During World War II the prisoners in German concentration camp suffered many tortures. Nazi concentration camp are considered by many to be the worst example of human depravity. Rarely do we see such blatant disregards for ethics or basic human right. Adolf Hitler used the ongoing war to throw ethics out the window and experiment on prisoners even if they did not consent. He adopted the pseudoscience eugenics to prove the superiority of the Aryan race and ordered the euthanasia of mentally ill and genetically unfit people before concentration camps had been set up. The camps have been the source of many horrific stories, the majority of which are about the medical experiments conducted by camp doctors. Nazi doctors used prisoners to perform cruel, inhumane, or sadistic experiments. Contrary to what is commonly believed, some experiments were based solely on scientific fact. The purpose was to torture and kill the prisoners.
These experiments triggered a reevaluation on previous ethical codes and the invention of a whole new set of rules. As soon as the war ended, there were many calls for retribution. Nuremberg held a Doctor’s Trial to bring justice to the victims of war. Twenty-three men were tried. Of those, twenty were Nazis doctors. Twenty of the accused were charged with crimes such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and conspiracy. Of the 23 defendants, 7 were executed and another 7 were exonerated.
The trials led scientists and doctors to reevaluate their ethical standards. Nuremberg Code, created in August 1947. Since its creation, it has played a major role in defining ethics. It changed the rules for what could be done with human subjects. It outlined new laws governing psychological research and medical, pharmaceutical, and scientific research. The code includes ten guidelines for conducting medical and scientific tests on human beings. Guidelines include:
It is essential that the subject of the experiment gives their consent.
It should not be random or unneeded, but rather, it should yield results that are beneficial to society and cannot be obtained by any other method.
The experiment needs to be planned so that its results can justify its execution.
It is important to conduct the experiment in a way that avoids all unnecessary mental and physical suffering.
It is not acceptable to conduct an experiment if it can be predicted that there will be a death or a disabling injury. This may only apply in the case of experiments involving experimental physicians who are also their subjects.
The risk level should not exceed the value of the problem that the experiment is intended to solve.
To protect experimental subjects from injury, disability, and death, it is essential to provide them with adequate preparations.
Only persons with a scientific background should conduct the experiment. Those who are involved in or conduct the experiment should have the highest level of care and skill throughout all twenty-one stages.
The human subject is free to terminate the experiment at any stage if the state of his body or mind makes him believe that it’s impossible to continue.
The scientist must be prepared, at any time, to terminate an experiment if the evidence is sufficient to show that a continued experiment could result in harm, disability or death for the experimental subject.
The guidelines were used not only in research but also for medical ethics. Consent from patients and subject is essential. Nazi experiments made medical ethics and scientific integrity a major issue in the twenty-first century’s growing scientific community. In the early days of human experimentation there were no laws or rules, but it was important to treat humans with respect. The Nuremberg Code was not adopted by any country or institution, despite its importance and seriousness.
Ethics laws today reflect the past. Hypothermia And Resuscitation Of Hypothermia remains a popular and useful experiment. The Nazi high command conducted the experiments on men, simulating the conditions of the Eastern front. The cold caused thousands of German soldiers to die from hypothermia. Dr. Sigmund Rasch conducted the experiments at Birkenau Dachau Auschwitz. The freezing experiments consisted of two parts. They were designed to find out how long the body temperature takes to reach death, as well as how to safely restore them to life after a low body temp without harming them. They used two methods to freeze their victim. Either the person was placed in a tub of ice-water or they were left naked outside in temperatures below zero. It was found that the ice-water bath is the fastest way to lower the body’s temperature. For the experiment, they used young healthy Russians or Jews who were usually naked. They prepared them by inserting an insulated thermometer into their rectum. The probe was secured in place using a metal band that could expand and be adjusted so it opened inside the rectum. The victims then went into the vat and began to freeze. The experiment showed that victims lose consciousness and eventually die when their temperature reaches 25 C. Auschwitz’s harsh winters provided an ideal opportunity to test theories.
Joseph Mengele led many horrific experiments at Auschwitz, including those based in eugenics. Many of the Nazi’s bizarre theories about “Aryanness” were used to guide these experiments. Even the question of whether or not there are distinct races of humans is controversial. Modern scientists do not believe that the Aryan people exist. The Nazis decided, once they had Germany under their control in 1933 to make German society look the way they imagined it. The Sterilization Law of July 14, 1933 (also called the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring), was a big step toward that goal. The law allowed people with specific illnesses to be sterilized either consentingly or involuntarily, so as to stop the spread of hereditary disorders. Mengele was forced to change his experiments after he failed to find out if Aryans were better than other races.
After Dr. Mengele’s inconclusive experiments, he started his own twin project. He would collect twins from docks, trains, etc. and separate them from their mothers, taking them to a different place than where their parents were. He would send the parents off to a different concentration camp or kill them. He conducted many experiments to see if fraternal and identical twins could be connected. In Berlin, he took multiple blood samples for analysis and infected Jewish as well Gypsy fraternal and idential twins. Dr. Nyiszli said they worked also with tuberculous doubles. Professor Von Verschuer destroyed Dr. Mengele’s letters and reports to cover up the unethical and brutal treatment of prisoners.
We rely on eyewitness testimony as no original documentation has survived. They did not find a solution to their problem. Mengele’s experiments were painful, but he was trying to find out about photogenic eyes pigmentation and the hereditary nature of eye colors. Nazis wanted to know if the color and structure of the eye could be used as a way to determine a test subject’s “race”. Even though it seems impossible, Mengele’s theories continue to be researched and developed. His focus on twins manifested itself through studies concerning fertility drugs. Some women have given birth to quadruplets, octuplets and even octuplets. The genetic editing that he did in his past research has now allowed scientists to fix DNA defects of parents. Thanks to the advances in technology, scientists can now use robots to test on animals and humans instead of using human or animal testing.
Remember two things when you reflect on the research done by Joseph Mengele. Mengele regularly submitted reports to Nazi departments of medicine, but kept much of his research to himself. The developments remained unknown. The Nazis also provided almost no funding for the project Mengele was responsible for. The Nazis spent nearly all their development funds on military research.
Hypothermia was the key to enabling us to launch people into orbit. The entire purpose of this experiment was to see how well the human organism could deal with extreme cold. They wrote a survival guide for cold weather that is still used, almost in its original form, by NATO troops. It was deemed the most useful because it showed the Nazis the effects of cold on their soldiers. They also sought vaccines to combat diseases like Polio, which were prevalent in the concentration camps. They were also able to cure other diseases that were common in the camps such as Typhus, Tuberculosis and Tuberculosis. They conducted their experiment on the rapid depressurization and pressurization of human bodies for U-boat operation studies.
Humans may feel pressure when submerged at great depths. The doctors’ research gave them the answers they needed to swim up and out of a sunken underwater submarine. These experiments led to the death of many people and left others crippled or injured. But these deaths weren’t in vain. G-suits were developed as a result of many horrific experiments performed on Jews and Gypsies. The G-suit is used by pilots to protect them from the effects of increased gravitational force on their bodies when they dive at high speeds. This technology was introduced by the Germans and specifically Nazi medical doctors. It appears that only a few of the experiments they conducted on unwilling subjects to gain this information have proven useful for the technology and innovations we use today. These experiments would have prevented us from sending people into space or deep water. These researches are still being used to save many lives today.
The experiments that were carried out in the past came about as a result of spontaneous impulses, and not from a long-term study. It is not possible to find the original documentation of any other experiment. As a result, we are relying on the testimony of several eyewitnesses. These experiments included castration surgeries, organ removals and amputations. Experts from the fields of law, medicine and history met to discuss human experimentation. They only said that Mengele’s work was ineffective. Some of this research is accurate, but it does not follow the scientific methods used at that time. Some prisoners’ bodies were still being used long after they died. Pernkopf Atlas is one of those medical texts that have lasted for centuries. The color plates depicting the body are so accurate that they’ve never been improved. Pernkopf’s apprentices dissected over 1400 bodies. All of the dead prisoners were either political or Jewish prisoners. Many may have been executed solely for the purpose to create these drawings. Once the drawings are completed, artists sign them using tiny swastikas. SS runes were also added. However, in later editions these were removed. This Atlas was used to teach tens or thousands of medical students about the anatomy of humans.
It was a sloppy job, with a lack of record keeping and control. Even Dr. Mengele was sloppy with his work, with no attestable results, and with poor record-keeping. These were not the actions of a man who could experiment on disposable humans. They ignored bio-ethics rules, and their work became increasingly sloppy and sadistic. Bioethics can be defined as the study of various ethical issues that stem from advancements in medicine, biology, and technology. It wasn’t until the 1960s that bioethics became a recognized field of study, largely due to the concerns raised by the Nazi-era medical practices.
Nuremberg was the venue for the trial of the Nazi leaders who were tried after World War II. Twenty doctors were accused of war crimes and crimes committed against humanity. The trials revealed the results of human experiments carried out at Auschwitz Dachau Sachsenhausen Buchenwald. Modern medicine does not hesitate to condemn Nazi doctors, but it says nothing about continuing to use their medical research. Scholars discovered recently that credible literature includes numerous references to Nazi experimentation or the work of former SS physicians. The works that refer to the experiments do not usually contain disclaimers as to how the data were collected. In this case, there is a heated debate over whether the experiment results should be used. It is a common and simple solution to ask how much good it can bring to the users of it right now, then in the long run, justifying it because there are no negative consequences for those who have died. Someone with a little more knowledge would say there are indirect, subtle consequences for people who are directly related, maybe family members. The mental trauma that these people have experienced may overshadow the positive effects of the experiment. The data may be used by some to say that the experiments weren’t so bad. This could lead doctors into conducting their own unethical tests.
The morality of using these data is a complex issue. Even if the data has positive results, it’s important to recognize that the person who uses the data may minimize the work that was done to produce them. It’s hard to know when to allow the good to come out of bad. The answer, according to many people, lies in the ethical obligations that society has towards victims of wrongdoings. Even though the wrongs and abuses committed against the victims may be over, the issue is not resolved. Victims have a right to be recognized for what was done. That society took the matter seriously and punished perpetrators of wrongdoing is also owed to victims. Nuremberg trials of 1946-46 have fulfilled most of these obligations, as has the worldwide disgust for the terrible things done to people during World War II. However, the information used should come with a full disclosure of where it came from.
It’s impossible to imagine that Nazis ever advanced medicine. The ethical code forbids experiments that are done to “improve the greater good”. The data collected was from people who did not consent to the conditions, which are now considered torture. This data was collected with brutality, without any regard for basic ethical principles. Some say that the data should be used, but we must remember that the crime was one for which every country has laws. Life is worth more than money, no mater how short. Nazis did great work in chemistry. However, they didn’t make any progress with medicine. These were excuses to cruelly torture and betray the hostages.
