...Introduction: This project aims to examine impacts of the Nazi medical experiments on scientific knowledge and practices. The Holocaust was a genocide perpetuated in Nazi Germany wherein Adolf Hitler and his collaborators were responsible for the deaths more than 15 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews [1]. The scientific experiments performed on prisoners in German concentration camps were ruthless crimes committed under the name of medical research. In this project, my main objective is to study the various types of experiments carried out, the intent behind them, their validity and usage in the current research scenario and the ethical controversies scientists dealing with those data struggle with. I plan to obtain the abovementioned...
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...World War II the Third Reich doctors did not adhere to any type of Morale code. The Nazi party believed that the Aryan race were superior to all other races Although this belief was not excepted by all Germans. A leading German scientist spoke out against the Nazi Party's ideals " The doctors are turning Germany into an Infernal combination of a lunatic asylum and a charnel house" (Rawlinson) They hired doctors like Josef Mengele who was called the “ Angel of death” ( Josef Mengele ) to perform...
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...Despite the unethical nature and questionable scientific validity of the nazi medical experiments, the results should still be accessible for scientific gain. During the Holocaust the medical experiments that were conducted were unethical. One reason being is that, the scientists hired to conduct the various medical experiments made an oath in the beginning of their career. This was called the Hippocratic oath, arguably the most important parts of the medical profession. At the time of graduation, doctors recite this oath as a promise of what they will give back to the practice of medicine. One particular part of the oath that the doctors have to recite is that “[they] will use treatment to help the sick accordingly to [their] ability and judgement, but never with a view to injury or wrongdoing” (The Hippocratic 1). By conducting horrific experiments such as internal irrigation where “the frozen victim would have water heated to a near blistering temperature forcefully irrigated into the stomach, bladder, and intestines” (Medical 1), the doctors violated the trust placed in them by the medical profession and humanity, making their data unethical. Also, the people chosen to be test subjects were treated no more than objects at the doctor’s disposal. Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor, states that her among thousands of others were “being treated like human guinea pigs” (I was 1). The Nazis dehumanized them by constantly treating like animals. In a different interview Eva Kor...
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...water? Most of the Holocaust victims who were test subjects in the Nazi medical experiments endured those things. According to Baruch C. Cohen’s “The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments,” during the Nuremberg trials after World War II, twenty doctors were convicted and charged with “War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity...revealed evidence of sadistic human experiments conducted at the Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps” (15). The Nuremberg trials brought fourth the attention to the ethics of the doctors while conducting these experiments. Ethics was a big issue, because there was and is clearly a fine line between research and the well being of a person. Evidently the Nazi doctors did not find what they were doing to be unethical, however the courts obviously disagreed. During the trials many of the Nazi doctors referred to there experiments as purely “research.” This had many scientists and other doctors question whether or not the “research” could still be used after the fact. After World War II, the use of the data and research found from the Nazi’s medical experiments is ethical, even though the process to obtain the data and research was unethical. This idea led to a lot of controversy on whether or not the data was unethical or ethical due to the Nazis breaking the ethics code of medicine. After the triumph of Hitler in 1933 the Nazi’s formed three medical programs in order to have “racial cleansing” (Proctor 36-38). From...
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...Patients undergoing experimentation in Nazi concentration camps suffered cruel and immoral treatment. The series of medical experiments took place in the early 1940’s; during WWII and the Holocaust. In these experiments patients suffered indescribable pain. Typically the experiments resulted in death, trauma, disfiguration and permanent disability. There was as, many as thirty different kinds of tests including: the freezing, the high altitude and the hemorrhage experiments. The Nazi physicians did not care about the patients undergoing tests, they only cared about getting new information to improve the German military. Consent was never given for any of the patients, all patients were forced into doing the inhumane tests created by the Nazis’s....
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...Unethical medical business research has occurred throughout time, and is particularly punctuated by the experiments conducted by at least 23 Nazi physicians on Jews, political prisoners, and the physically and mentally handicapped during World War II. Unethical medical procedures were performed without the knowledge, consent, or protection of the subjects (University of Phoenix, 2011, Week One Reading). Advancement in medicine requires testing on humans and animals; however, medical research is considered unethical if the testing is performed against the will of the subjects. During World War II, Nazi doctors performed up to 30 different experiments on concentration camp prisoners that caused the victims intense pain, mutilation, permanent disability, and at worst, death (Tyson, 2000). Many of the experiments were conducted to improve the performance of the German military personnel, to multiply the Aryan race, and to develop vaccines for diseases. Some of the experiments included studying the effects of high altitude on the brain, monitoring bodily reactions to freezing temperatures, infecting victims with bacteria or gas gangrene in inflicted battlefield-type wounds, and injecting poisons. Others included amputation to attempt bone, muscle, and joint transplantation, sterilization, and artificial insemination (Tyson, 2000). The sum of concentration camp victims of the experiments by the Nazi scientists is unknown. The doctors performed the horrific experiments on male...
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...Nazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners, largely Jews from across Europe, but also Romanie and so fourth, Soviet Prisoners of war and disabled Germans, by Nazi Germany in its concentration camps mainly in the early 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust. Nazi doctors and their assistants forced prisoners into participating they did not willingly volunteer and consent was not given for the experiments. Typically, the experiments resulted in death, trauma, disfigurement or permanent disability or sever chemical burns. these were considered examples of medical torture. At Auschwitz and other camps, under the direction of Eduard Wirths,he would select and the selected inmates were subjected...
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...“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.” This is a quote from Josef Mengele, a doctor who performed medical experiments during the Holocaust. When the true extent of the Holocaust was found out many people didn't want to believe that it was true, especially the medical experiments. Even today, citizens don’t truly know what these “medical procedures” entailed. The Nazi medical experiments were one of the worst monstrosities that took place during the Holocaust. The National Socialist German Workers' Party medical experiments were classified in three different groups; each one to help the Nazis win World War II. The first category was “War Efforts”. Many German soldiers would die from hypothermia, altitude sickness,...
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...Even 70 years after the events, the atrocities committed by physicians in Nazi Germany during Hitler’s Third Reich and the influences it has made on bioethics today are still widely debated. Who were these doctors and did they view what they were doing as wrong, or did they simply view themselves as healers for what they considered the superior race? To understand how to react to such a ruthless period of time, one must first understand who these alleged physicians were and attempt to analyze the psyche and supposed justification as “medical research”. While society today can agree that the actions relating to medical treatment and human experimentation were inexcusable, some people believe it is ethical for medical researchers to utilize data...
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...decisions made at the Nuremberg trials. Primary sources as the partial transcript of the Doctor’s trial were used to evaluate the contribution of the verdicts made at the trials to human rights. Documents will be analyzed in regards to their origin, purpose, value, and limitations in order to properly evaluate the evidence. B. Summary of Evidence On December 9, 1946, an American military tribunal opened criminal proceedings against twenty-three leading German physicians and administrators for their willing participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Officially called United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al, the trail was the first of twelve similar proceeding against Nazi doctors held by the United States following World War II. During the reign of the Third Reich, Nazi physicians planned and enacted the “Euthanasia” Program – the systematic killing of those they...
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...Dachau Concentration Camp Established on March 22 by Heinrich Himmler, Dachau was first of the Nazi concentration camps to open in Germany, and was in operation the longest from 1933 to 1945; all twelve years of the Nazi regime. Dachau is located on the grounds of an abandoned World War I munitions factory. The first buildings served as the main camp until 1937, when prisoners were forced to expand the camp and demolish the original buildings. The new camp, completed in mid 1938, included 32 barracks and was designed to hold 6,000 prisoners; however, the camp population was usually over that number electrified fences were installed and seven watchtowers were placed around the camp (20th Century History 19) . At the entrance of Dachau was an iron gate with the infamous phrase, "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Will Make You Free”). The first commandant of Dachau, Hilmar Wäckerle, was replaced in June 1933 after being charged with murder of a prisoner. Although Wäckerle’s conviction was overruled by Hitler, who stated that Dachau and all other concentration camps were not to be subjected to German law, Heinrich Himmler wanted to bring in new leadership for the camp. Dachau’s second commandant, Theodor Eicke, established a set of regulations for daily operations in Dachau that would soon become the model for all Nazi concentration camps. A variety of SS officers trained under Eicke, most notably future commandant of the Auschwitz camp system...
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...information on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the results were quite slim. Most of the results involved syllabi for college classes or websites much like our own that were prepared for a class. The website that I reviewed is from the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics, which was actually created from President Clinton’s apology and ideas for improvement of racial relations and medical testing. The webpage’s main purpose is to educate the public about the atrocities that were performed on African-Americans in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and to help prevent an event like this from ever happening again The Tuskegee Syphilis Study by Fred D. Gray examines a medical study that occurred in Tuskegee, Alabama which dealt with monitoring African-American subjects discover the effects of untreated syphilis. The main goal of the study was to seek out African-American males in the second stage of syphilis, and then to sporadically perform exams on these men to determine the effects that syphilis had on their bodies. The test subjects were told that they were receiving medical treatment...
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...The history of research ethics begins with the tragic history of research abuse by Nazi doctors during World War II. A total of sixteen German physicians practiced unethical medical experiments on Jews, gypsies, and political prisoners. These experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners were done without their consent. Unethical medical experimentation carried out during the Third Reich may be divided into three categories. The first category consists of experiments aimed at facilitating the survival of Axis military personnel. In Dachau, physicians from the German air force and from the German Experimental Institution for Aviation conducted high-altitude experiments, using a low-pressure chamber, to determine the maximum altitude from which crews of damaged aircraft could parachute to safety. Scientists there carried out so-called freezing experiments using prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia. They also used prisoners to test various methods of making seawater drinkable. The second category of experimentation aimed at developing and testing pharmaceuticals and treatment methods for injuries and illnesses which German military and occupation personnel encountered in the field. At the German concentration camps of Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Natzweiler, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme, scientists tested immunization compounds and sera for the prevention and treatment of contagious diseases, including malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow...
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...Have you ever wondered what work, experiments, and torturous deaths of Jews, went on inside the Auschwitz camp? Auschwitz was a death camp that forced Jews into manual labour, where they were viciously murdered, and where Nazis performed cruel medical experiments. The prisoners, at Auschwitz, were forced into many jobs consisting in physical labour. They were working for an average of 11 hours a day, with hardly any breaks to rest. The employment that was required of them varied from demolishing houses, making roads, and the hardest of all, clearing marsh land. This job was especially hard because there was the danger of sinking down and never returning. Many of the other prisoners had to pull one another out of the marsh. The Nazis murdered...
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...The most groundbreaking medical discoveries on this earth have been found in the past several decades. However, not all of these discoveries were obtained though good judgement. Many of these instances occurred during World War II, when humans were wrongfully used as science experiments. These terrifying cases did not occur in just one place, but all across the globe. Unit 731, North Korean experimentation, illegal bomb testing and German experimentation of people is just a few of the monstrosities that happened during this time period. What is more surprising than the experiments is the outcomes for these patients, criminals, and overall effect on the world. For a period of eight years, during the second Sino-Japanese war, a large building known as Unit 731 was converted into a chemical and biological research and development building. Run by commander Shiro Ishii, this place was filled with morbid science experiments, all very unique from one another. Vivisections done on live people were fairly common, as well as amputations which would later be reassembled to other parts of the body. Humans became living test cases for...
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