Nazi Paragraph Draft 2
Human experimentation in Nazi Germany during the 1930s was
conducted by “killing on a scale unmatched hitherto in human history”[1]
in the quest for the perfect Aryan human as the Nazi government eradicated a
grand majority of the “unfit” population in concentration camps. Dr. Josef
Mengele’s surgeries were gruesome enough for him to be granted the title of
“Doctor Death”, or “Angel of Death”[2]
based on his genetic experiments and work to “destroy life devoid of value”[3]
which he would perform on the inmates of Auschwitz and other camps, even
including child twins in his research on the human body[4]
to decipher a way to engineer Aryan twins to repopulate a Nazi Europe, working
to further the Nazis’ plan to cleanse Germany of “inferior” beings. He started
with “mercy killings” for the “incurably insane”, but steadily worked towards Die Endlösung: The Final Solution – a
plan to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. In Dachau, Mengele subjected
Russian Prisoners of War to hypothermia experiments to see how long Nazi pilots
might survive in the ocean, and what rewarming techniques or devices would be
most effective in reversing the effects.
His experiments may have been horrible for those involved,
especially for the unfortunates on the examination table, but Mengele’s
experiments proved to become useful to the world as when light was shed on the
brutality of the “medical work” being conducted in Auschwitz, such as his
increased knowledge of human anatomy from his in-depth experiments and
surgeries; conducted to discover which attributes/disabilities were inherited
genetically, a process considered to be pseudo-science and was in effect an
excuse to test the limits of a human being by subjecting them to experiments
that would most definitely resort in death.[5]
The entirety of the Nazi regime came under fire at the Nuremburg
Trials in 1945-1946 where a Code was written to frame the groundwork for modern
doctoral procedures, and new practices were implemented to prevent further
experiments such as Mengele’s to happen in the future[6]. At the Trial, Mengele’s practice at the camps
were found to have a “common design to discover, or improve, various medical
techniques,” but unlike proper and moral procedures, the findings were commonly
just different ways people could die, earning Mengele’s practice the name thanatology - the macabre science of
producing death, since so many innocent people died as subject to his testing. The
new Nuremburg Code “formulated the principle of informed consent for the first
time on an international level”[7],
including ten points of which medical professionals are required to follow in
the event of a human experiment, to keep the entire process ethical and satisfy
the global idea of moral and legal concepts. The Code allowed for more open
communication between doctor and patient in the modern medical era and prevents
work like Mengele’s to happen in the modern world. The code has also been cited
as a foremost influence on the development of international codes governing
ethical aspects of human subject research in all fields of science.
[1]
Gomel, Elana. "From
Dr. Moreau to Dr. Mengele: The Biological Sublime." Poetics Today
21.2 (2000): 393-421. Google Scholar Database. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.
[2]
Baader, Gerhard, Susan E.
Lederer, Morris Low, Florian Schmaltz, and Alexander V. Schwerin.
"Pathways to Human Experimentation, 1933-1945: Germany, Japan, and the
United States." Osiris 20 (2005): 205-31. SMU Online Resources.
Web. 19 Jan. 2017.
[3]
Posner, Gerald L., and John
Ware. Mengele: The Complete Story. New York, NY, McGraw-Hill Book
Company, 1986.
[4]
Reis, Shmuel P., and Hedy
S. Wald. "Learning from the past: medicine and the Holocaust." The
Lancet 374.9684 (2009): 110-11. SMU Online Resources. Web. 18 Mar.
2017.
[5]
Annas, George J., and Michael A. Grodin. The Nazi doctors and the Nuremberg
Code: human rights in human experimentation. New York, NY, Oxford
University Press, 1995.
[6]
Weindling, Paul. Nazi
Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.
[7] Roelcke, Volker. "Nazi medicine and research on human
beings." The Lancet 364 (2004): 6-7. SMU Online Resources.
Web. 18 Mar. 2017.
Nazi Paragraph Draft 1
Human experimentation in
Nazi Germany during the 1930s was conducted by “killing on a scale unmatched
hitherto in human history”[1]
in the quest for the perfect Aryan human as the Nazi government eradicated a
grand majority of the “unfit” population in concentration camps. Dr. Josef
Mengele’s surgeries were gruesome enough for him to be granted the title of “Doctor
Death” or “Angel of Death”[2]
based on the experiments he would perform on the inmates of Auschwitz, even
including child twins in his research on the human body[3].
His experiments may have been horrible for those involved, especially for the
unfortunates on the examination table, but Mengele’s experiments proved to
become useful to the world as when light was shed on the brutality of the “medical
work” being conducted in Auschwitz, as well as in the entirety of the Nazi
regime at the Nuremburg Trials in 1945-1946, the laws permitting doctoral
procedures was changed in favor of the patient and new practices were
implemented to prevent further experiments such as Mengele’s to happen in the
future[4]. The Nuremburg Code introduced “formulated the
principle of informed consent for the first time on an
international level”[5]
which allowed for more open communication between doctor and patient in the
modern medical era.
[1] Gomel, Elana. "From
Dr. Moreau to Dr. Mengele: The Biological Sublime." Poetics Today
21.2 (2000): 393-421. Google Scholar Database. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.
[2] Baader, Gerhard, Susan E.
Lederer, Morris Low, Florian Schmaltz, and Alexander V. Schwerin.
"Pathways to Human Experimentation, 1933-1945: Germany, Japan, and the
United States." Osiris 20 (2005): 205-31. SMU Online Resources.
Web. 19 Jan. 2017.
[3] Reis, Shmuel P., and Hedy
S. Wald. "Learning from the past: medicine and the Holocaust." The
Lancet 374.9684 (2009): 110-11. SMU Online Resources. Web. 18 Mar.
2017.
[4] Weindling, Paul. Nazi
Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.
[5] Roelcke, Volker. "Nazi medicine and research on human
beings." The Lancet 364 (2004): 6-7. SMU Online Resources.
Web. 18 Mar. 2017.
Introduction Draft 1
During World War II, extremist groups such as the Nazi Party in
Germany and the military dictatorship of Japan rose to power. These groups held
extreme views about certain minority factions of their populace, and due to the
war, needed to perform experiments to create the most advanced weaponry and
defense systems possible. These two governments decided to use human
experimentation to achieve this goal. In America, a study began to test the
effects of syphilis on the human body to cure U.S. citizens and soldiers of the
disease. These experiments yielded the deaths of 1000s of people, yet also
found valuable information on the working of the human body and its immune and
defense systems, despite their impractical methods[1]. Nazi
Germany and the military dictatorship of Japan conducted many experiments on
their path to the betterment of their nations to win the war. Of these
experiments, a large proportion were conducted on live, unwilling human
subjects. These experiments resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people deemed
“unfit to live” by their nation’s governments[2]. In Japan, the performance of human
experimentation was carried out by Unit 731, so named due to the 731 scientists
that were a part of the program. The scientists disguised their experiments
under the guise of the “Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Department”
starting in 1936, with the lead scientist being Ishii Shiro. He and other lead
scientists were never tried for their “war crimes” and instead were sought
after by the American government to collect their research data, “not as
evidence of war crimes, but for the purpose of scientific data gathering”.[3] In
Germany, Josef Mengele was performing live human vivisections to find new
information on how the human body operated as well as how much stress it could
endure as he sought to create the perfect man by eliminating “inferior species”
through eugenics[4].
Across the battlefield to the Allies and the United States, human
experimentation perpetuated through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. This study was
conducted in order to find how much stress a body could endure and to find a
cure for syphilis and other diseases like it. However, even after the invention
of penicillin, the study continued without offering that treatment to the
patients. Due to the fact that the subjects were exclusively African American
males in a poor area, the doctors felt no need to give them proper treatment,
instead continuing the experiment[5] to
study the effects of different ranges of syphilis on the human body thus
showing that the inherent racism present in the Axis experiments were mirrored
on the “moral” side of the Allies.
This essay focuses on the positive outcomes of the human
experimentation conducted by the scientists of Nazi Germany, Japanese Unit 731,
and those in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. All the experiments were conducted on
cherry-picked groups of people, be it religion or race, with the methods of
experimentation seen in the modern world as wholly inhumane and gruesome. This
essay draws on a variety of sources including numerous journal articles and
books pertaining to the experimentation and its effects after the conclusion of
the war. As this essay contradicts the conventional view of the World War II
era human experimentation being barbaric and a step backward in the medical
field, it draws from papers by those involved and articles pertaining to the
elements of the experiments.
This essay focuses on the human experimentation conducted between
1932 and 1945, with the exclusion of the Syphilis Study which continued to 1972[6].
The experiments performed by the scientists of Nazi Germany, Unit 731, and
Tuskegee were indeed torturous in their execution, but they did yield positive
results for the medical community and led to betterment of medical science.
This interpretation necessitates a reexamination of the product of World War II
human experimentation as being purely destructive and prompts the question that
will be answered in this essay: To what extent did human
experimentation on racial groups in both the Axis and Allied countries of
Japan, Germany, and the United States from 1932-1945 contribute to modern
medical practices/procedures?
[1] Keiichi, Tsuneishi.
"New Facts about US Payoff to Japan's Biological Warfare Unit 731."
Trans. James Orr. The Asia-Pacific Journal 4.8 (2006): 1-4. Google
Scholar. Web. 2 Feb. 2017.
[2] Baader,
Gerhard, Susan E. Lederer, Morris Low, Florian Schmaltz, and Alexander V.
Schwerin. "Pathways to Human Experimentation, 1933-1945: Germany, Japan,
and the United States." Osiris 20 (2005): 205-31. SMU Online
Resources. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.
[3] Keiichi,
Tsuneishi. "Unit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army’s Biological Warfare
Program." Trans. John Junkerman. Asia-Pacific Journal 3.11 (2005):
1-8. SMU Online Resources. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.
[4]
Gomel, Elana.
"From Dr. Moreau to Dr. Mengele: The Biological Sublime." Poetics
Today 21.2 (2000): 393-421. Google Scholar. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.
[5] (Brandt,
Allan M. "Racism and Research: The Case of the Tuskegee Syphilis
Study." The Hastings Center Report 8.6 (1978): 21. SMU Online
Resources. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.)
[6] Thomas, S. B., and S. C.
Quinn. "The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 1932 to 1972: Implications for HIV
Education and AIDS Risk Education Programs in the Black Community." American
Journal of Public Health 81.11 (1991): 1498-505. SMU Online Resources.
Web. 19 Jan. 2017.
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