Medical Experiments

Could you imagine having your bones snapped in half or being a parent and having a set of twins and “after all the living data was taken of the twins they would be killed by a single injection of chloroform into the heart. Care was then taken to make sure that the twins would die at the same time. Then after that the twins would be dissected with the organs being sent to research centers.” These are just a couple of the cruel medical performances during the holocaust.

During the holocaust the experiments were very cruel and because of the cruelty a large number of people were killed. “Most of the time the

Nazi medical experiments were placed into two categories, one being those sponsored by a government for a specific military purpose, and the other one being the ones where the ones who were interested in being an S.S. doctor.” “Claubergs was well known during the holocaust for his sterilization and medical experiments. Clauberg began his Auschwitz work in December of1942 in Birkenau. After he realized his experiments required a special block he moved to block ten in April 1943 and began experiments there. Claubergs method was to inject a caustic substance into the cervix in order to obstruct the fallopian tubes.”

“The freezing and hypothermia experiments were divided into two parts. First they had to figure out how long it would take to lower the body temperature to death and second how to best resuscitate the frozen victim.” The doctors froze the bodies one of two ways, either by putting the body in a bath of ice and cold water or to put the body outside naked in sub-zero temperatures. “The ice bath method proved that it was the fastest way to drop the body temperature” If they could not resuscitate the body then the person would obviously lay dead, to me this is very mean and cruel. I don’t think the doctors should have been able to do these experiments on people unless there was something really wrong with them, like if they were dieing or something along those lines. “The way they chose the people for the experiments is they just went out and got young healthy Jews or Russians.” When they placed the naked people outside in the sub-zero temperatures they strapped them on a stretcher so that they couldn’t go anywhere. “The warming or resuscitation experiments were just as cruel as the freezing experiments.” They did the following to heat the body back up; they used a sun lamp, internal irrigation, a hot bath, or warming by body heat. When the body was placed under the sun lamps it would literally burn there skin because the lamps were so hot and produced so much heat.” “When the body was put through internal irrigation the victim would have water boiled to a blister temperature, and then the water would be injected to the victim’s stomach, bladder, and intestines. All victims that this was done on appeared to die from the treatment.” The hot bath seemed to be the best, as the temperature slowly increased the body slowly became conscious. This was also one that killed victims easily because if the body heated up to fast then it would shock the body and the victim would die. The last experiment of the warming of the body was that Heinrich

Himmler suggested to Dr. Rascher that he tried to use women to warm the frozen men. This experiment had some success but not as much as the warm bath. These are some of the ways that the body was resuscitated.

There were many other treatments that were done on people. To me the freezing treatment and the killing of the twin’s treatment were the cruelest experiments of all the ones that I researched. If you think these experiments are bad could you even begin to imagine what is was like to have these doctors do surgery on you? I know I defiantly couldn’t even begin to think about it.1

1Heather Huggett

English 1st block

5-23-05