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The Role Of Medical Experiments In The Holocaust

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When most people think of the holocaust, they think of people being forced into concentration camps, they think of Jews and Nazis, they think of cruelty and death. But what most people don’t think of, is all the experiments that went on, all the medical experiments. The Nazi doctors wanted to find cures for medical conditions that most everyone wanted to cure, but these doctors went about finding the cure a little differently. They would take prisoners they had and experiment on them in ways of cruelty hard to even imagine. This will only be about one of the many experiments done, the freezing and hypothermia experiments. Doctor Sigmund Rascher was the one overseeing this particular experiment, he mainly conducted the experiments at Dachau (Holocaust on Trial http://www.pbs.org). He used over 300 hundred people in his experiments, all of them prisoners in the concentration camps and all of them young, strong Jews and/or Russians(Jewish Law Articles http://www.jlaw.com) . He had two parts to his experiment, how long it took to freeze to death, and what the best way to revive a person was (Remember.org http://remember.org/educate/medexp). To freeze a person, they were either left outside, naked, or submerged in a vat of freezing ice water, also naked (Remember.org http://remember.org/educate/medexp). The water was the fastest way of …show more content…

Even now, just reading about it happening makes it hard to believe these were actually people being put through these tortuous events. Maybe that made it easier for Dr. Rascher, or maybe he didn’t care in the first place. Either way, over 80 people died in this one experiment alone (Holocaust on Trial http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/holocaust/experiside.html)
. Who knows how many others died in other experiments. How many were permanently damaged or changed in some way. Whose lives were destroyed. And many of the experimenters felt no remorse

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