Now that I’ve run out of old poetry, I figured I’d continue on the World War II/Holocaust chain of thought from about a month ago, when I brought up my granddad’s account of the Blitz. This time, it’s an article I wrote for school about the medical experiments conducted at the camps.
We are taught that the concentration camps were used to kill the Nazi’s victims and enemies. They also served to incarcerate people whom the Nazis believed were a security threat and to exploit forced labor. The lesser known use of these camps, however, was medical experimentation.
With theoretically “inferior” subjects in the camps, doctors could experiment without worrying about the patient’s wellbeing. They were, for all attempts and purposes, disposable, allowing the medical personnel to operate at risk to the subject’s life without qualms. As a result, many of those who were experimented on during this time did not survive the tests, or were severely injured in the process.
They did a combination of experiments based in curiosity, efficiency tests, and attempts at finding cures and solutions to problems without risking the lives of their own in the process. The term “curiosity” here sounds innocent; believe me, it was not. They put twins through inhumane tests, compared how different ethnicities withstood various diseases, and collected heterochromatic eyes. They tested efficiency of their various methods of murdering people and of sterilization.
As for the other tests, they did everything from infecting patients with deadly diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and more, and then trying to cure them, to bone grafting attempts, to exposing them to chemical weaponry in hope of finding antidotes, to forcing them to drink seawater (attempting to make it drinkable) to freezing them (finding a treatment for hypothermia) to killing them with simulated high altitudes (what altitude is safe for pilots to parachute from?).
It is unknown exactly how many people were experimented on in the camps. There is a minimum of 15,754 documented victims, but it is likely that there were many more, considering the Nazis’ notoriety for leaving these kind of statistics undocumented.
