There seems to be no limit on the number of horror stories from Nazi Germany. This is definitely true when it comes to the human Nazi medical experiments that took place throughout World War II.
The Nazis are known for using human subjects in their medical experiments to research such fields as medicine and genetics. These unethical experiments were never short on subjects because the Nazis forced the prisoners in concentration camps to participate.
These Nazi medical experiments usually subjected these prisoners to a great deal of pain and, in many cases, led to their deaths. Below is just a sample of the types of experiments that concentration camp prisoners were forced to endure.
Hypothermia
To prepare the troops for the extreme cold, Nazi doctors conducted experiments on how extreme cold affected the human body and on how to resuscitate someone after someone succumbed to such temperatures.
The most common practice was to strip a prisoner naked and submerge him in a large tank of ice water. Another method used, especially in Auschwitz, was to strap a naked prisoner to a stretcher and leave him outside in sub-zero temperature. Then the body temperatures of the prisoners were monitored. The prisoners were left in their frigid environments until they died.
The goal was to determine how long the human body can survive such temperatures and what would be an effective method of resuscitating a soldier who experienced the same fate.
Warming
The warming Nazi medical experiments preformed to determine the best method to fight hypothermia were just as horrible as their cold counterparts. Subjects were placed under heating lamps. The temperature was increased until the skin would burn and blister.
Often, the same subject would be frozen and heated over and over again during one testing session. Another experiment was to heat water to near boiling temperatures and then forcefully ?irrigating? the body by running the water through the stomach, bladder, and intestines. Documents show that there were no survivors of this particular experiment.
Sterilization
Nazi Doctor, Carl Clauberg, conducted thousands of sterilization experiments on concentration camp prisoners from the beginning of and through the mid-1940s. These experiments involved the use of surgery, pharmaceuticals, and radiation to discover an efficient and inexpensive method to sterilize hundreds of thousands people.
At first, a concoction of drugs (iodine and silver nitrate) was injected into the subjects. However, this method proved not only time consuming, but also had serious side effects. One major side effect was cervical cancer.
Because of these drawbacks, the Nazis opted for a more efficient method to sterilize the masses. The subjects were exposed to a specific level of radiation. Once the dose was administered, the subject was sterile within minutes of exposure. The Nazis favored this method because the radiation could actually be administered without the knowledge of the subject.
A common Nazi ruse was to bring a group of prisoners into a room under the idea that they were there to complete various forms of documentation. While the unsuspecting prisoners completed the useless forms, they were exposed to radiation. In about three minutes, the prisoners were completely sterile with little to no evidence that anything had occurred.
One occasion if the dose was too high or the exposure was too long, the prisoners experienced painful radiation burns. This method was so effective that the Nazis were able to sterilize over 400,000 individuals.
The Nazi medical experiments listed here are only a few out of the thousands upon thousand of horrendous documented experiments that the concentration camp prisoners had to endure under the Nazi Third Reich.
Dennis Dufrene is the resident historian and technical writer. With this background, Dennis brings insight and accuracy to the stories published here at Top Secret Writers. Dennis has 314 post(s) at Top Secret Writers
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