Medical Experiments of the Holocaust Essay

The Holocaust was a terrible event that will never be forgotten. One of the worst events that happened was the experiments done on Jews. The experiments done on Jews during the Holocaust, such as freezing experiments, genetic experiments, and experiments on organs, were inhumane and unjustifiable.

In one series of tests, victims were put in large tubs of ice to lower their temperatures. Some victims were clothed, others not, some soaked for a long time, others a short time. Another series of tests put subjects naked in the outdoors. During both series, many subjects developed extreme rigor. The doctors measured changes in the victim's’ heart rate, body temperature, muscle reflexes, and other factors. If body temperature fell below 79.7 degrees Fahrenheit, doctors would begin to rewarm the body. Body rewarming techniques included using blankets, heat lamps, andin some cases, bodies of women who were forced to copulate with the

It is interesting to note that Nazis were cunning enough to choose locations that were far from the public eye because they probably knew to a certain degree that although the Nazi party had massive support, that could all go out the window if the German people found out cruel experiments and executions being conducted. Another thing to note is that it seems as though mentally disabled Germans were the guinea pigs for how the Nazis would experiment on and execute the Jews later on. Doctors weren't really needed at these institutions, they were only really there to maintain the illusion of a scientific and medical program. However they did have another task, which was to come up with reasons for the cause of their patients' deaths. They would send out letters to victims' families. It seems these Nazi doctors were very methodical in order to cover up what they were doing but it would turnout that weren't as clever as they thought they were. The families of the victims would notice inconsistencies with the official cause of death and later on public protests would cause Hitler to order the gas chambers be dismantled in August

The freezing and hypothermia experiments were tested upon males to test the conditions of the warriors suffered out in the fields. Tons of German soldiers died of freezing temperatures or were paralyzed by cold injuries. They only used healthy men in these experiments, though, because the week men would not be equal to the soldiers.

Many claim that doctors were only advancing science, and others claim the horrid acts that were committed were done because of the hatred towards the Jewish people. Regardless of which fact is inevitably true, both situations caused cruel and inhuman treatment to the Jews, and ultimately led to their deaths at the camps. A civilian doctor named Carl Clauberg was famous for his sterilization experiments. The procedure involved injections to the cervix to destroy the fallopian tubes, and then often the victims were gassed and left for dead (Winik 9). When the Jews arrived on transports, Nazi doctors immediately determined who would be gassed and who would go to a work camp (Winik 8). In Auschwitz, Nazi doctors presided over the murder of most of the one million victims of that camp. “Doctors consulted actively on how best to keep selections running smoothly, on how many people to permit to remain alive to fill the slave labor requirements” … “and on how to burn the enormous numbers of bodies that strained the facilities of the crematoria (Gutman 303). In the book, “Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp,” Yisrael Gutman offers a summary of the events that took place at Auschwitz:

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.

The patients were usually placed under sun lamps and the heat was so much that it would burn their skin; one young homosexual victim cooled over and over again and then revived with the lamps until he was pouring with sweat; he soon died one evening after continuous test sessions.

Disease was one of the effect that affected the Jews in the holocaust. “One of the disease that caused the Jews to get sick was typhus” (“Typhus”). That shows how the Jews were living in poor conditions which caused people to get ill. “There are three different types of Typhus; epidemic/louse-borne typhus caused by rickettsia prowazekii ,murine typhus caused by rickettsia typhi and scrub typhus caused by Orientia tsutsugamushi”(Typhus) . In Auschwitz II Birkenau camp , there was no running water and unsanitary equipment which caused the spread of diseases”(Auschwitz:The Camp of Death).This shows how the Jews did not get clean water to drink and what they drink and eat were contaminated and infected. The contaminated water made more jews infected

The Holocaust was a terrifying and horrific feat in our worlds past as no one seemed to want to help the Jews escape there mass onslaught led on by the Nazi forces throughout WWII. They were rounded up like animals and treated as slaves going to camp after camp waiting their turn in the gas chamber. Did anyone know what was happening? Did people try to escape? These are just some of the many questions brought up by skeptics and some historians.

The Holocaust was an terrible event that happened from 1933 to 1945. Approximately eleven million people were killed by the Nazis. A genocidal policy was passed by Adolf Hitler after he became the leader of Germany in 1933. His goal was to get rid of all the Jews in Europe and those who are considered in his "undesirable" list. As countries such as Italy, Japan, and Austria units with Germany and became the Axis Powers, they started invading and taking over other countries around them in Europe. I believe there are reasons that can explain why we still study about the Holocaust today.

     Throughout history the Jewish people have been scapegoats; whenever something was not going right they were the ones to blame. From Biblical times through to the Shakespearean Era, all the way to the Middle East Crisis and the creation of Israel, the Jews have been persecuted and blamed for the problems of the world. The most horrifying account of Jewish persecution is the holocaust, which took place in Europe from 1933 to 1945 when Adolf Hitler tried to eliminate all the people that he thought were inferior to the Germans, namely the Jews, because he wanted a pure Aryan State.

The doctors who examined the incoming prisoners and sorted them also worked in these hospitals performing medical research on the ill. This medical research was mostly placing the Jewish prisoners in ice water baths then monitoring them until they died. This research was mostly used to prevent hypothermia if German Pilots ever ended up being stranded in the ocean. Some of the experiments performed by doctors often had no research purpose at all, such as experiments involving eye color changing using chemical droppers and the surgical sewing of children together to create siamese twins. Auschwitz was the largest death camp with 20,000 Jews being killed a day and 39 subcamps.

The Holocaust was one of the twentieth century's greatest tragedies that were made possible by anti-Semitism, the indifference of other nations, isolationism politics, and outright fear.

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Though use of the term itself

The holocaust was first discovered in the year 1941. The Soviet army was marching towards Lubin in Poland, and they came across the Majdanek concentration camp. The prisoners of the camp had already been herded off on a death march. In the year 1944, the SS started evacuating the Natzweiler-Struthof Camp, heading it’s prisoners on a death march resulting in about 2,000 deaths. There was another death march during the year of 1945, from Auschwitz camp, where about 15,000 prisoners died.