Jenna Dutton

UWRT 1102-005
Tonya Wertz Orbaugh
November 9, 2015
Experiments conducted on the Jews during the Holocaust: A Research Review
The Nazis triggered a large amount of harm to the Jews during the World War II in many
ways that people cannot imagine. Thousands of Jews were involved in painful, sometimes
deadly, experiments that were directed by German physicians without their consent. Many
wonder how somebody can have the guts to cause so much humiliation to a person, but it did not
even phase the Germans. The Nazi Medical Experiments were conducted in order to gain crucial
information on how to prevent a type of disease or a theory that was created by the Germans.
There were around thirty medical experiments that were conducted in the concentration camps
including sterilization, traumatic injuries, genetics or interrogation and torture. People look at
doctors or physicians as someone that goes the extra mile to try and save someones life, but
unfortunately the doctors during the Holocaust violated the expectation positioned in them by
humanity. Although the Jews did not want to cooperate while the experiments were being
conducted on them, many had to because if they did not do what the Germans wanted them to do
they were killed right away. When WWII was over in 1945, many of the doctors that created the
unimaginable harm to the Jews were able to escape their crimes against humanity.
There were many different kinds of experiments that the Jews had to go through that can
be classified into two categories. The first category consists of experiments aimed at enabling
the survival of Axis military personnel. In Dachau, the first concentration camp created for

prisoners, the German air force had physicians that conducted high-altitude experiments (Nazi
Medical Experiments). These experiments were conducted so that the Germans could
determine how high up a person could go in order to parachute down to safety. They were
conducted in low-pressure chambers where the Germans would change the pressure inside the
chamber, leading to many deaths. Physicians would also conduct freezing experiments at
Dachau to find a treatment for hypothermia (Nazi Medical Experiments). The Jews would be
submerged into tanks of ice cold water for hours until the physicians got the data they needed.
The second category aimed at testing pharmaceuticals and treatment methods for
illnesses and injuries. There were several concentration camps, some including Sachsenhausen,
Natzweiler or Neuengamme, where the Germans would test the immunization compounds for the
prevention of many diseases. The Germans were trying to find a cure for several diseases
including malaria, yellow fever, infectious hepatitis and tuberculosis when they were conducting
these experiments on the Jews (Nazi Medical Experiments). Some children who survived, that
are now elderly, have little memory of the experiments while others having memorys that may
not be hundred percent accurate. At the camp called Ravensbrueck, bone-grafting was
conducted on the Jews to test the effectiveness of newly developed sulfa drugs, which are
supposed to kill bacteria and fungi by interfering with their metabolism (Nazi Medical
Experiments). Experiments were also conducted at these camps to test possible antidotes where
the Jews were exposed to phosgene and mustard gas.
The Germans were looking for twins when they arrived at camps so they could conduct
twin experiments on them. If one twin could not survive through these experiments, the other
would automatically be killed as well. Andy Walker, the writer of The twins of Auschwitz,
states as well as twins, Mengele experimented on dwarves, giants and Romas. We can classify

if someone is a twin, but how did the Germans classify a person as a dwarf or giant? It makes
you wonder if there was a certain height they had to be, or if they just picked who they wanted
to. Did the Germans just break the Jews into categories by hair color, hair length or race when
determining if a person was classified as a dwarf or giant? Josef Mengele was a well-known
researcher who studied twins at the Institute for Heredity Biology and Racial Hygiene in
Frankfort (Walker). Jona Laks, a survivor of the twin experiments explains in The twins of
Auschwitz, that Mengele removed organs from people without anesthetic, and if one twin died
the other would be murdered. It was important to the Germans that both of the twins survived
the experiments conducted on them, because both would be murdered if they could not survive
the pain or torture set out on them. I feel that this quote really speaks to me because so many
questions pop in my head about it. This quote makes me wonder if the Germans were frustrated
when they had to kill a set of twins after they put the time and effort into them in the first place.
I also wonder about how many Jews were actually able to withstand these experiments, because
without having anesthesia a person cannot endure a large amount of pain without dying from it
so I do not feel that these experiments were actually beneficial to the Germans.
In 1939, the Nazis began to experiment with poison gas so they would be able to kill a
large number of Jews at one time. Gas chambers were at many camps including Bernburg,
Brandenburg and Sonnenstein. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum created an
article titled Gassing Operations, which states at the height of deportations, up to 6,000 Jews
were gassed each day at Auschwitz. When thinking about the number of Jews killed a day just
by gas chambers, it makes you wonder how many Jews were killed a day with all of the
experiments combined. It also makes me think how they managed to keep the camps going, with
the labor that were held out by Jews, if so many died a day from experiments. Jews were tricked

to come inside the gas chambers by being told they would be going into showers. An article
called Gassing Operations, that was mentioned before also said The Nazi and Ukrainian
guards sometimes shouted at and beat the victims who were ordered to enter the showers with
raised arms to allow as many people as possible to fit into the gas chambers. We already know
that the Nazis caused harm to Jews, but knowing that they were tricked into the gas chambers
makes the whole situation even more inhumane. We do not know actually how many times Jews
were tricked a day during the Holocaust to do something that could potentially result in death.
After completing this paper, I now can say that I have built a stronger background
knowledge about the experiments that were conducted during the Holocaust. Typing a paper for
me is like studying for a test because after typing a paper I feel as though I have gain more
information about whatever I have written about. When writing this paper, I wanted to make
sure that I included sources that would be able to educate the readers with important information
about the experiments conducted but also show what I learned when researching about my topic
from online resources. I chose the quotes and sources I did because I felt they really gave strong
background information that was important when learning about the experiments. I feel that as a
writer I was able to connect these sources together, in a way that made the information in this
paper flow. The weekly writings that were previously assigned before this paper really helped
me when throughout this research review. I was able to take information that I said in those
writings and develop a stronger sentence off of what I had already said about it previously.

Works Cited
"Gassing Operations." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust
Memorial Council, 18 Aug. 2015. Web. 4 Nov. 2015.
"Nazi Medical Experiments." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States
Holocaust Memorial Council, 18 Aug. 2015. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.
Andy Walker. "The Twins of Auschwitz - BBC News." BBC News. Web. 4 Nov. 2015.

Peer Response
The peer response this time was a little different than the last peer response because we
had to get together outside of class. I will say that it was harder to for me to tell the reader what
kind of mistakes and errors that were made throughout her paper because it was through email
and not face to face. Last time I was able to verbally tell the reader what he needed to do to
change his mistakes and he was able to understand how I felt about it. But unfortunately this
time I was unable to talk it out like I wanted to so I could make sure the writer could understand
how I felt about the paper. On the bright side, I was able to give the reader some helpful
thoughts in her paper that would grab the audiences attention throughout the introduction
paragraph. There were a couple of sentences that did not make sense to me once I kept reading
them out loud, so I made note to what she could do to change the sentence for the audience to
understand it a little better. She did a good job dialoging the quotes that were used in the paper,
and it was obvious that the quotes used were very important to her research review topic. I also
was able to give her some tips on MLA documentation because once she mentioned a name that
wrote the quote, she then sited the source but I told her that she did not have to site the piece of
information if it was obvious to the reader where it came from. I also gave her the advice of
reading her paper out loud because that it when you will be able to tell if something does not
make sense. Overall, I love doing peer reflections because I like being able to give advice to
others that will make their paper better but also get advice that will make my paper better as
well.