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Nazi medical experiments
Nazi medical experiments
What medical experiments were performed while the holocaust was going on
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Experiments on Jews
The freezing / hypothermia experiments were conducted for the Nazi high command. The experiments were conducted on men to simulate the conditions the armies suffered on the Eastern Front. The German forces were ill prepared for the bitter cold. Thousands of German soldiers died of freezing or were debilitated by cold injuries.The experiments were conducted under the supervision of Dr. Sigmund Rascher at Birkenau, Dachau and Auschwitz .The freezing experiments were divided into two parts. First, to establish how long it would take to lower the body temperature to death and second how to best resuscitate the frozen victim.The two main methods used to freeze the victim were to put the person in a icy vat of water or to put the victim outside naked in sub-zero temperatures.The icy vat method proved to be the fastest way to drop the body temperature. The selections were made of young healthly Jews or Russians. They were usually stripped naked and prepared for the experiment. A insulated probe which measured the drop in the body temperature was inserted into the rectum. The probe was held in place by a expandable metal ring which was adjusted to open inside the rectum to hold the probe firmly in place. The victim was then placed in the vat of cold water and started to freeze. It was learned that most victims lost consciousness and died when the body temperature dropped to 25 C.The second way to freeze a victim was to strap them to a stretcher and place them outside naked. The extreme winters of Auschwitz made a natural place for this experiment.
Another cruel way to kill someone was to boil their insides. The frozen victim would have water heated to a near blistering temperature forcefully irrigated into the stomach, bladder, and intestines. All victims appeared to have died from the treatment.
They also did experiments on twins. The twins were examined from head to toe. Measurements of every inch were taken. The twins were allowed to keep their hair for the first several days of the examination. After all the living data was taken the twins would be killed by a single injection of chloroform in the heart. Care was taken to insure the twins died at the same time. The twins were then dissected with the organs being sent to research centers.
In one case i read about there were three sets of twins.
"Medical Experiments ." 10 June 2013. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . 18 March 2014 .
Twins are truly fascinating from the time of separation of the embryo to birth; and still the complexity of twinning is not yet fully understood among the scientific world. Scientists have studied the human body from the time of prenatal development to birth, and still are in awe of the formation of twins. Research in twinning is ever more increasing in this field, leadi...
During the Holocaust, the Nazis carried out many unethical medical experiments on patients without regard for their survival. Prisoners were forced to be subjects in various studies against their will. The Nazis’ victims went through indescribable pain as they were forced through high-altitude, freezing, tuberculosis, sea water, sulfanilamide, poison, and transplant experiments. Through these tragic Holocaust experiments, scientists and doctors discovered treatments used today for high-altitude sickness, hypothermia, contagious diseases, dehydration, poisoning, and war wounds.
As the human species develops, medicine follows suit. Researchers look down medicinal avenues which promise a better life-- a longer life. However, red and blue paint cannot engender purple paint without proper mixing. Thus, health sciences cannot expand without thorough experimentation. The Nazis exemplified this concept of “thorough experimentation” with their cruel and inhumane medical experiments. The trials varied in nature and reason. Some of the “experiments had legitimate scientific purposes, though the methods that were used violated the canons of medical ethics. Others were racial in nature, designed to advance Nazi racial theories. [However,] Most were simply bad science.” (jewishvirtuallibrary.org). The medical experiments performed by the Nazis were vast and highly divergent, but they can generally be divided into three categories: racial experimentation, war-injury experimentation, and pharmaceutical testing.
Epstein shows the process that the majority of Jews were being put through, such as the medical examinations, medical experimentations, gas chambers and crematoriums. Medical examinations were used to determine if the Jews were healthy enough to work. Dr. Mengele used the Jews as “lab rats” and performed many experiments such as a myriad of drug testing and different surgeries. The gas chamber was a room where Jews were poisoned to death with a preparation of prussic acid, called Cyclo...
Nazis' Ways of Eliminating the Jews During the Holocaust In 1941, America and Soviet Russia allied with Great Britain and France to fight the Nazi forces in the Second World War. Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazis, knew he faced the most powerful nations in the world and was not ready for a long conflict. They needed to destroy the "evidence", the Jews, of the holocaust before the allied forces closed in from the west. Up to this point, the Nazis had used slow, stressful and inefficient methods of killing Jews and Hitler wanted a faster way of getting rid of them.
"Nazi Medical Experiments: Background & Overview." Background & Overview of Nazi Medical Experiments. Jewish Virtual Library, n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2014.
method and burning the bodies after would be an easy way to get rid of
A person’s body can only withstand so much in extreme conditions. One of the top priorities for Nazis doctors was seeing how far you can push your body to the limit (United States Holocaust Museum). While Hitler attempted to take over the world, thousands of his troops were sent all over Europe in many severe environments. So scientists decided to test the endurence of the human body to see if they could send the Nazis soldiers any farther using inmates of the camps as subjects. Many of these experiments tested things like how long a person could fight off hypothermia (United States Holocaust Museum). A very notorious doctor for this kind of “treatment” is Doctor Herta Oberheuser who would cut a child’s limbs to simulate battle wounds (Auschwitz.dk). Oberheuser would then rub things like saw dust, glass, or wood to make the cuts seem more like sores you might get in combat (Auschwitz.dk). After words, she would try to find ways to heal the deep and grimy cuts effectively (Auschwitz.dk). Experiments lik...
...ctors put in the tuberculosis bacteria in the prisoners at camp Neuengamme. Around two hundred adults died from this. They also cut off legs and shoulders from prisoners at Ravensbruck to attach them onto other subjects. This also included parts of bones, muscles, and nerves to analyze the healing process for the body parts. The result of the experiments were horrid pain, mutilation, disability, and death.
Nazi doctors submerged victims in vats of icy water for periods of up to five hours in an attempt to find ways to treat German pilots forced to eject into icy ocean water. The victims were either naked
attacked them in their homes. Jews had to sell their businesses and other property to
“In Spite of everything I believe that people are really good at heart. I simply cannot build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death” (Snyder 244). Despites attacks on their religion, designed to weaken and destroy Judaism many Jews held on to their faith trusting in God to get them through all the appalling events happening in their life. Throughout centuries Jews moved from place to place; mainly because of exclusion and prejudice against them (Levy 8). They were set apart by religious differences, cultural differences, along with many others by many over a long period of time.
Treatment of Jews in the 16th Century Looking at the history of Jews in England, it is evident that Jews were persecuted and murdered up until 1290, when Jews were expelled from the country. Jews were treated with strong disrespect both because of their alternative religious beliefs, and because of their financial status and ways of living. One can safely assume that Shakespeare never actually met a Jew, because Jews had been expelled three and a half centuries before he lived. Therefore the stereotypically evil character of the Jew was merely a myth, passed down through the generations. Shakespeare obviously intended on demonising the Jew of his play, making Shylock an outcast to the community of Venice.
The history of animal experimentation and tests, and the argument surrounding it, has an expansive and somewhat extensive history. Some of the first medical research that was conducted on living animals was done by Aelius Galenus, better known as Galen, in the second century C.E. There have been examples of animal testing in earlier dates, but Galen devoted his life to understanding science and medicine, so he is attributed to being the father of vivisection. In the twelfth century, an Arabic physician named Avenzoar introduced animal testing dissections as a means to better understand surgery before preforming the operation on a human patient. Edmund O’Meara made one of the first opposing ar...