The 20 August, 1947, Luneberg, Germany.
After more than 8 months on a trial, 23 defendants, most of them doctors accused not only of evil
Nazi medical experiments but also involvement in deadly euthanasia programs, hear their
sentences read.
After the gruesome testimonies of tens of witnesses, the world finally learns the truth
about the painful and often deadly medical experiments on thousands of prisoners without
their permission.
While 7 of the defendants are acquitted, the atrocities which the rest of them committed
were so inhuman and horrendous, that 9 of them receive prison sentences ranging from
10 years to life imprisonment and 7 of them are sentenced to death by hanging.
After the outbreak of the Second World War, Nazi Germany started to occupy many countries
across Europe.
Millions of people in the Nazi occupied territories including Jews, Romani people, Slavs and disabled
people were turned into slaves and thousands of them became subjects of pseudo-medical
Nazi experiments.
These experiments were often conducted without anesthesia and had 3 main objectives: to ensure
the survival of German military personnel, to test new drugs and treatments and to advance
racial ideology.
To ensure the survival of German military personnel, the Nazi doctors at Dachau concentration
camp performed high-altitude experiments in low-pressure chambers simulating conditions
at altitudes of up to 21,000 meters to determine the maximum altitude from which crews of damaged
aircraft could parachute to safety.
Another medical experiment here was the so-called freezing experiment to treat hypothermia which
occurs when the body temperature drops.
In this picture the prisoner is wearing an experimental Luftwaffe garment.
There were even experiments when the naked prisoners were exposed to outside temperatures
of −6 °C or 21 °F for several hours.
To rewarm them, the fanatic doctors even threw them into boiling water.
In all the above-mentioned experiments the Nazi doctors wrote down every detail of the
prisoner’s death and after how many minutes they died.
Dachau even had sea water experiments to find a method to make a sea water drinkable.
The inmates were given nothing to eat or drink but the sea water.
After a few days, they were so desperate to find the source of fresh water that they started
to lick the freshly mopped floor.
Dachau is also a home for new drugs and treatments for malaria.
Doctor Claus Schilling infected the inmates either by injecting infected blood directly
into a vein or had them bitten by infected mosquitoes which Nazis themselves were breeding
in Dachau.
In order to fight malaria, he used quinine and various synthetic drugs which had a number
of side effects they wished to study.
Another experiment was testing immunization compounds and serums for the prevention and
treatment of contagious diseases including malaria, typhus or tuberculosis.
At Buchenwald concentration camp for instance, Waldemar Hoven conducted experiments regarding
typhus and the tolerance of serum containing phenol.
At Ravensbrück concentration camp they conducted sulfonamide experiments.
Sulfonamide was an early antibiotic.
Himmler’s personal physician Karl Gebhardt and his assistants Fritz Fischer and Herta
Oberheuser often used a hammer to break legs of female prisoners in Ravensbrück concentration
camp, then infected the open wounds with aggressive bacteria and monitored the healing with and
without antibiotics.
They also experimented with removing and damaging nerves, muscles, and bones in the legs to
see if they would regenerate.
They even attempted to transplant the limbs from one person to another believing it could
help in treating amputee soldiers.
To advance the racial ideology, the Nazi regime not only legalized the involuntary sterilization
of persons suffering from diseases including schizophrenia, alcohol abuse, insanity, blindness,
or deafness but also performed sterilization experiments on the inmates.
At Auschwitz and Ravensbrück they tried to develop a sterilization method which would
require a minimum of time and effort and would be suitable for sterilizing millions of people.
The most infamous Nazi doctor was Josef Mengele who performed his experiments at Auschwitz
concentration camp.
Mengele was mainly interested in identical twins.
The reason probably was that he wanted to increase the number of new-born racially desirable
Aryan twins.
Mengele even took part in selections of arriving prisoners because he was looking for twins
to conduct medical experiments on them.
His subjects, mostly children, were often better fed and housed than the other prisoners
and he presented them with sweets and introduced himself as “uncle Mengele “. However,
the experiments which followed were incredibly brutal.
They included infecting one twin with typhus or some other disease and transfusing the
blood of one twin into the other or performing unnecessary amputations of limbs on them.
He was also obsessed with heterochromia people with eyes of 2 different colors.
He even attempted to change or lighten the eye color and hair color of his victims, like
the ones you can see in this picture here, by injecting chemicals into the eyes to make
them look more Aryan.
After he conducted his experiments, he killed the subjects and sent their eyes to Belin
for further study.
Another of Mengele’s obsession was with dwarfs and people with physical disabilities.
He tried to treat them with X rays and unnecessary drugs causing them incredible pain and often
death.
After the war, Karl Gebhardt and Waldemar Hoven faced justice at the Nuremberg Doctor’s
trial and Claus Schilling at the Dachau trial.
They were all sentenced to death by hanging.
However, Josef Mengele never faced justice for his crimes.
He lived as a free man in Brazil where he died in 1979 after suffering a stroke while
swimming.
The faith of those submitted to these experiments was often a sad one.
Most of them died during the experiments or were killed after the experiments to study
the effects of the experiments after their death.
Those who survived were often left physically and mentally disabled for the rest of their
lives.
At the Doctor’s trial which lasted from 1946 until 1947, the defendants tried to justify
their experiments saying that these experiments had been a military necessity and compared
the victims of their experiments to collateral damage from allied bombings.
Some doctors even claimed that they had been doing the world a favor and that there was
no international law regarding medical experimentation.
As a result, the Nuremberg Code - set of research ethics principles for ethical medical human
experimentation - was created in order to set values that professionals can refer to
in the case of any confusion or conflict.
Modern scientists reject the use of results from experiments in the camps because they
were involuntary, caused unnecessary pain and suffering, and often ended in death or
disability.
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