# Nazi Experiments (Essay)



## faded (Jun 10, 2004)

Hey guys, this is an essay that I wrote for my language arts class (10th grade).

                   The Cry for the Doctor that Ended with Death:
   Medical Experimentation on Concentration Camp Inmates During WWII

During the Holocaust, over 7,000 of those persecuted were murdered because doctors experimented on them and eventually killed them. This fact is something that we often do not think about when we think of the Holocaust. We think about the gas chambers, the crematoriums, and the awful tasks that the slave-like prisoners had to complete every day in order to live to see the next. With all of that on our mind, medical experiments just seem to slip past our train of thought. It may be because we have not been taught about the gruesome tests that inmates went through or it is that we don’t want to dwell on the thought that humans could be that cruel and act so…inhuman. The fact of the matter is that they did and it is unforgivable. The things of the past can not be changed, no matter how hard someone tries, and whether those Nazi doctors are still alive today or not, they can never ask for forgiveness from the ones they experimented on and killed. These experiments were cruel, unethical, and the doctors who performed them were most definitely a disgrace to all mankind.

Thinking of medical experiments, what automatically comes to mind are subjects willingly donating themselves to doctors so that medical advancements can be made. This is what should of happened during WWII, but it didn’t. The facts say that people were killed, but it is not that simple. The people that went through those horrifying experiments must have felt themselves being ripped from all they ever knew and thrown into a filthy barrack. They find themselves being taken from there also and tested on by an evil doctor for no obvious reason. In a high altitude chamber, in a tub of nearly freezing water, or with poisons sprinting through their veins with death as the only finish line, they must have been in excruciating pain with nothing to remedy it and nobody willing to disobey orders and comfort them. They must have gotten to the point that they wished for death so they didn’t have to endure that pain any longer than necessary. That kind of pain had to be unbearable and the fact that doctors whom they had probably at one time trusted could have issued such torture without even a thought is not only cruel, but also must have made people lose some of their faith in the human race.

One doctor that made many women lose their faith in mankind is Carl Clauberg. To him, experimenting oh people was like a sport. He was once asked by Professor Himmler how many women he could sterilize in one day. He injected chemicals into the women’s womb during normal gynecological examinations. Thousands of women were sterilized this way. This was not only painful, but it ruined the woman’s reproductive organs. Clauberg easily answered Professor Himmler’s question, stating he could sterilize 1,000 women a day as long as he had a staff of ten assistants.What is most disgusting though, is not the fact that Clauberg didn’t seem to care whether or not the patients were in immense anguish, it was that he had thrown away all the past moral principles and moral values that doctors before him had tried so hard to maintain.

It is heinous to kill six million people, but what is more atrocious is the way some of them were killed. Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor, was considered one of the most sadistic of all the Nazi doctors during WWII. Josef Mengele had a strange obsession with twins and would keep them separate from all of the others. He tried numerous processes on them to see if he could find differences in their structure. Once, he tried to change the eye color of a pair of twins by injecting poison into their eyes, killed another pair of twins so he could do an autopsy on them, and even tried to create artificial Siamese twins by sewing the veins of their hands together. This not only was unsuccessful, but it caused the hands of the twins to become severely infected. He claimed he was doing all of these tests to add knowledge and insight to the medical world, but no advancements were made, the only thing that resulted from his numerous trial and error processes were many people either dead or suffering.

Of all the experiments dealt upon unsuspecting prisoners, there is one category that still stands as the most horrific. This category is racial experiments. These were not only evil because of the reason they were done, but is also evil because of what was done to the patients to try to prove that they were inferior and the Aryan race was superior. This set a bad tone for the doctors of the future; those doctors should have been people that the inmates could have trusted when they were in a time of need. Those Nazi doctors took them in and claimed to be helping them, when in reality they were doing meaningless tests that would leave them dead or disfigured for life. Inmates found that they could not trust anyone, not doctors, not their fellow inmates. It was them against the world, and they knew they couldn’t win by themselves. This wasn’t just unethical of the doctors, it was dishonorable. When people think of doctors, lawyers, and people in sophisticated job fields, they think of people that will stand beside them until the job is done, not leave them stranded, they think of someone they can rely on, but the doctors of WWII threw that reliance away.

Before the Holocaust, and even today, people search and search for the right doctor. A doctor whom they know will cure their ailments and help them to become better. They usually find one and in a couple of days they are rejuvenated and back to normal. This all changed during the Holocaust when Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, handicaps, Catholics, and other non-Aryans had all of their rights stripped away from them and no longer had the choice to choose which doctor they went to or whether they went home better or not. Some didn’t come home at all. They were taken to a land that was in many ways like an evil carnival. The carousel went round and round every day with them working endlessly at the same thing day after day. Guards of the concentration camps were like unpredictable trapeze artists. They never knew whether they would stay on the tight rope or whether they would come crashing down upon them like an anvil for any trivial thing they did wrong. Lastly, the doctors were like clowns, the audience never knew if they wanted to laugh during the show or cry because all they wanted was for the charade to end so they could go home. These doctors were indeed clowns, but not funny ones, they were evil ones. They were a shame to all the doctors in the future. They took lives as easy as breathing, something we don’t even think about because it comes naturally. Their minds were at rest during the whole procedure, which is the most shameful part of the whole thing. They didn’t even feel a pang of guilt killing people; they took joy in it. They were proud to show that they were the “greatest” and had the thought that they would come to rule the earth. As a Christian, it is believed that all are created equal and that we are all kin. For someone to go and kill another person is like killing a brother; you couldn’t live with yourself. The fact that WWII doctors lived with themselves and delighted in killing others is a humiliation.

During WWII many things went on that were scandalous. All the acts committed were wicked, but something about experimenting on people against their will just to prove a racial theory seems more evil than the other atrocities of the Holocaust. It seems as if the person had to go through more unnecessary pain before they died. If a part of time could be erased, the Holocaust would probably be that time and it is probably often wondered what the world would be like if the Holocaust had not happened. But, as it was said before, time can not be changed, but instead of making those same mistakes again, we should learn from the past and hope that nothing as horrendous as the Holocaust ever happens again. If it does, however, we know that the world has come to a point of no return. It is said sometimes that a man must have a war every twenty or so years so that each generation can experience battle and death. It has happened so far along this crooked path, but WWII was one of the worst. What went on in those camps during the Holocaust will hopefully never be forgotten because people need to remember that what happened was evil, unethical, and those doctors are a shame to all who have lived and all those who died.


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