Should doctors and scientists be able to use data from Nazi death camp experiments? The Holocaust was the genocide of many groups, including Jews, by the German Nazi administration during World War II. Nazi doctors conducted as many as 30 different types of experiments that resulted in excruciating pain, permanent incapacitation, and often death. For example, physicians in Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the main death camps in Poland, were especially interested in experimenting on young twins, where they even amputated their appendages, replacing them with the other twins. Also, in the Neuengamme concentration camp, Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer, a Nazi doctor, injected live tubercle bacilli, the primary cause of tuberculosis, into the lungs of prisoners to determine if people had any natural immunities to the disease and to develop a vaccine against it. The Nazi medical experimentation has been a major controversy in today's advancing medical field; whether information from these horrific experiments should be used or not. Doctors and scientists today should not be able to use data because the experiments were inhumane and brutal, and many in the medical and scientific communities consider the Nazi data to have been obtained through improper scientific studies, likely deeming it inaccurate.
     

From an ethical standpoint, the experiments were cruel and devalued human life to a great extent. Doctors at the Ravensbruck death camp performed studies to test the effectiveness of sulfanilamide and other drugs to curb infections, in which they “...inflicted battlefield-like wounds in victims, then infected the wounds...aggravated the resulting infection by rubbing ground glass and wood shavings into the wound…” (The Experiments by Peter Tyson). If they were to do experiments on soldiers who were injured in combat, that would be an acceptable procedure to better further combat medicine, but to deliberately harm otherwise healthy individuals, or as healthy as a death camp inmate can be, is the epitome of villainy. On top of that, Nazi wickedness increased as experimenters wanted victims to suffer more intense agony than a simulation of a battlefield wound, a leading cause of death. Heissmeyer, a Nazi bacteriologist, admits that he “...was not concerned about curing the prisoners who were put at his disposal. Nor did he believe that his experiments would produce therapeutic results, he counted on there being detrimental, indeed fatal, outcomes to the prisoners” (Death Camp Experiments). The Jews were treated like rats in a lab experiment, to their disposal and without being interacted with as people. The Nazis denied Jews their humanity. The inhumanity of Nazi medical experiments has eclipsed all acts of barbarism that history has witnessed, and on this fact alone, no result of this cruelty should ever be used by the civilized.
     The trials run by Nazis were unwilling to adhere to proper rules of scientific conduct. For instance, “...experimentees were usually malnourished, emaciated, and severely weakened” (Death Camp Experiments). The horrendous conditions of concentration camps significantly depleted the victims and made them prone to illness and diseases, so the experimentees physiological responses to the experiments would likely be different from those of healthy, normal people. Unlike the procedures the Nazi doctors followed, to formulate a conclusion in modern scientific studies, the data has to have been based on tests run in controlled conditions to prove the accuracy of the experiment, and therefore, the Nazi data is faulty. In the Dachau concentration camp, one of the first in Germany, Nazi doctors studied hypothermia on inmates, which were “conducted without an orderly experimental protocol and with inadequate methods...there is also evidence of data falsification and suggestions of fabrication” (Death Camp Experiments). The basic information essential for documenting an orderly experimental protocol and evaluating the results is not provided. Only an impression of the scope of the study can be formed, reflecting an incomplete and disorganized approach. Knowing this, the methods of study were defective. In conclusion, the Dachau hypothermia research and many other experiments reveal critical shortcomings in scientific content and credibility.
     

Some feel scientists and doctors should be able to use the data from Nazi death camp experiments because the information could help save lives, but political bias manipulated the data, deeming the results inaccurate. The experiments were part of the Nazi political agenda, influenced by “...political aspirations and sought results that supported Nazi racial theories” (Death Camp Experiments). This indicates that Nazis would be likely to ignore facts that opposed their methods as the remaining information they wished to obtain was “proof” of Aryan supremacy. In the case of experiments comparing Aryans to Jews and other groups, it is entirely possible that the results were artificially skewed to show Aryans in the better light. “And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of humanity,” (Death Camp Experiments) claims Nazi physician Dr. Fritz Klein. The Nazi doctor believes the world would be better if Jews were exterminated, demonstrating the hatred he and other Nazis had towards the Jewish population. With this in mind, the treatment of the experimenters and the selection of sample sizes for the experiments could have influenced the data and conclusions drawn from the tests to prove Jewish inferiority and unimportance in the world of the superior German. Due to the Nazis’ bigotry present during the conduction of the experiments, the data recorded is not a reliable foundation for modern research.
     

In conclusion, permission to use the data from Nazi-run concentration camp experiments should not be granted to physicians and researchers due to the atrocities, poor experimental design, and inexact politicized science present in the scientific trials. The argument against unethical scientific experiments like the ones conducted throughout Europe during the Holocaust is far from over. Although Nazi tests have been widely discredited, people must always be vigilant for current trials and research that does not meet standards the world has set as a response to the mass scale slaughter of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and non-Aryans. By acting together, the world can compel its leaders to exercise their responsibility to protect innocent men, women, and children from brutal regimes.