Nuremberg Trail Research Paper

Holocaust was one of the most abhorrent events in human history. According to the article “Nuremberg Trails” by History.com staff, six millions of Jews as wells as other groups considered as "racial inferiority" were massacred. Inmates in these concentration camps were either killed by the Nazis soldiers, or died because of dreadful living conditions. Furthermore, Nazi doctors utilized them as test subjects; numerous of inconceivable experiments were performed on those prisoners such as: freezing experiments, poison experiments, sterilization experiments, twin experiments, etc. As a result, by the end of World War II, many Nazi officials and military officers along with lawyers and doctors were brought to justice; they were charged with crimes

The trails held a significant impact in creating a stable world. The Nuremberg trails did not only bring war criminals to justice, but also lay the basic building block for international laws; “[t]he findings at Nuremberg led directly to the United Nations Genocide Convention (1948) and Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), as well as the Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War (1949).”, according to the article. However, the impact of the trails was broader than just focusing on issues related to war. As highlighted in previous paragraph, Nazis doctors conducted many inhuman experiments on human which resulted in the Doctors Trail, a subsequent trial of the Nuremberg trials, “in which twenty-three defendants were accused of crimes against humanity, including medical experiments on prisoners of war.”, stated in the article. The influence of it was so significant that changed the way scientists, doctors, as well as people’s view on human experimentation. Rebecca Skloot states in her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, “The tribunal set forth a ten-point code of ethics now known as the Nuremberg Code, which was to govern all human experimentation worldwide.” (131,

The same situation happens to The Declaration of Helsinki developed by World Medical Association and adopted in 1964. During its lifetime, it has been revised many time, the current official version of it was revised in 2013. It focuses on obligation of researchers on human research ethics. Although the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki aren’t law, many nations use it as principles to form law that protect human rights in human experimentations. According to the article “Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code” written by Evelyne