What+experiments+did+they+perform?

The Nazis preformed many different experiments over the time that they were able to perform them. However, there were 3 different types of experiments that are well documented as having performed by the doctors of the camps. The main experiments were experiments in which people were subjected to extreme heat and cold, experiments where the prisoners were sterilized, and experiments on twins. These three experiments were the three most heavily documented ones according to what I have found online and the most commonly seen in the camps.

The first type of experiment that I listed, subjecting people to extreme heat and cold was done in two different ways. The first was to make the prisoners hot or cold by using a water bath, whether it is hot or cold. Often times, after the prisoner was exposed to one temperature of water they were slowly exposed to the opposite one. This took place two ways, either the person was heated or cooled quickly, which almost always lead to shock and death, or they were warmed or cooled slowly, which had a high success rate. The other experiment that the Nazis did with heat was to place a prisoner under sunlamps, which is described in the quote, “One young homosexual victim was repeatedly cooled to unconsciousness then revived with lamps until he was pouring sweat. He died one evening after several test sessions.” (Remember). These sun lamp experiments seemed to have been done for no reason other than it was just another way to torture and slowly kill Jews.

The second type of experiment was the experiments that the Nazis did on prisoners in order to find a quick way to sterilize them. These experiments were also held because traditional methods of sterilization i.e. castration, at the time took too long to do and recover from and cost too much money to do. The bottom line in this case, was that it was too expensive to do medical procedures on prisoners you were going to kill any way correctly, so they chose to do the procedures quickly, but faultily. The main way that the Nazis tried to sterilize prisoners was through exposing them to radiation, which did in fact sterilize them. However this method caused many issues and side effects, one of them being that most of the people that this was done on suffered from severe radiation burns. Another side effect was the fact that chemicals like the ones used to sterilize the people caused cancer. When prisoner suffered from these side effects, as they often did they were killed because they were no longer useful to the Germans.

The final experiment that was done on prisoner were the ones done on twins that had been captured, this is best described by the following excerpt from a holocaust remembrance website. “All parts of their heads were examined. The head examination took almost days. They were then completely X-rayed ... The twins were then photographed for several days. The purpose of the photographs were to show hair patterns. They were each forced to stand, bend, and kneel in many positions to accomplish the photographs. For example, they were required to stand with their arms lifted for many hours so the under arm hair could be photographed… They were taken into a room with tables and a hot water vat. The water in the vat was very hot. They were made to sit in the water until they were ready to pass out from the heat. They were then strapped to a table where their hair was plucked out trying to save the hair root… After enough hair was collected, they were totally shaven of every hair on their body. The twins were then again extensively photographed without hair. After this three weeks of tortuous medical examinations they were taken two the dissection laboratory. Using two doctors, each twin was simultaneously given an injection in the heart, taking their lives”(Remember). This account best shows the sort of terrible things that were done to twins at the time of the Holocaust. Most of this fascination with twins was fueled by Dr. Mengele, who had an interest in the biology of twins. Other experiments done at the time on twins included sewing them together to create conjoined twins, and injecting their eyes with chemicals to see if it would change their eye color. All of the experimentation done on twins was seemingly for no reason at all, other than to feed Menegle’s fascination with twins.

By: Alex Hatch

For more information on the experiments go [|here]. For more picture evidence of the experiments go [|here]. Click the thumbnails on the side to see a bigger picture.