The first ethical issue in the Nazi experiment that I found is the autonomy of the patient

and his right for information. The doctors in Nazi Germany believe that they did not need to
consider informed consent. All records indicate that the subjects/prisoners did not consent to
any of the experiments. In many cases, experiments were performed by unqualified persons
and under the most horrendous physical conditions. All of the experiments were conducted
with no thought or precautions to the wellbeing of the subject from the possibilities of injury,
disability, or death. They did not have any difficulty designating the mentally retarded, habitual
criminals, the physically handicapped, patients with chronic diseases, as those less valuable
members of society, referred to as “life unworthy of life”, and they could be legitimately
sacrificed to improve life for the majority of the population. It even expanded from mentally
retarded and undesirable over time to include anyone opposed to the Nazi regime which gave
rise to discrimination and racist. This give rise to the first principle of the Nuremberg code:
voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that This means that
the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be
able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud,
deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have
sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to
enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

The second ethical issue that I found from the Nazi experiment and what really made
me angry is the experimenter’s inhumane treatment towards their human subjects. One of this
is the freezing/hypothermia experiment. Their intentions were good: to improve the lives of
their soldiers who always suffer from freezing cold. However, their methods are not. They put
the victim in an icy vat of water for up to eight hours at a time, or to put the victim outside
naked, strapped to a stretcher, in sub-zero temperatures for 9 to 14 hours, as the victims
screamed with pain as their bodies froze. The resuscitation or warming experiments by various
means were equally as cruel and painful to the subjects as the freezing experiments, and
resulted in horrible deaths. Their cruelty and unethical behavior made thousands of people to
suffer in extreme pain, die in an inhumane way and live their lives forever scarred. What is even
laughable is the presence of doctors there who should have been advocating for the better
treatment of this people and stopping the atrocious deeds that they are doing. To ensure that
these medical experiments on human beings are conforming to well-defined ethical standards
and will supersede the justification that such experiments may yield results for the “greater
good of society”, the Nuremberg Code has the following principles: The experiment should be
so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury; No
experiment should be conducted, where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or
disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental
physicians also serve as subjects; The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that
determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment;
Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the
experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death; During the
course of the experiment, the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an
end, or the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if
the continuation of the experiment will jeopardize the life of the experimental subject.