Ethical Experiments During The Holocaust

“Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander,” this means when immoral events happen in the world people need to tell others and stop them rather than stand there and watch the events take place (Skog 57). During the Holocaust, people were taken as prisoners, and the doctors conducted unethical experiments on them rather than treating them. Many people died throughout the Holocaust because of these complex trials. Regular people became victims and experienced experiments performed by doctors solely because of the person’s religion or ethnicity. The bone, muscle, and nerve transplants done without anesthesia, the hypothermia experiments, Josef Mengele’s twin experiments at Auschwitz, …show more content…
This procedure was carried out to “establish the most effective treatment for victims of immersion hypothermia” (Berger 1). These tests made the prisoners experience a slow death by freezing. It was done to benefit the Germans by finding a way to prevent hypothermia in crew members in the German air force who had been shot down into the cold North Sea. The people were exposed to water temperatures ranging from thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit to fifty-three degrees (Berger 2). When the victims were taken out of the water, their body temperatures continued to fall, despite the fact that the doctors were trying to find an effective way to warm them up. They used several methods of warming the people up, including, blanket warming, body heat warming, and warming by hot baths. The hypothermia caused many abnormal heart functions like heat arrhythmias. About eighty percent of the people who were involved in the hypothermia experiments went home (Jakubik 9). Many victims survived these trials, but they had to go through the cold water torture several times. They “ were veterans at this by now” (Connolly 1). Some men had gone through this so many times that some of the camp leaders knew them by name. The hypothermia experiments at Dachau were just rumors until “the Nazis published the facts themselves” (Connolly 1). After that, the whole …show more content…
The torture they had endured for a long time was traumatizing and left the victims scared for their lives (Goldhill 2). Just when they thought they had been liberated, they had to go though more mentally straining situations. They “spent over nine months in Displaced Persons camps” (Caplan 5) to try to recover from the events they had experienced. Even though they had been freed, they still had to go through training to help them to express and understand what had happened to them. This was very difficult for them to overcome and some never mentally recovered (Goldhill 2). Some of the victims had to deal with the long term physical effects of the medical experiments. “Many Mengele twins suffered incurable mysterious diseases” and many never recovered and suffered the effects of the Holocaust for the rest of their lives (Caplan 6). Some victims developed cancer and other diseases that were caused by all the injections and all the experiments conducted on them, while others went on to live a perfectly healthy and happy life. Although the horrible memories of what these people went through would always be in their minds, some moved on and had the best years of their life after this (Caplan 6). It is terrible that some people never had this, but they sought as much help as they could (Caplan 6). There was not always hope for all the people in the Holocaust, but