Nazi_Germanys_Experimentation_on_Human_Subjects

Bioethics fall 2011 Research Paper Deborah Williams 11-18-11 Nazi Germanys Experimentation on Human Subjects Hitler’s Rise to power in Nazi Germany, 1933, shed a very bright light onto human experimentation during the years of the Second World War, and for a very long period after. The Nazi ideology of perfection caused the death of more than 2million people who were thought of as ill or and not pure Aryan. During this period the Nazis not only targeted the Jews, but also Slavs, Religious groups, Gypsies, Communist, Gay men, Gay women, mentally and Physically disabled people, among them also native Germans who were seen as unfit to society. No man, women, child, or infant could escape the death strike that Germany was allowing their unfit leader, to go on. Absolutely no one, was safe. Especially the tragic persons that were stuck behind the toturous iron gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dachau, or Chelmno, which was strictly an extermination camp. An infamous SS Doctor who oversaw the collection of arriving transports of innocents, had the ability to determine who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer. The other SS who helped unload the transports had been given special instructions to find twins, dwarfs, giants, or anyone else with a unique hereditary trait like a club foot or heterochromia (each eye a different color). Mengele had a very special interest, mainly “Zwillinge” (German for twins), or dwarfed gypsy children. But this “Doctor” is far more infamous for performing gruesome unethical human experiments, with no discriminations on who he chose, including children, for which Dr. Josef Mengele was coined the devilish name, the "Angel of Death." “He was deemed responsible for 400,000 deaths.”(Farmington, Gale) Mengele's handsome physical appearance, Exceptional dress, and calm demeanor greatly contradicted his attraction to all the murder and gruesome experiments. Josef was absolutely infatuated with twins. Most of the experiments that were conducted by him were all carried out on sets of twins. At Auschwitz, Mengele did a number of studies on twins. When he got the twins back to the experimental room, they were forced to undress and lay next to each other, no matter what age. Then every detail of their anatomy was carefully inspected, studied, and measured. What was the same was deemed to be hereditary and was different was deemed to be the result of the environment. These tests would last for several hours on end. The twins would wake at dawn everyday, the first thing he wanted was, “Blood, often in large quantities, was drawn from twins' fingers and arms, and sometimes both their arms simultaneously. The youngest children, whose arms and hands were very small, suffered the most: Blood was drawn from their necks, a painful and frightening procedure” (Lagnado, 62) One of the most gruesome experiments Josef preformed involving twins, was that of creating medically conjoined twins. He brought a set of Gypsy twins back from the lab after they were sewn back to back, from the neck down, without anesthesia. Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese twin by connecting blood vessels and intestines and lower digestive organs together. The twins screamed day and night until gangrene set in, and after three days, they eventually died. During the years Auschwitz was open, 1,500 pairs of twins who passed through the Auschwitz death camp during World War II until its liberation at the end of the war. Only 100 pairs of twins survived afterwards, including one twin named, Eva & Miriam Mozes Kor. The fact that Eva and Miriam survived Auschwitz was a miracle in itself, they were one of the few individual sets of twins that were still alive at the time the camp was liberated on April 15th 1945. Eva & Miriam Mozes Kor were an absolute miracle. They were born in the small village of Portz, Romania, on Jan. 30, 1934. Life for the Mozes family was good for many many years, but in March of 1944, the family was told to gather a few belongings because they were going to be moved. They were taken to a ghetto in Simleul Silvanei and then unknowingly they were deported to Auschwitz. While in the lab one day with Mengele, Eva was allowed to leave and use the latrine in the back, “The first time I went to use the latrine located at the end of the children's barrack, I was greeted by the scattered corpses of several children lying on the ground. I think that image will stay with me forever. It was there that I made a silent pledge - a vow to make sure that Miriam and I didn't end up on that filthy floor."(Lagnado, 54) And she kept her word. Several years in the twin’s barracks, Eva and her sister were subjected to unknown injections, and one day Eva reacted very negatively. She was given around five mysterious injections. Afterwards, that evening she developed anextremely high fever. I was shuddering uncontrolably. All of her appendages were swollen, about four times their normal size. Mengele and three other doctors came in the next morning. They looked at her fever chart, and Dr. Mengele said, laughingly, 'Too bad, she is so young. She has only two weeks to live ." In 1950, Eva and Miriam received visas for Israel and departed there. They became members of a kibbutz. In 1952, they both joined the Israeli Army. Eva studied drafting and Miriam became a nurse. In 1960, Eva married an American, Michael Kor, also a concentration camp survivor, and came to the United States, settling in Terre Haute, Indiana. As adults, Eva and Miriam suffered grim health problems. Eva suffered from miscarriages and tuberculosis. Her son had cancer. Miriam's kidneys never fully developed and she died in 1993 of a rare form of cancer, probably brought on by the unknown medical experiments and injections which she was subjected to at the hands of Josef Mengele. In 1985, 40 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Eva Mozes Kor, Miriam, and other survivors returned to Auschwitz, and then steered a mock trial of Josef Mengele in Israel, which received international news coverage. As far as research shows Eva is still alive today. Herta Oberheuser, was an unemotional female physician under the direction of, Dr. Karl Gebhardt. These two together was a complete match made in hell. Gebhardt and his team conducted most of the completely inhumane, torturous, unethical, and gruesome experiments on humans, even heard of to this day. She herself, performed most of the gruesome work, focusing on deliberately inflicting wounds In order to simulate the combat wounds of German soldiers fighting in the war. Herta purposely rubbed foreign objects, such as wood, rusty nails, slivers of glass, dirt or sawdust into the wounds. Dr. Herta Oberheuser killed children with oil and Evipan injections, and then removed their limbs and vital organs. The time from the injection to death was between three and five minutes, with the person being fully conscious until the last moment. She and her team was famous for doing mostly chemical experiments such as Sulfanilamide Experiments, Incendiary Bomb Experiments, Mustard Gas Experiments, Freezing Experiments, Sea-water Experiments, High-Altitude Experiments, and Experiments with Poison just to name a few of the absolutely horrid. They explored the boundaries of human endurance at extremely high altitudes. The preys were placed in the low-pressure chamber and shortly thereafter the simulators altitude was raised. Many victims died as a direct result of these experiments and others suffered grave injury and torture. Continuous experiments at altitudes higher than 10.5 Km resulted in death. These experiments revealed that breathing stopped after about 30 minutes, while in a few noted other cases the electrocardiograph charted action of the heart, and that stated that the heart continued beating for another 20 minutes after breathing stopped. A more torturous experiment of this altitude endurance was a continuous experiment without oxygen at a height of 12 Km. Conducted on a 37-year old Jewish man in good general condition probably besides the obvious malnutrition. Studies stated that Breathing continued up to 30 minutes. But after just 4 minutes the subject began to sweat and to vigorously move around his head, after 5 minutes cramps occurred, their arms and fingers contorted. Between 6 and 10 minutes breathing increased in speed and the subject became eventually unconscious. 11 to 30 minutes breathing slowed down to about three breaths per minute, finally stopping altogether. The subject eventually turned deep blue and purple, (cyanosis), and a thick froth developed in the mucus membranes. Oberheuser was the only female defendant in the medicinal Nuremberg trials. She received a 20 year verdict but was free in April 1952 and became a family doctor at Stocksee in Germany. Her license to practice medicine was then revoked in 1958. Auschwitz was finally liberated in January of 1945, by the Soviet forces. The SS abandoned the Auschwitz camp a few hours before the soviets showed up. The SS unit hurried away to avoid being captured by the Soviets and were then found and taken as prisoners of war by the Americans. Mengele who had given an alias, was released in June 1945 with papers giving his name as "Fritz Hollmann". From July 1945 until May 1949, he worked as a farmhand in a small village near, Buenos Aires but soon came in contact with influential Germans, who allowed him an affluent lifestyle. He also got to know other Nazis in Buenos Aires, such as Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Wolfgang Gerhard and Adolf Eichmann. In 1955, he bought a 50 percent share of “Fadro” Farm, a pharmaceutical company. Josef lived with his family in a German-owned house in the Buenos Aires suburbs from 1958 to 1960. While in Buenos Aires, Mengele practiced medicine, specializing in illegal abortions, and was briefly in custody by police on one occasion for the death of a patient during an abortion. Dr. Josef was listed on the Allies' list of war criminals as early as 1944. His name was mentioned in the Nuremberg trials several times, but Allied forces were convinced that Mengele was dead. He died in 1979 under the name of Wolfgang Gerhard, a Nazi he befriended in Brazil and whose identity he assumed. The remains of "Wolfgang Gerhard" were exhumed on June 6, 1985 and identified as Mengele's. Everything was kept very quiet only to protect those who knew him in South America. In 1992, a DNA test confirmed that the remains were that of Mengeles, the Angel of death. He had evaded capture for 34 years, and as the most infamous torturer of all time, he was never brought to justice. After the exhumation, the scientists who proved his identity stored his remains and attempted to send them home several times to his remaining family, but the family rejected them. Work Cited Farmington: Gale, "Mengele, Josef (1911 - 1979)." World of Criminal Justice, Gale. 2002. Credo Reference. 11 May 2004. Web. 13 Nov. 2011. . Lagnado, Lucette Matalon and Sheila Cohn Dekel. Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengle and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991. Steinacher, Gerald. "5: Destination Argentina." Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford UP, 2011. 46. Print. Weider History Group. "Did the Nazis' 'Angel of Death' Leave a Lasting Legacy in Brazil." World War II January 1, 2009, Vol.26, Issue 5 (May 2009): 10. Print.