Pros And Cons Of Nazi Medical Experiments

During World War II, German Physicians conducted freezing experiments on prisoners which resulted in the deaths of 80 to 100 inmates.(Tyson) Thousands of prisoners were killed during the Holocaust due to experiments performed without their consent. In the article “Mein Data: Did any useful” By Brian Palmer, there are numerous examples on why the experiments were useless and unnecessary. In the article “Nazi Medical Experiments” by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum discusses the horrific experiments Dr. Josef Mengele performed on children and on people with disabilities. According to “Nazi Medical Experiments: Background and Overview” by Jewish Virtual Library, Dr. Horst Schumann performed experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz and
Little concentration camp doctors conducted experiments for testing “vaccines, antibiotics, fertility, transplantation, and eugenics.”(Palmer) The tests were not relevant to the public. Most were orchestrated for the benefit of private groups: military, pilots, etc. It did very little to aid the citizens of Germany. The tests could have been performed on smaller groups of people, however they used hundreds as test subjects for each experiment. Most of the tests were “useless, scientifically unsound, or duplicative.”(Palmer) They did not have to use such a high number of prisoners to carry them out. The results were obvious, too. They were “predictable, like the fact that imprisoned Gypsies could not survive on salt water alone for 12 days.”(Palmer) Most of these experiments were completely irrelevant and was solely carried out to torture the prisoners. Mengele orchestrated an experiment to increase the birth rate among Aryans, which were “utter failures” because testing mass sterilization “would be of no use to modern doctors if it ever did produce substantive data.”(Palmer) These experiments were useless and could have been avoided. The physician’s would have been able to use a different method which does not involve people. Although these experiments were pointless, some believe that they were
They believed that performing different types of crucial experiments on the victims would be good for the society as a whole. For them, nothing seemed wrong about human testing. Similar to the Nazis, most of the people argue that “their actions could not be considered illegal”.(Steinberg) Since, the Nuremberg Law was not created during the war, they considered doing experiments on prisoners to be right. However, as a human being they should have thought about the rights of other humans. In my opinion, every people in the world has the right to decide whether they want to be the subject of the experiments. The Nazi doctors supported their medical experiments during wartime. They had a feeling that they were working to improve the health of people in the world. During world war (Ⅱ), the doctors tested vaccines on many people that “saved millions of lives”. (Steinberg) However, they only focused on the lives of sick people. They did not consider the patients “as an individual” rather they were finding a solution. (Steinberg) When taking these kind of actions, people need to respect the opinions of all the subjects of the experiments. Society will not be able to reach the level of perfection, until people learn to treat each individual equally. Yet, this was not the case at the time of the war that took lives of many innocent people for solutions to a few problems. Although, people believe