Inhuman Research: Medical Experiments in German Concentration Camps

by Alfred Pasternak

More than sixty years after the events, the medical experiments conducted in German concentration camps remain a relatively little known chapter of the Holocaust historiography.
After discussing the nazification of German medicine, the author documents the various experiments followed by their ethical evaluation. Finally, he presents the name and biographical data of the doctors actively involved in the experiments, and also photos of the main perpetrators.

397 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Terri Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am working on a Master's thesis on the Nazi camps and this is part of my research. This is a gut-wrenching book. The author was the only child from his community in Hungary to survive Auschwitz and he lost close to 100 members of his family to the camps. Imagine 100 members of your family plus all of your childhood friends and classmates dying in these camps for absolutely no reason. He dedicated the book to his sweet, quiet, loving grandmother who entered Auschwitz on her walking cane and as he puts it, "was reduced to a few ounces of ash before the end of a day." I am glad I am an Atheist when I read this- I would be in a rage at any god or goddess I believed in who would sit on its ass and watch this and not stop it.

There are gruesome details in the form of testimony during the war crimes trials that make me feel like passing out. These experiments were often for the military to find out how to protect their men. Saltwater experiments involved making prisoners go without food for a week all the while drinking seawater. Those who didn't die went mad. Those that went mad were killed. The idea was to see how long sailors could live if shipwrecked and pilots if they were shot down from the air. Other experiments involved tying prisoners to stretchers naked and leaving them outside in sub-freezing weather all night while drenching them with ice water every hour, purposely infecting prisoners with typhus and treating only half of them with vaccines Nazis had developed prior to infecting them (testing the effectiveness of the vaccines against typhus much like a clinical trial while cruelly killing others with typhus), and purposely breaking bones in prisoners' bodies and not treating them or amputating limbs and grafting them onto another amputee. There are some I can't even bring myself to talk about. They treated these people like inanimate objects with no mercy or feeling.