Results of Death Camp
Experiments:
Should They Be Used?????
Background Information
Nazi doctors conducted
as many as 30 different
types of experiments of
concentration camp
inmates.
They did these without
consent of the victims
who suffered
indescribable pain,
mutilation, permanent
disability, or in the case
of many…death.
“Experiments”
•High Altitude
•Freezing
•Sulfanilamide
•Twins
•Poison
•Tuberculosis
•Phosgene
•Bone, Muscle, Joint Transplants
•Seawater
High Altitude
In 1942, Sigmund Rascher and others conducted highaltitude experiments on prisoners at Dachau. Eager to
find out how best to save German pilots forced to eject
at high altitude, they placed inmates into low-pressure
chambers that simulated altitudes as high as 68,000
feet and monitored their physiological response as they
succumbed and died. Rascher was said to dissect
victims' brains while they were still alive to show that
high-altitude sickness resulted from the formation of tiny
air bubbles in the blood vessels of a certain part of the
brain. Of 200 people subjected to these experiments, 80
died outright and the remainder were executed.
Freezing
To determine the most effective means for treating German
pilots who had become severely chilled from ejecting into the
ocean, or German soldiers who suffered extreme exposure
on the Russian front, Rascher and others conducted freezing
experiments at Dachau. For up to five hours at a time, they
placed victims into vats of icy water, either in aviator suits or
naked; they took others outside in the freezing cold and
strapped them down naked. As the victims writhed in pain,
foamed at the mouth, and lost consciousness, the doctors
measured changes in the patients' heart rate, body
temperature, muscle reflexes, and other factors. When a
prisoner's internal body temperature fell to 79.7°F, the
doctors tried rewarming him using hot sleeping bags, and
scalding baths. Some 80 to 100 patients perished during
these experiments
Sulfanilamide
For the benefit of the German Army, whose frontline soldiers
suffered greatly from gas gangrene, a type of progressive
gangrene, doctors at the Ravensbruck concentration camp
performed studies to test the effectiveness of sulfanilamide
and other drugs in curbing such infections. They inflicted
battlefield-like wounds in victims, then infected the wounds
with bacteria such as streptococcus, tetanus, and gas
gangrene. The doctors aggravated the resulting infection by
rubbing ground glass and wood shavings into the wound,
and they tied off blood vessels on either side of the injury to
simulate what would happen to an actual war wound. Victims
suffered intense agony and serious injury, and some of them
died as a result.
Twins
In an effort to find ways to more effectively multiply the
German race, Dr. Josef Mengele performed
experiments on twins at Auschwitz in hopes of plumbing
the secrets of multiple births. After taking all the body
measurements and other living data he could from
selected twins, Mengele and his collaborators
dispatched them with a single injection of chloroform to
the heart. Of about 1,000 pairs of twins experimented
upon, only about 200 pairs survived.
Poison
Researchers at Buchenwald concentration
camp developed a method of individual
execution by injecting Russian prisoners with
phenol and cyanide. Experimenters also
tested various poisons on the human body by
secreting noxious chemicals in prisoners'
food or shooting inmates with poison bullets.
Victims who did not die during these
experiments were killed to allow the
experimenters to perform autopsies
Tuberculosis
To determine if people had any natural immunities to
tuberculosis, and to develop a vaccine against the
disease, Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer injected live tubercle
bacilli (bacteria that are a major cause of TB) into the
lungs of inmates at the Neuengamme concentration
camp. About 200 adult subjects died, and Heissmeyer
had 20 children from Auschwitz hung in an effort to hide
evidence of the experiments from approaching Allied
forces.
Phosgene
In an attempt to find an antidote to phosgene, a toxic
gas used as a weapon during World War I, Nazi doctors
exposed 52 concentration-camp prisoners to the gas at
Fort Ney near Strasbourg, France. Phosgene gas
causes extreme irritation to the lungs. Many of the
prisoners, who according to German records were
already weak and malnourished, suffered pulmonary
edema after exposure, and four of them died from the
experiments.
Bone, Muscle, and Joint
Transplantation
To learn if a limb or joint from one person could be
successfully attached to another who had lost that limb
or joint, experimenters at Ravensbruck amputated legs
and shoulders from inmates in useless attempts to
transplant them onto other victims. They also removed
sections of bones, muscles, and nerves from prisoners
to study regeneration of these body parts. Victims
suffered excruciating pain, mutilation, and permanent
disability as a result.
Seawater
Dr. Hans Eppinger and others at Dachau conducted
experiments on how to make seawater drinkable. The
doctors forced roughly 90 Gypsies to drink only
seawater while also depriving them of food. The
Gypsies became so dehydrated that they reportedly
licked floors after they had been mopped just to get a
drop of fresh water. The experiments caused enormous
pain and suffering and resulted in serious bodily injury.
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• Few today would disagree about denouncing the
Nazi experimenters as barbaric and their
experiments as little more than sadistic torture
executed under the guise of science.
• As such, many feel that findings from those studies
should never be published or used. However, some
of the research resulted in data that potentially could
save lives today.
• Nazi hypothermia studies, for instance, have been
cited in the medical literature for decades, and
recently several scientists have sought to use the
data in their own work.
You will be asked the following question eight
times: "Based on what you now know, do
you think doctors and scientists should
be able to use data from Nazi death-camp
experiments?"
Each time, you must answer Yes or No to
that question, and each time you will get a
different counterargument meant to challenge
your decision.
Before answering the question for the eighth
and final time, you may elect to read all 14
counterarguments—seven for and seven
against using the data.
"Based on what you now know, do you
think doctors and scientists should be
able to use data from Nazi deathcamp experiments?"
YES
NO
What if you knew that the medical competence of
the Nazi doctors has been questioned?
The Hippocratic Oath, penned by the father of
medicine and held by medical professionals as a
sacred tenet to this day, states in part: "I will use
treatment to help the sick according to my ability and
judgment, but never with a view to injury and
wrongdoing...." The Nazi experimenters not only
violated the oath in the foulest way, causing them to
relinquish forever all rights to be considered doctors,
but their expertise has been called into question, even
by their own countrymen in their own day.
YES
NO
Counterarguments
Counter 1A
"Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve
life. 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 mankind."
—Dr. Fritz Klein, Nazi physician, responding to a
concentration-camp inmate who asked, while
pointing to smoking chimneys in the distance,
"How can you reconcile that with your
[Hippocratic] oath as a doctor?"
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Counter 1B
"I wouldn't trust the man who produced the data [from
the Nazi experiments]; how can you trust a man who
would do that?"
—Seymour Siegel, Executive Director of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council
"Their actions were clear, direct violations of both the
Hippocratic Oath as well as the public's belief that
doctors always look after their patients' well-being."
—Lauren Howell, in "Nazi Medical Experiments: Murder
or Research?"
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CHOICE
Counter 1C
"One characteristic feature of Heissmeyer's experiment is his
extraordinary lack of concern, add this to his gross and total
ignorance in the field of immunology, in particular bacteriology.
He did not then, nor does he now, possess the necessary
expertise demanded in a specialist [on] TB diseases ... He does
not own any modern bacteriology textbook. He is also not
familiar with the various work methods of bacteriology ...
According to his own admission, Heissmeyer was not
concerned about curing the prisoners who were put at his
disposal. Nor did he believe that his experiments would
produce therapeutic results, and he actually counted on there
being detrimental, indeed fatal, outcomes to the prisoners."
—Dr. Otto Prokop, Germany's forensic authority, on the competence of Dr. Kurt
Heissmeyer. Heissmeyer conducted tuberculosis experiments on 20 Jewish
children from Auschwitz whom he later had hung so they could not bear
witness.
What if you knew that many in the medical and
scientific communities consider the Nazi
experiments bad science?
Those who judge the Nazi experiments poor
science cite several reasons. First, drawn as
they were from the death camps,
experimentees were usually malnourished,
emaciated, and severely weakened, and thus
their physiological responses to the
experiments would likely be different from
those of normal, healthy people. Second, Nazi
doctors had political aspirations and sought
results that supported Nazi racial theories.
Third, the data were never replicated and, in an
ethical world, can never be replicated. Finally,
soaked with the blood of their victims, the
experiments were morally tainted, which
renders them scientifically invalid. For these
reasons, many dismiss the experiments as
pseudoscience.
To test how to treat
phosphorus burns, a mixture
of phosphorus and rubber to
inmates' skin, ignited it, and
let it burn for 20 seconds
YES
NO
Counterargument
Counter 2A
"[The experiments were] a ghostly failure as well as a hideous crime ... [They]
revealed nothing which civilized medicine could use."
—Brigadier General Telford Taylor, chief counsel for the prosecution at
Nuremberg "Doctors Trial," 1946-47
"Injecting a half-starved young girl with phenol to see how quickly she will
die or trying out various forms of phosgene gas on camp inmates in the hope
of finding cheap, clean, and efficient modes of killing so the state can
effectively prosecute genocide is not the sort of activity associated with the
term research."
—Dr. Arthur Caplan, bioethicist now at the University of Pennsylvania
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Counter 2B
"I don't see how any credence can be given
to the work of unethical investigators.
Given the source of the information and
the way in which it was obtained, how can
anyone believe it? How can anyone want
to believe it?"
—Dr. Arnold S. Relman, editor of the New
England Journal of Medicine, on the Nazi
hypothermia work
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CHOICE
Counter 2C
"[The Dachau hypothermia experiments were] conducted without
an orderly experimental protocol [and] with inadequate methods
and an erratic execution. ... There is also evidence of data
falsification and suggestions of fabrication. Many conclusions
are not supported by the facts presented. The flawed science is
compounded by evidence that the director of the project
showed a consistent pattern of dishonesty and deception in his
professional as well as his personal life, thereby stripping the
study of the last vestige of credibility. On analysis, the Dachau
hypothermia study has all the ingredients of a scientific fraud,
and rejection of the data on purely scientific grounds is
inevitable."
—Dr. Robert L. Berger, New England Deaconness Hospital and
Harvard Medical School
What if using the Nazi data could set a dangerous
precedent, sanctioning unethical human experiments
and possibly encouraging similarly deplorable acts?
• A brief review of history indicates that the evil perpetrated by the
Nazi doctors is one of degree, not of type. White South African
physicians falsified medical reports of blacks tortured or killed in
prison. From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, New York University
researchers infected mentally retarded children with hepatitis in
order to track the course of the disease and search for a cure. In
1963, doctors at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn,
New York, injected 'live' cancer cells into 22 chronically ill and
debilitated patients; they did not inform the patients that they were
participating in an experiment completely unrelated to treatment of
the disease for which they were hospitalized. These cases may not
be as heinous as the Nazi experiments, but if researchers cite and
use results from the latter, might that not give tacit encouragement
to further unethical studies using human beings?
YES
NO
Counterarguments
Counterargument 3A
• "[U]sing information from the death camps might be seen as
sanctioning the use of results from current unethical research
and thus encourage more of it."
• —Marcia Angell, M.D. [9]
"Doctors in general, it would seem, can all too readily take part
in the efforts of fanatical, demagogic, or surreptitious groups to
control matters of thought and feeling, and of living and dying."
• —Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing
and the Psychology of Genocide, after listing numerous
instances of cases in which doctors throughout the world have
conducted evil acts in the name of nationalism or racism [10]
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CHOICE
Counter 3B
• "To declare the use of the Nazi data ethical, as some of the American
scientists and doctors advocate, would open a Pandora's box and could
become an excuse for any of the Ayatollahs, Kadafis, Stroessners, and
Mengeles of the world to create similar circumstances whereby anyone
could be used as their guinea pig."
• —Eva Mozes Kor, survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's twins experiments at
Auschwitz [11]
•
"While using such data could save lives in some situations ... in a much
larger context it could lead to a way of thinking that would condone taking
some lives in order to save others."
• —A reporter paraphrasing comments made by Dr. Judith Bellin, an
Environmental Protection Agency toxicologist, about using data from Nazi
phosgene experiments [12
What if you knew that many feel that using the data would
make us the Nazi experimenters' moral accessories?
• Many hold that making use of the
data wrenched so brutally from
helpless victims would not only
validate the Nazi doctors'
unthinkable acts, but also make us
the victims' "retrospective torturers"
and them our "retrospective guinea
pigs" . Indeed, Lord Immanuel
Jakobovits, Chief Rabbi of the
British Commonwealth of Nations
and an expert in Jewish medical
ethics, felt use would only serve to
further dishonor the victims while
the late Harvard Medical School
professor Dr. Henry Beecher
believed publishing unethically
obtained medical data would cause
a "far-reaching moral loss to
medicine."
Rudolf Brandt, an SS officer and aide
to Himmler, was found guilty of a host
of war crimes, including conducting
medical experimentation and killing
tuberculosis-infected people.
Sentenced to death, he was hanged
on June 2, 1948
Counterarguments
YES
NO
Counter 4A
• "The idea behind the negative reaction now is that the Nazis were criminals;
we are decent. That's not true. What we've done is not as evil, but it's in the
ballpark."
• —Dr. Arthur Caplan, bioethicist now at the University of Pennsylvania,
commenting about uproar surrounding physiologist Robert Pozos' proposed
use of Nazi data on hypothermia
•
"The conduct of Nazi physician-scientists was barbarous, revolting,
monstrous, devoid of any decency. Their research defiled human beings,
medicine, science, and humanity. They dragged through bloody mud an
honorable profession to which contemporary physician-scientists who now
wish to make use of these results belong."
• —Jay Katz, M.D., Yale University School of Law
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CHOICE
Counter 4 B
• "Today some doctors want to use the only thing left by these victims. They
are like vultures waiting for the corpses to cool so they could devour every
consummable part. To use the Nazi data is obscene and sick. One can
always rationalize that it would save human lives; the question should be
asked, at what cost?"
•
• —Eva Mozes Kor, survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's twins experiments at
Auschwitz
•
"We must not add our numbers to the multitudes of onlookers who slept
peacefully through the nights of anguished cries while dreaming their sweet
dreams of a better tomorrow."
•
• —Dr. Willard Gaylin, psychiatrist and former president of The Hastings
Center, a biomedical ethics thinktank
What if you knew that many survivors of the
Nazi experiments feel strongly that the data
should never be used?
• Among the small minority of those experimented upon who
survived to bring shocking details of the atrocities to the outside
world are a vocal group who would consign the data to oblivion.
Many make the same arguments that modern doctors and
scientists opposed to the data's use make, namely, that using
the information would legitimize the Nazi experimenters and
their damnable undertakings, make us moral accomplices,
further demean the victims, etc. Responses from survivors
asked whether the data should be used ranged from the calm
and reasoned to the incredulous: "No! No! No! I (we) suffered,
and it is no 'medical data' or 'information' whatsoever!!!"
YES
NO
Counterarguments
Counter 5A
• "As much as I am for scientific research for the
betterment of humanity, I do feel that the
scientific data collected from experiments done
on inmates of Nazi concentration camps should
not be used. If I would agree, I feel I [would]
give a stamp of approval to the ways and
means [these] experiments have been
conducted and quasi-legalize [them]."
• —Anonymous survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's
twins experiments at Auschwitz
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Counter 5B
• "[T]he scientist who reuses these data aligns himself
with the values and methods of the Nazi
scientists/doctors by extending their work into
contemporary research, thereby giving it credibility
and sanction. He too is saying first and foremost, 'for
the sake of science' and for the sake of 'progress,'
ignoring the case for humanity."
• —Sara Vigorito, survivor of Mengele's twins
experiments at Auschwitz. Just three years old when
she arrived, Vigorito spent a year in a wooden cage a
yard and a half wide with her twin sister, who died
from repeated injections to her spinal column
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Counter 5 C
• "In the case of the Mengele Twins, copies of the data
should be given to those twins who are still alive. The
data of the victims who are dead should be shredded
and placed in a transparent monument, as evidence
that they exist but cannot be used. It should be a
lesson to the world that human dignity and human life
are more important than any advance in science and
medicine."
• —Eva Mozes Kor, survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's
twins experiments at Auschwitz
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CHOICE
Counter 5 D
• "I consider it inexcusable to dignify those
murderers with the word 'scientist' or
dignify what they did with the word
'research' ... The data should be thrown to
the winds and forgotten."
•
• —Gisela Konopka, concentration-camp
survivor
What if you knew just how much victims
of the experiments suffered?
• "One cannot fully confront the dilemma of using
the results of Nazi experiments," the attorney
and ethicist Baruch Cohen has written, "without
sensitizing one's self to the images of the frozen,
the injected, the inseminated, and the sterilized."
[26] One could add without sensitizing oneself to
eyewitness testimony. Obviously, the hundreds
who died at the hands of Nazi death-camp
doctors cannot tell their story of unfathomable
fear, unbearable pain, and senseless death. One
must rely on those who survived and those who
prisoner during low-pressure
witnessed the execrable atrocities that occurred
experimentation at Dachau,
1942.
in the concentration camps. Here is some of that
testimony:
YES
NO
Counterarguments
Counter 6A
• "The third experiment ... took such an extraordinary course that
I called an SS physician of the camp as witness, since I had
worked on these experiments all by myself. It was a continuous
experiment without oxygen at a [simulated] height of 12
kilometers [39,283 feet] conducted on a 37-year-old Jew in
good general condition. Breathing continued up to 30 minutes.
After four minutes the experimental subject began to perspire
and wiggle his head, after five minutes cramps occurred,
between six and ten minutes breathing increased in speed and
the experimental subject became unconscious; from 11 to 30
minutes breathing slowed down to three breaths per minute,
finally stopping altogether."
• —From a report by Dr. Sigmund Rascher to Heinrich Himmler
dated April 5, 1942 concerning his high-altitude experiments on
prisoners at Dachau concentration camp
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CHOICE
Counter 6 B
• "It was the worst experiment ever made. Two Russian officers were brought
from the prison barracks. Rascher had them stripped and they had to go into
the vat naked. Hour after hour went by, and whereas usually
unconsciousness from the cold set in after 60 minutes at the latest, the two
men in this case still responded fully after two and a half hours. All appeals
to Rascher to put them to sleep by injection were fruitless. After the third
hour one of the Russians said to the other, 'Comrade, please tell the officer
to shoot us.' The other replied that he expected no mercy from this Fascist
dog. The two shook hands with a 'Farewell, Comrade' ... These words were
translated to Rascher by a young Pole, though in a somewhat different form.
Rascher went to his office. The young Pole at once tried to chloroform the
two victims, but Rascher came back at once, threatening us with his gun ...
The test lasted at least five hours before death supervened."
• —Testimony given at the "Doctors Trial" at Nuremberg by Walter Neff, an
Auschwitz prisoner who served as Dr. Sigmund Rascher's medical orderly
during hypothermia experiments
Click HERE for the final
question
What if the Nazi experiments had been
conducted on your mother, your brother,
your child?
• "I offer this challenge to the
hypothermia researchers. As
you page through the research,
have next to it actual photos of
Jews being tortured in the name
of research and see how long
you are able to analyze data.
Better yet, think of your mother
or father floating in that tank and
see if your beliefs about this
subject hold up."
Nazi doctors immerse a
prisoner in ice water during
hypothermia experiments at
Dachau.
Make your
decision
Click On Your Final Decision
•YES
•NO
What if you knew that not publishing and/or using
the data could strengthen the arguments of those
who say the Holocaust never happened?
• So-called Holocaust deniers maintain that the Holocaust itself never took
place. Many who find such arguments absurd and detestable feel that failing
to cite or use the Nazi data might only fan the flames of Holocaust denial. As
such, most scholars, whether or not they advocate using the Nazi data, hold
that the fact that the experiments happened should never be forgotten, lest
such atrocities recur. Thus, Dr. Jay Katz of Yale Law School, who opposes
use, would publish the data in full detail, then condemn them to oblivion [31],
while Ronald Banner of the Jewish Ethical Medical Study Group in
Philadelphia, who does not oppose citation of the data, nevertheless feels
"chagrined that someone would refer to those experiments without
mentioning something about the way the information was gained. It shows a
lack of conscience. There are times that something, morally, stinks so bad
that you have to hold your nose even while you refer to it."
Counterarguments
YES
NO
Counter 1A
• “It sends a chill down every normal human
being’s spine to think of the horrible things the
Nazis did there, but I’m separating the results
and the circumstances. Actually, if the U.S.
doctor [Pozos] dedicated his study to the
memory of those victims of the Nazis, it would
serve as a nice way of reminding people about
the horrible experiments.”
• Ephraim Zuroff, Israeli representative to the
Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles
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Counter 1 B
• “I submit that we must put the Holocaust and the Nazi
experiments directly under the floodlights and on center stage
even if some of us and our past and present are partly
illuminated by the glare. Instead of banning the Nazi data or
assigning it to some archivist or custodial committee, I maintain
that it be exhumed, printed, and disseminated to every medical
school in the world along with the details of methodology and
the names of the doctors who did it, whether or not they were
indicted, acquitted, or hanged. ... Let the students and the
residents and the young doctors know that this was not ancient
history or an episode from a horror movie where the actors get
up after filming and prepare for another role. It was real. It
happened yesterday. ... They tried to burn the bodies and to
suppress the data. We must not finish the job for them.”
• —Dr. Velvl W. Greene, professor of medical ethics at Ben
Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel
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CHOICE
•
Counter 1 C
“The best argument I’ve heard for preserving
the Nazi data is to keep evidence that those
experiments were carried out. As long as the
data are available, evidence that at least some
people did some bad things in Nazi Germany
cannot be denied.”
•
• —Howard M. Spiro, M.D., Department of
Internal Medicine, Yale University
What if you knew that such data could not be
obtained today?
• Hypothermia expert Dr. Robert Pozos had
immersed hundreds of volunteers into ice water
in the years after he founded the University of
Minnesota's Hypothermia Laboratory in 1977.
(He is no longer affiliated with the university.)
But he never let a participant's temperature drop
more than 3.6°F (i.e., below 95°F).
Unburdened by even the slightest sense of
humanity, the Nazi hypothermia experimenters, ,
on the other hand, let their victims' interior body
temperatures drop to 79.7°F before attempting
to revive them. Most died an excruciatingly
painful death as a result. However, some did
revive, and the Nazis found that rapid rewarming
in hot water proved the most effective way to
revive them. In an ethical world, such data would
not exist, but they do exist and could benefit
humanity. Should they simply be lost to science?
At the Nuremberg "Doctors Trial,"
Dr. Alexander points at scars on
the leg of Polish survivor who
endured sulfanilamide
experiments at Ravensbruck
concentration camp.
Counterarguments
YES
NO
Counter 2 A
• "Dr. Rascher, although he wallowed in blood ... and in obscenity
... nevertheless appears to have settled the question of what to
do for people in shock from exposure to cold ... The final report
satisfies all the criteria of objective and accurate observation
and interpretation ... The method of rapid and intensive
rewarming in hot water ... should be immediately adopted as
the treatment of choice by the Air-Sea Rescue Services of the
United States Armed Forces."
• —Maj. Leo Alexander, U.S. Army doctor who served as aide to
the chief counsel of the Nuremberg war-crimes trial and
authored an oft-cited 1945 report on the Dachau hypothermia
experiments. While Alexander later concluded the results were
undependable, other medical experts, most recently
hypothermia researchers Robert Pozos and John Hayward,
have claimed that the data are useful
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Counter 2 B
• "The goal of science is to produce new knowledge. If, during
unethically conducted experiments, one valid scientific fact is
produced, should that information be used as it has been,
referenced in the literature as it has been, or just discarded?"
• —Jay Katz (Yale University School of Law) and Robert S.
Pozos (hypothermia expert)
"I don't want to have to use this data, but there is no other and
will be no other in an ethical world."
• —Dr. John S. Hayward, hypothermia expert at University of
Victoria University, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, on why he used
Nazi hypothermia data in his research
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Counter 2 C
• "To justify the use of Nazi data in a research
article, I would expect scientists to use the
findings only in circumstances where the
scientific validity is clear and where there is no
alternative source of information."
• —Kristine Moe, journalist
If you feel that the Nazi results are tainted because of
the way they were obtained, what if you knew that
many deem information morally neutral?
• Many scientists might argue that while the Nazi experiments were nothing
short of bestial, their results can only be judged scientifically, not morally;
data are neither good nor bad, they are just data. Even if scientists, journal
editors, and others were to judge results on moral grounds, Dr. Eleanor
Singer, editor of Public Opinion Quarterly, considers it "nonsense to talk
about 'enforcing ethical standards' as though these were clear and agreedupon." Until the scientific community reaches a consensus on the degree to
which ethical concerns should govern the spread of scientific knowledge,
Singer maintains, "I would argue that open dissemination, not censorship,
affords the best chance for developing agreed-upon principles of what
constitutes ethical research procedures, and of how potential conflicts
among ethical principles, and between such principles and scientific goals,
are to be resolved."
YES
NO
Counterarguments
Counter 3 A
• "The most powerful argument in defense
of the use of the data gathered by
unethical methods is that the information
gathered is independent of the ethics of
the methods and that the two are not
linked together. In essence, data are
neither evil nor good."
• —Dr. Robert Pozos, hypothermia expert
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Counter 3 B
• "Perhaps the most intriguing question on
which the issue of proper use turns is
whether or not scientific data can acquire
a moral taint. Common sense seems to
indicate that a parcel of information about
the physical world is morally neutral."
• —Brian Folker and Arthur W. Hafner
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Counter 3 C
• "We are talking of the use of the data, not
participation in these heinous studies, not
replication of atrocities. The wrongs perpetrated
were monstrous; those wrongs are over and
done. How could the provenance of the data
serve to prohibit their use?"
• —The late Dr. Benjamin Freedman, formerly a
bioethicist at McGill University in Montreal
What if you knew that the data might
help save lives today?
• Hypothermia expert Robert Pozos believes Nazi
data on rapid rewarming could save lives, while
Dr. John Hayward, also a specialist in
hypothermia, has used Nazi cooling curves to
determine how long cold-water survival suits would
safeguard people at near-fatal temperatures. As
journalist Kristine Moe has pointed out, scientists
and physicians have gained valuable insights from
Detailed notes kept by Jewish
other horrific events in history. Jewish doctors
doctors on children and adults
locked inside the Warsaw Ghetto took copious
who starved to death in the
clinical notes on how their compatriots, many of
Warsaw ghetto were later
published as a seminal study on
them children, perished from starvation; smuggled
hunger disease.
out of the ghetto, those notes were later published
as a landmark study on hunger disease. Survivors
Counterarguments of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki offered a valuable, albeit tragic,
opportunity for specialists to learn more about
radiation sickness. With human lives at stake,
should we consider the Nazi data any differently?
YES NO
Counter 4 A
• "The argument that the information [from the Dachau
hypothermia experiments] could be used to save
human lives is a powerful one...."
• —Dr. Robert Pozos, hypothermia expert
•
"I'm trying to make something constructive out of it. I
use it with my guard up, but it's useful."
• —Dr. John S. Hayward, hypothermia expert at
University of Victoria University, Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada, on why he used Nazi hypothermia data in his
research
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CHOICE
Counter 4 B
• "We won't argue that the experiments were well
reported or well designed, but compared to
what we had, they offered a measure of
improvement. They obviously had a lot of flaws.
But we felt compelled to use it because it
provided dose-response data."
• —John Vandenberg, EPA project manager in
charge of regulatory review of phosgene gas,
on why he condoned citing data from the Nazi
phosgene experiments
If the data have a chance to benefit people
today, are we not morally obligated to use
them?
• The United States produces about one billion pounds of
phosgene gas a year for use in manufacturing plastics and
pesticides. Yet phosgene causes lung irritation and fluid buildup and can making breathing difficult if not impossible. To
assess the risks to factory workers and those living nearby, the
Environmental Protection Agency thought of using Nazi data on
phosgene-gas experiments, but decided it was immoral. As one
writer commented, "Is it fair to those people currently being
exposed to the chemical to pretend that applicable data do not
exist? Can the ethical questions be so compelling that we
ignore information that might conceivably reduce the amount of
human suffering and misery currently being experienced?"
YES
NO
Counterarguments
Counter 5 A
• "We cannot imply any approval of the methods. Nor,
however, should we let the inhumanity of the
experiments blind us to the possibility that some good
may be salvaged from the ashes."
• —Kristine Moe, journalist
• "Perhaps justice would ultimately be served if we were
to allow life to emerge from the Nazi murders."
• —Baruch Cohen, attorney and ethicist
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CHOICE
Counter 5 B
• "As a child of survivors of the Holocaust, I
have strong empathy for those opposed to
the data's use. Nevertheless, as a physician
who deals with children and has seen them
comatose, brain damaged, and dead from
hypothermia, my sense is that to save one
child through the use of this information is
worthwhile."
• —Anonymous medical doctor
What if you knew that many survivors of the
medical experiments feel that the data should
be used?
• The first three opinions given below come from
survivors of Dr. Josef Mengele's twins
experiments at Auschwitz. Dr. Nancy L. Segal,
a psychologist, quoted the survivors in her
article "Twin Research at Auschwitz-Birkenau:
Implications for the Use of Nazi Data Today."
YES
NO
Counterarguments
CHOICE
Counter 6 A
• "If these experiments will be of any help to humanity, then I am in favor of
them being used as needed."
"I think that the data collected in experiments conducted on us should by all
means be used, since there were a variety of methods used, and I am
certain that the data can be very beneficial to today's doctor."
"It appears that, at least in some cases, there was an attempt to induce
illness by injecting bacteria and then an attempt to cure these illnesses, that
is to say, we served as laboratory animals in the hands of the criminal,
Mengele, and this type of research should of course be made available to
the world."
"I wore a number in Dachau. I have two Belgian friends who went through
the procedures of Dr. Rascher ... I see no reason why the results obtained
should not be used for further research."
• —Unnamed concentration-camp survivor
Might not using the data lend a belated dignity to the
victims, so that their lives were not lost for nothing?
• "Of course, nobody in their right mind condones
the experiment. The question is, Given that this
fiendish thing was done, what do you do with the
information that exists. ... I suspect that the
prisoners would have wanted to have the
information used to help somebody."
• —Todd Thorslund, vice president of ICF-Clement,
an environmental consulting company that wrote a
risk-assessment report for the Environmental
Protection Agency that cited Nazi phosgene
experiments
A Dachau prisoner during a
high-altitude experiment.
Final
Decision
• "The suffering is done—let someone benefit from
all the pain."
• —Lucien A. Ballin, member of a military
intelligence assault force that helped unearth Nazi
medical-experiments data in 1945