Nazi Medical Experiments

How do you start aNazi Medical Experiments research paper? Our expert writers suggest like this:

During World War II, the Nazis engaged in a variety of atrocities against humanity that were revealed after the war had ended. Medical doctors and scientists played a vital role in many of the most heinous Nazi crimes committed at death camps during the war. In addition to directing the practice of genocide, Nazi doctors also conducted a variety of medical experiments on involuntary human subjects in concentration camps. Your paper will want to discuss the following:

1. Nazi medical experiments during World War II, including the basis for the testing and doctors, such as Josef Mengele, who were responsible for designing and conducting the experiments.
2. Demonstrate the cold, calculated cruelty exhibited by physicians and the Nazi regime during this era.
3. Examine the usefulness of data that was collected from these experiments to modern medical researchers.
4. The horror exhibited by the Nazi's medical experiments remain a harsh reminder that people are capable of committing acts of severe inhuman cruelty, and while some suggest the research may be useful, the use of data from these Nazi experiments is ethically wrong.

p>The Nazis in established a policy of medical killing that was carried out by doctors and their assistants and based upon a racist concept that contended handicapped people, Jews, Gypsies and Turks were "life unworthy of life." There were five steps to the Nazi's practice of direct medical killing, beginning with coercive sterilization, killing impaired children in hospitals, impaired adults in mental hospitals, and disabled inmates in concentration camps, and the extermination of those in concentration camps, which included six million Jews that were put to death.

Although the doctors were active participants in the Nazi's medical killing programs, they conducted a wide range of medical experiments on prisoners, such as removal of living fetuses at different stages of development, transplanting human organs, and others that were outlined in the Nuremberg Medical trial. While many of these experiments were sponsored by the Nazi leadership for ideologically or military reasons, others were allegedly performed for some scientific interest. For example, sterilization and castration experiments conducted at the Auschwitz concentration camp was part of the racial cleansing program, infecting prisoners with typhus had military applications, while study of pre-cancerous cervix conditions had a scientific basis.

One of the experiments conducted over several years investigated the effects upon humans of exposure to freezing water. The experiments, begun in 1942 under Dr. Sigmund Rascher, a Luftwaffe (Air Force) scientist who believed that the knowledge gained from these experiments would help save valuable skilled pilots for further use in the war.