Nazi human experimentation

Nazi Germany conducted medical experiments on prisoners in its concentration camps mainly between 1942 and 1945. There were 15,754 documented victims, of various nationalities and ages, although the true number is believed to be more. About a quarter of documented victims were killed and survivors generally experienced severe permanent injuries. At Auschwitz and other camps, under the direction of Eduard Wirths, selected inmates were subjected to various experiments that were designed to help German military personnel in combat situations, develop new weapons, aid in the recovery of military personnel who had been injured, and to advance Nazi racial ideology and eugenics, including the twin experiments of Josef Mengele. Aribert Heim conducted similar medical experiments at Mauthausen. After the war, these crimes were tried at what became known as the Doctors' Trial, and revulsion at the abuses led to the development of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics. Some Nazi physicians in the Doctors' Trial argued that military necessity justified their experiments, or compared their victims to collateral damage from Allied bombings.

Experiments The table of contents of a document from the subsequent Nuremberg trials prosecution includes titles of the sections that document medical experiments revolving around food, seawater, epidemic jaundice, sulfanilamide, blood coagulation and phlegmon. According to the indictments at the subsequent Nuremberg Trials, these experiments included the following:

Blood coagulation experiments Sigmund Rascher experimented with the effects of Polygal, a substance made from beet and apple pectin, which aided blood clotting. He predicted that the preventive use of Polygal tablets would reduce bleeding from surgery or gunshot wounds sustained during combat. Subjects were given a Polygal tablet, shot through the neck or chest, or had their limbs amputated without anesthesia. Rascher published an article on his experience of using Polygal, without detailing the nature of the human trials, and set up a company staffed by prisoners to manufacture the substance. Bruno Weber was the head of the Hygienic Institution at Block 10 in Auschwitz and injected his subjects with blood types that differed from their own. This caused the blood cells to congeal, and the blood was studied. When the Nazis removed blood from someone, they often entered a major artery, causing the subject to die of major blood loss.

Bone, muscle, and nerve transplantation experiments From about September 1942 to about December 1943, experiments were conducted at the Ravensbrück concentration camp for the benefit of the German Armed Forces, to study bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration, and bone transplantation from one person to another. In these experiments, subjects had their bones, muscles and nerves removed without anesthesia. As a result of these operations, many victims suffered intense agony, mutilation, and permanent disability. On 12 August 1946, a survivor named Jadwiga Kamińska gave a deposition about her time at Ravensbrück concentration camp, describing how she was operated on twice. Both operations involved one of her legs and although she never describes herself as having any knowledge as to what exactly the procedure was, she explained that both times she was in extreme pain and developed a fever post-surgery but was given little to no aftercare. Kamińska describes being told that she had been operated on simply because she was a "young girl and a Polish patriot". She describes how her leg oozed pus for months after the operations. Prisoners were also experimented on by having their bone marrow injected with bacteria to study the effectiveness of new drugs being developed for use in the battlefields. Those who survived remained permanently disfigured.

Freezing experiments In 1941, the Luftwaffe conducted experiments with the intent of discovering means to prevent and treat hypothermia. There were 360 to 400 experiments and 280 to 300 victims, indicating that some victims suffered more than one experiment.

Another study placed prisoners naked in the open air for several hours with temperatures as low as −6 °C (21 °F). Besides studying the physical effects of cold exposure, the experimenters also assessed different methods of rewarming survivors. "One assistant later testified that some victims were thrown into boiling water for rewarming." Beginning in August 1942, at the Dachau camp, prisoners were forced to sit in tanks of freezing water for up to three hours. After subjects were frozen, they then underwent different methods for rewarming. Many subjects died in this process. Others were also forced to stand naked outside in below freezing temperatures, with many screaming in pain as their bodies froze. In a letter from 10 September 1942, Rascher describes an experiment on intense cooling performed in Dachau where people were dressed in fighter pilot uniforms and submerged in freezing water. Rascher had some of the victims completely underwater and others only submerged up to the head. The freezing and hypothermia experiments were conducted for the Nazi high command to simulate the conditions the armies suffered on the Eastern Front, as the German forces were ill-prepared for the cold weather they encountered. Many experiments were conducted on captured Soviet troops; the Nazis wondered whether their genetics gave them superior resistance to cold. The principal locales were Dachau and Auschwitz. Sigmund Rascher, an SS doctor based at Dachau, reported directly to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and publicised the results of his freezing experiments at the 1942 medical conference entitled "Medical Problems Arising from Sea and Winter". Himmler suggested that the victims could be warmed by forcing them to engage in sexual contact with other victims. An example included how a hypothermic victim was placed between two naked Romani women.

High altitude experiments

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.