Doctors In The Holocaust

When one looks through the history of the last century, many great atrocities can come to mind. However, the one that is the most common is that of the Holocaust during World War II. People often wonder how something like this could have been allowed to happen. These same people wonder this without realizing that something similar has happened, right within their own shores. Not only this, but they do not realize how previously close we could become to having this happen again.

Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eye­wit­ness Account by Dr. Mik­lós Nyis­zlI is a non-fiction mem­oir of a Jew­ish Hun­gar­ian med­ical doc­tor who per­formed alongside Dr. Josef Mengele in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz from 1944-45 to conduct “research” on Jews. This book is a lot to swallow and doesn’t beat around the bush, it’s straight to the point.

Throughout the course of humanity, we have experienced terrible transgressions in our society. Although they took place sixty-one years apart, similar horrific events from the Holocaust (1933-1945) and the Rwandan Genocide (1994) occurred. In Night, the Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state sponsored persecution and murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis believed they were “racially superior” so they killed the Jews because they were deemed “inferior” and needed to be eliminated.

She describes how Nazi Doctors would conduct horrendous experiments on Jews, such as dissecting living people, without receiving any consent from them. She then explains that the Nuremberg code was later established to prevent such inhumane experiments. Since the code didn’t apply in America, researches like Southam and Mandel continued their experiments without informed consent. However, other doctors still found this to be immoral, and refused to participate in performing these experiments finding that, “Injecting cancer cells into a person without consent was a clear violation of basic human rights and Nuremberg code” (Skloot 132). Skloot compares the practice of American doctors to the inhumane experiments conducted on the Jews in Germany to have the readers see similarity between the immoral methods. Both practices did not receive consent from their patients. She uses research to find factual evidence about practices without consent that were made illegal in another country. By comparing the experiments conducted by American doctors to an extreme event, she leads the reader to develop the opinion that all practices without the consent of the patient are unjust. She includes the opinions of medical professionals to express their concern for these methods to the readers. A doctor from that time would have the greatest insight on the experiments that were being conducted and the practicality of them. The reader then sees it as logical that conducting potentially dangerous experiments without any consent is a violation of human rights.

“I will remember that there is an art to medicine as well as a science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife and the chemist’s drug.” (Louis Lasagna). However, the doctors of the holocaust didn’t care, and used the victims as guinea pigs for the results. The medical experiments performed during the Holocaust had horrific outcomes for those experimented upon.

In the last few years, some publications have appeared that treats one group or another, yet the state of our knowledge about the perpetrators remains incomplete. We know little about many of the institutions of killing, little about many aspects of the perpetration of the genocide, and still less about the perpetrators themselves. As a consequence, popular and scholarly myths and misconceptions about the perpetrators abound, including the following. It is commonly believed that the Germans slaughtered Jews by and large in the gas chambers, and that without gas chambers, modern means of transportation, and efficient bureaucracies, the Germans would have been unable to kill millions of Jews. The belief persists that somehow only technology made horror on this scale possible. It is generally believed that gas chambers, because of their efficiency, were a necessary instrument for the genocidal slaughter, and that the Germans chose to construct the gas chambers in the first place because they needed more efficient means of killing the Jews. It has been generally believed that the perpetrators were primarily, overwhelmingly SS men, the most devoted and brutal Nazis. It has been held that had a German refused to kill Jews, then he himself would have been killed, sent to a concentration camp, or severely punished. All of these views, views that fundamentally shape people's understanding of the Holocaust, have been believed as though they were

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.

When looking at the holocaust, it is widely known the devastation and pain that was caused by the Nazis; however when inspecting the holocaust on a deeper level, it is evident that the Jews were exposed to unimaginable treatment and experimentation often overlooked in history discussions. When looking at “Night”, Elie Wiesel was helped by the doctors in the camp when his foot was severely infected; although this is not the experience he had, many Jews were mistreated and even killed by the doctors. Many Nazi doctors that were assigned to Jewish patients were later found to have exposed the patients to horrific medical experiments and unnecessary treatments that commonly led to their death.

The doctors of the holocaust were some of the most brutal humans known to man. These doctors performed a wide range of experiments sometimes there was no point to them but to just kill innocent humans. Which is why the doctors will always be remembered for their brutal experiments, the reasons behind them, the results of those experiments, and the consequences they faced after the holocaust.

Doctors and Experiments of the Holocaust 6 million Jews, 2.7 million Soviets, 1 million Poles, half a million Gypsies, and a quarter of a million disabled and innocent people were all murdered and killed during the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a terrible and awful time in history, and often times we try to push it away and forget about all the innocent people that were killed. The doctors such as Josef Mengele and the experiments that he performed on concentration camp prisoners and kids were a big part of the Holocaust, and many of these people and children were tortured, dissected, and killed. Dr. Josef Mengele was known as the cruelest and evil doctor during the Holocaust. He was oftentimes referred to as the “Angel of Death.”

The horrific experiments of Dr. Mengele demonstrate the cruelty of the Nazi’s during the holocaust. Most of the world today knows of Dr. Mengele of having been the doctor of death for being responsible for killing more than 6 million Jews.

Elie Wiesel said, “for the dead and the living, we must bear witness” (citation). During the Holocaust, the Jews were treated terribly. Even though they were mistreated, and beaten several times a day, they still received food and water in small amounts. One of the main ambitions of Germans was to find ways to improve their performance in war, and to make their lives easier and more efficient altogether. The Nazi doctors found the most inhumane ways to do everything they did. Harsh treatment of the Jewish people existed through excessive forced labor, horrible living conditions, and many different kinds of medical

Understanding the events of the Holocaust requires consideration of numerous socio-political and economic factors in interwar and WW2 Europe. One particularly important area of exploration is the role played by physicians working for the Reich. Examining their behavior, justifications for murder, and relationship to the state provides insight into the moral and ethical foundations of the society which allowed a genocide that ended in the death of millions. In the context of the concentration camps they abandoned both their humanity and their ethics as doctors to become murderers and torturers for state science. Multiple factors, including ideology, socialization, and psychological adaption allowed Nazi doctors to throw away the fact that

Conditions of crisis and instability within a country or situation render it impossible for human rights to flourish. In The Nazi Doctors, Lifton explores the psychology of the doctors during the Nazi regime who were able to commit atrocities such as sterilization, human experimentation, and mass murder. Throughout the book, Lifton demonstrates how in order to commit violence, there is no

The average person’s understanding of the Holocaust is the persecution and mass murder of Jews by the Nazi’s, most are unaware that the people behind the atrocities of the Holocaust came from all over Europe and a wide variety of backgrounds. Art Spiegelman’s Maus: a Survivor’s Tale, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution, and Jan Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedbwabne, Poland, all provides a different perspective on how ordinary people felt about their experiences in the Holocaust both perpetrators and victims.