29][30] In early 1942, prisoners at Dachau concentration camp were used by Sigmund Rascher in experiments to aid German pilots who had to eject at high altitudes.
[34] At one point, a group of roughly 90 Roma were deprived of food and given nothing but seawater to drink by Hans Eppinger, leaving them gravely injured.
Tschofenig explained how while working at the medical experimentation stations he gained insight into some of the experiments that were performed on prisoners, namely those in which they were forced to drink salt water.
Tschofenig also described how victims of the experiments had trouble eating and would desperately seek out any source of water, including old floor rags.
[8] Intravenous injections of solutions speculated to contain iodine and silver nitrate were similarly successful but had unwanted side effects such as vaginal bleeding, severe abdominal pain, and cervical cancer.
They gave the women abdomen X-rays, men received them on their genitalia, for abnormal periods of time in attempt to invoke infertility.
The Danish endocrinologist Carl Vaernet developed an artificial male sex gland, a capsule that slowly released testosterone when implanted under the skin.
[47][48] In 1944, Vaernet proposed to deputy Reich SS Physician Ernst-Robert Grawitz that the capsule could convert homosexual men into heterosexuals.
[47] Vaernet claimed that "successes" with the implants occurred,[49] presumably due to positive reports from prisoners hoping to receive a release from the camp,[47] or knowing it would increase their odds of survival.
[49] According to notes written by the senior doctor at Buchenwald dated 3 January 1945, at least one man died during the experiment in December 1944 "of heart failure associated with infectious enteritis and general bodily weakness".
[49] Eugen Kogon reported that a second man died as a result of the operations due to festering inflammation of cell tissue, presumably after 3 January 1945.
[47]: 171 Homosexual and Jewish prisoners were also given experimental treatments for typhus at Buchenwald, for phosphorus burns at Sachsenhausen, and were used for testing opiates and Pervitin.
[37] Some male Jewish prisoners had poisonous substances scrubbed or injected into their skin, causing boils filled with black fluid to form.
[8] At various times between September 1939 and April 1945, many experiments were conducted at Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, and other camps to investigate the most effective treatment of wounds caused by mustard gas.
[8] Other documented transcriptions from Heinrich Himmler include phrases such as "These researches… can be performed by us with particular efficiency because I personally assumed the responsibility for supplying asocial individuals and criminals who deserve only to die from concentration camps for these experiments.
"[61] Many of the subjects died as a result of the experiments conducted by the Nazis, while many others were murdered after the tests were completed to study the effects post mortem.
While Neisser went on to be fined by the Royal Disciplinary Court, Moll developed "a legally based, positivistic contract theory of the patient-doctor relationship" that was not adopted into German law.
[64] Eventually, the minister for religious, educational, and medical affairs issued a directive stating that medical interventions other than for diagnosis, healing, and immunization were excluded under all circumstances if "the human subject was a minor or not competent for other reasons", or if the subject had not given his or her "unambiguous consent" after a "proper explanation of the possible negative consequences" of the intervention, though this was not legally binding.
[65] The code calls for such standards as voluntary consent of patients, avoidance of unnecessary pain and suffering, and that there must be a belief that the experimentation will not end in death or disability.
[35] In a 1990 review of the Dachau experiments, Robert Berger concludes that the study has "all the ingredients of a scientific fraud" and that the data "cannot advance science or save human lives.
Writing for Jewish Law, Baruch Cohen concluded that the EPA's "knee-jerk reaction" to reject the data's use was "typical, but unprofessional", arguing that it could have saved lives.
