INTRODUCTION :
- Nazi Human Experimentation was a sequence of medical experiments on prisoners in concentration camps by Nazi Germany during World War II.
- The unification of Germany was done between 1871- 1918, known as the German Empire by Bismarck.
- Due to the propaganda of supremacy of the Aryan race by people like Hitler and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, they emphasized that they would not let mix this pure blood into some other. Hence, medical experiments were performed.
- Targeted Audience: Romani (Indians), Sinti, ethnic Poles, Soviet POWs, disabled Germans, and Jews across Europe.
- Doctor's Trial: Experiments resulted in deaths, trauma, and even permanent disability of the subjects. After the war, the bizarre torture came under the name of the Doctor's Trial.
EXPERIMENTS :
There were four categories in which the experiments were divided.
- Experiments on Civilians: These are the experiments where they inject different sorts of artificial solutions/hormones into the victim's body. The result was either the victim died of suffering if, unfortunately, the victim survived, then they deal with the mental trauma for the rest of their life.
- Experiments for Diseases: They take the victim's blood sample, infect it with certain pathogens, inject it into the blood, and then start with the treatment—diseases like Yellow fever, Hepatitis B, Typhoid fever, Tuberculosis, Epidemic jaundice, etc.
- Experiments on Soldiers: Soldiers in Germany had to fight across the borders, so they were put in extreme conditions to face any climatic change for further. Many soldiers died during this experiment.
- Experiments on Twins: This is the most horrifying category of all. They want to see the similarities and differences in the genetics of twins and whether they can manipulate their bodies unnaturally.
TWIN EXPERIMENT :
- Central leader: Joseph Mengele (Angel of Death)
- He conducted experiments between 1943-1944 on around 1500 sets of Auschwitz. Two hundred people survived these studies. (You can find the testimonies of real survivors of these experimentations on YouTube. I will provide the link below).
Bone, muscle, and nerve transplantation experiments :
- Period: September 1942 to December 1943
- Place: Ravensbruck Concentration Camps
- Motive: For the benefit of the German Armed Forces. To study regeneration and transplantations from one person to another.
- Procedure: Sections of bones, nerves, and muscles were removed from the subject's body without anaesthesia. They were also experimented with their bone marrow injected with bacteria to study the drug's effectiveness.
- Result: Intense agony, mutilation, and permanent disability in human subjects.
Freezing Experiments :
- Period: 1941
- Conducted by : Luftwaffe
- Conducted at: Dachau Camp
- Intent: Discovering means to prevent and treat hypothermia
- Total Experiments: 360 to 400
- Victims Suffered more than one experiment: 280 to 300
- Procedure: Prisoners were kept naked in the open air with a temperature of -6 degrees Celsius. Prisoners were also forced to sit in tanks full of freezing water and ice for about 3 hours. After the subjects were frozen, they then undergo a process of rewarming. Many died during the process.
Malaria Experiments :
- Period: February 1942 to April 1945
- Conducted at: Dachau Camps
- Motive: Investigate immunization of treatment for malaria
- Procedure: Healthy inmates were infected by mosquitoes or by injections of extracts from the mucous glands of the female anopheles.
- Total subjects: Over 1200
- Result: Half of them died, and the other half remained with permanent disability for the rest of their lives.
Mustard Gas Experiment :
- Period: September 1939 to April 1945
- Motive: Investigate the most effective treatment of wounds caused by mustard gas.
- Child victims show incisions where axillary lymph nodes have been removed after they were infected with TB.
Sea-Water Experiment:
- Period: July 1944 to September 1944
- Conducted In: Dachau Camps
- Motive: To study methods to make seawater drinkable
- Subjects were deprived of all food and only given filtered seawater.
- A group of 90 Roma was so dehydrated that they were even observed licking the freshly mopped floors to get some drinkable water. The situations were bizarre.
Personal Statements From Victims :
- An Age 83
Place of Persecution: Auschwitz
Dates: April 1943 to May 1945
"The experiment was done to me in Auschwitz, Block 10. The experiment was done on my uterus. I was given shots in my uterus, and as a result of that, I was fainting from severe pain for a year and a half. [Years later,] Professor Hirsh from the hospital in Tzrifin examined me and said that my uterus became as a uterus of a 4-year-old child and that my ovaries shrank."
- K, Age 80
Place of Persecution: Auschwitz
Dates: 1942 to 1945
"As soon as I arrived in Auschwitz, I was taken into a room, and there I was undressed and made to kneel… on my knees and my hands. The SS officer [who] was probably a doctor, dressed in a white robe, shoved an iron stick, which had a handle on its end, right into my rectum. He then turned the stick and caused an involuntary ejaculation of sperm. A female SS officer [who] worked with the other officer held two pieces of glass underneath my genitals to collect a sample of my sperm for the lab. They then made me stand up on a special machine that gave electric waves to both sides of my genitals until a sperm was ejaculated. After the liberation, I was taken to Sanatorium Gauting next to Munich. There I was bedridden for almost a year, starting with a weight of only 30 kilograms. During that year, I was operated on for serious medical problems."
- G, Age 81
Place of Persecution: Auschwitz
Date: March 1944 – April 1944
"Each day, I was submerged in hot water. Whenever I tried to put my head out of the water to breathe, I was forced back into the water by Dr Josef Mengele's stick. He was enjoying himself. This lasted for 10 minutes. I was immediately afterwards put into cold water, and the same procedure was repeated. There were five [people], including myself, undergoing the same process. After these daily sessions, we were taken to barrack No. 8 – Auschwitz, which was destined [for] those who were to die, to see for how long we were going to survive. A [woman] passing by saw me gesturing and crying for help through a hole in a plank of the wooden barrack. She loosened the plank and wrapped me. I was saved. I know nothing about the fate of the other four persons."
- E, Age 69
Place of Persecution: Mogilev
Date: August 1943 – October 1943
"I was subjected to medical experiments from the beginning of August 1943 until the end of October 1943 under the Nazi regime. In the camp where I was kept as a child, we did not receive any food for days. We cried out for food. Then the boss of the [camp] came up to us children. He distributed various desserts to us children. After a couple of hours, we realized that something was not in order with the food. I got really sick and suffered from cramps. I threw up and had diarrhoea, chills, and a fever. Many died as a consequence of this poisoned food. Due to this [heavily poisoned] food, my legs felt as if they would be paralyzed. I could not walk for several weeks and could only be carried. As soon as I recovered, I received numerous injections from a doctor into the right side of my mouth, close to my lower jaw. Why I was injected, for what, and what substance I was injected, I don't know since I was only eight years old at that time. I still have a hole in my right cheek. The man who ordered all of [this], his name was Knoblauch. After the war, he was hunted as a criminal of war."
"If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example."
― Anne Frank
SOURCES:
- https://www.claimscon.org/about/history/closed-programs/medical-experiments/personal-statements-from-victims/
- https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/holocaust
- https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aryan-1
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4822534/
- https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/exhibition/science-and-suffering-victims-and-perpetrators-of-nazi-human-experimentation/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHvSz16lcXs
Testimony of victims: