The medical experiments conducted on concentration camp prisoners by Nazi physicians were among the most documented atrocities of the Holocaust. The experiments were carried out at Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, Natzweiler-Struthof, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen and several other camps. They were not the work of fringe figures: they were sponsored by senior SS administrators, conducted by qualified physicians with formal academic positions, in some cases funded and directed by major institutions of German military medicine, and in almost all cases reported back to the academic and military bodies that had commissioned them. The total number of prisoners subjected to medical experiments is uncertain because the records are incomplete; the historians’ estimate is that at least 7,000 named individuals were experimented on, with the actual number probably substantially higher. Most of those experimented on were killed by the experiments or were murdered afterwards.
Categories of experiment
The experiments fell into several categories. Military medical experiments aimed at producing knowledge useful to the German armed forces. The high-altitude experiments conducted by Sigmund Rascher at Dachau under Luftwaffe sponsorship, between February and May 1942, exposed around 200 prisoners to low-pressure conditions in a sealed chamber to study pilot survival; approximately 80 were killed. The freezing experiments, also at Dachau and also under Rascher, immersed prisoners in iced water for hours at a time to study the limits of cold exposure; approximately 100 of the around 300 prisoners involved died. The seawater experiments at Dachau, conducted by Hans Eppinger from 1944, deprived prisoners of drinking water for up to twelve days while feeding them seawater, to study the limits of survival in life-raft conditions.
The infectious disease experiments aimed at producing vaccines for diseases the German armed forces were encountering. The typhus experiments at Buchenwald and Natzweiler infected prisoners with epidemic typhus to test vaccine candidates; around 1,000 prisoners passed through the Buchenwald block and around 200 died. The malaria experiments at Dachau under Klaus Schilling infected around 1,200 prisoners with various malaria strains over five years to test treatments; over 400 died. The phosgene gas experiments at Natzweiler tested the toxicity of the chemical-warfare agent on prisoners.
The racial-anthropological experiments aimed at producing scientific evidence for the regime’s racial categories. Josef Mengele’s twin experiments at Auschwitz examined identical and fraternal twin pairs through invasive procedures and post-mortem dissection; around 1,500 twin pairs passed through Mengele’s care between 1943 and 1944, of whom perhaps 200 individuals survived. The skeleton-collection experiments by August Hirt at Strasbourg killed 86 Auschwitz prisoners specifically for the production of an anatomical skeleton collection at the Reich University of Strasbourg; the collection was found largely intact at liberation.
The pharmaceutical and surgical experiments aimed at developing new treatments and procedures. The bone-grafting and limb-transplantation experiments at Ravensbrück on Polish women political prisoners; the sulphonamide experiments on infected wounds, also at Ravensbrück, tested early antibiotic compounds and produced approximately 200 cases of induced gangrene in named subjects. The sterilisation experiments at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück by Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann tested mass-sterilisation methods using X-rays and chemical injections; around 1,000 prisoners were experimented on.
The institutional context
The experiments were not conducted in secrecy from the German medical and academic establishments. The Luftwaffe contracted the Dachau high-altitude experiments and received the resulting reports. The German Air Ministry funded Rascher’s work directly. The Reich Research Council approved and funded multiple of the camps’ research programmes. The Wehrmacht medical services received the typhus and malaria findings and used them in their own work. The Strasbourg skeleton collection was commissioned by the Reich University. The Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology received biological samples from Mengele at Auschwitz with normal academic correspondence. The experiments were embedded in the regular institutional structure of German wartime medicine and science.
The trials and what was prosecuted
The Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg in 1946 to 1947 prosecuted twenty-three figures, of whom most were involved in the experimentation programmes. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician and the senior medical figure overseeing the wider programme, was hanged. Karl Gebhardt of the Ravensbrück sulphonamide experiments was hanged. Five further defendants were sentenced to death and four to terms of imprisonment. Mengele escaped to South America and died in Brazil in 1979 without facing trial; his page in the Perpetrators section sets out his case in more detail. Clauberg was tried in the Soviet Union and released in 1955, then arrested in West Germany and died awaiting a second trial in 1957. Many of the more junior physicians who had carried out the experiments were never prosecuted at all.
What the medical experiments did to medical ethics
The Doctors’ Trial produced the Nuremberg Code, which is treated on its own page in this section. The Code has been the foundation of all subsequent international research-ethics frameworks. The medical-experimentation record from the camps, paradoxically, has remained a difficult intellectual problem in medical ethics for the further reason that some of the data produced by the experiments (particularly the Dachau hypothermia data) is the only large-sample human data on certain physiological questions, and modern medicine has had to decide whether and how to use research that was produced by murder. The standard position, set by the World Medical Association from the 1960s onwards and reinforced by the Declaration of Helsinki of 1964 and its successors, is that the data should not be used.
Sources
- Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Basic Books, 1986
- Vivien Spitz, Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans, Sentient, 2005 (Spitz was a court reporter at the Doctors’ Trial)
- George J. Annas and Michael A. Grodin (eds), The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation, Oxford University Press, 1992
- Ulf Schmidt, Justice at Nuremberg: Leo Alexander and the Nazi Doctors’ Trial, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004
- Paul Weindling, Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004
- Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, Volume I and II (the Doctors’ Trial, “United States v. Karl Brandt et al.”), US Government Printing Office, 1949
- USHMM, “Nazi Medical Experiments”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org
- Yad Vashem, “Medical Experiments on Prisoners”, https://www.yadvashem.org