During World War II, prisoners held in German concentration camps were victims of many torturous experiences. Nazi concentration camps have historically been considered one of the worst examples demonstrating how low humanity can fall. There are not many circumstances that show such blatant disregard for ethics and basic human rights. Adolf Hitler took advantage of the ongoing war to completely set aside ethics and conduct experiments on prisoners, even if they did not agree. He adopted the pseudoscience of eugenics for Aryan racial superiority and ordered the euthanasia (painless killing) of genetically unfit and mentally ill people before concentration camps were established. Horrific stories have emerged from the camps, most of them involving medical experiments performed by camp doctors. Nazi doctors took complete advantage of prisoners to conduct torturous, inhumane, and sadistic medical experiments. Contrary to popular belief, some experiments were not based on any scientific fact: they were specifically designed to harm and injure prisoners, subjecting them to agony that would ultimately end in their death. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayThe experiments independently caused a complete reevaluation of previous ethics and gave way to the invention of new ethical laws to be respected. Once the war was over, there was a huge call for punishment and justice for what had been done by the Nazis. The Nuremberg Trials hosted a special trial of doctors to try to bring justice to those who were murdered during the war. Twenty-three people were put on trial, twenty of whom were Nazi doctors, and twenty were accused of conspiracy, war crimes, crimes against humanity and membership of criminal organizations. Of the twenty-three defendants, seven were executed, seven others were acquitted, and the rest served prison terms (although most of them did not serve their full sentences). The trials led to a reevaluation of scientific and medical ethics. In August 1947 the Nuremberg Code was created, which since its creation has been fundamental to the formation of ethics. He rewrote the laws about what was allowed for human experimentation and established new laws for psychological research, as well as medical and pharmaceutical research. The code provides ten strict ethical guidelines to follow when conducting medical or scientific experiments on human subjects. The guidelines are: The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. The experiment should be such as to produce fruitful results for the good of society, not achievable by other methods or means of study and not of a random and unnecessary nature. The experiment should be designed in such a way and based on the results of animal testing and knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem being studied. the expected results will justify carrying out the experiment. The experiment should be conducted in such a way as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury. No experiment should be conducted where there is a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments in which experimental doctors 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. Adequate preparations should be madeand provide adequate facilities to protect the experimental subject from even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified people. The highest degree of skill and care should be required during all phases of the experiment of those who conduct or participate in the experiment. During the course of the experiment, the human subject should be free to terminate the experiment if he has reached a physical or mental state in which continuation of the experiment seems impossible to him. During the course of the experiment, the responsible scientist must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any time if he has reasonable grounds to believe, in the exercise of good faith, superior skill and careful judgment which require of him that continued of the experiment is likely to cause injury, disability or death to the experimental subject. The code isn't just for research; the guidelines have also been used in the practice of medical ethics. The most important thing to note is the need for consent from patients and subjects. Nazi experiments have caused medical and scientific ethics to become of great importance in the growing scientific world of the twenty-first century. In the past, it had never been required to specify rules and laws for human experimentation, although the emphasis was on the treatment of human beings as such. Despite the seriousness and importance of the Nuremberg Code, it has never been adopted by any nation or institution as a new code of ethics. Today, ethics laws reflect what came before them. A popular experiment, the results of which have been useful to science today, is hypothermia and hypothermia resuscitation. The experiments were conducted for the Nazi high command and were conducted on men to simulate the conditions suffered by the armies on the Eastern Front. Thousands of German soldiers died of hypothermia or were weakened by cold injuries. The experiments were conducted under the leadership of Dr. Sigmund Rascher in Birkenau, Dachau and Auschwitz. The freezing experiments were divided into two parts: determining how long it takes to lower body temperatures to death and how to safely bring them back to life from low body temperatures without harming or killing them. There were two main methods used to freeze the victim. They either put the person in a tub of ice water, or they put them outside naked in subzero temperatures. Bathing in ice water has been proven to be the fastest way to lower body temperature. They used healthy young Jews or Russians, usually stripped naked and prepared for the experiment. To prepare them for the experiment, they inserted an insulated probe into their rectum to measure the drop in temperature. The probe was held in place by a metal ring, which was expandable, and was adjusted to open inside the rectum to keep it in place. The victims were then placed in the tub filled with cold water and began to freeze. The information obtained from the experiment was that most of the victims lost consciousness and died when the body temperature reached 25 C. The second method used was to tie the victims to a stretcher and put them outside naked. The extreme winters of Auschwitz made it an easy and accessible way to test their theories. Joseph Mengele was one of the main doctors at the Auschwitz concentration camp, leading many gruesome experiments, including experiments based on eugenics. Many of the experiments were based on strange Nazi racial theories about who was “Aryan” and who was not. The question of the existence of distinct human races is itself controversial. No modern scientist will agree that anything like this existsto the Aryan race. Once the Nazis had Germany completely under control in 1933, they decided to shape German society according to their ideal image of what Germans should be. A big step forward towards this goal came with the entry into force, on 14 July 1933, of the Sterilization Law (also known as the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases). The law stated that people who had or suffered from specific diseases could be sterilized (either consensually or otherwise) to prevent the spread of hereditary diseases. Experiments done to deduce whether the Aryan race was superior to other races yielded no results, leading Mengele to initiate a new type of experiment. Following the inconclusive eugenics experiments conducted by Dr. Mengele, he began his twin project. He would pick up twins at docks, train stations, etc., separating them from their parents and taking them to places other than their parents. He would order that the parents be sent to different concentration camps or killed. He used several sets of experiments and ongoing tests to try to understand whether twins are related in one way or another, no matter whether they were fraternal or identical. He infected Jews and Gypsies, fraternal and identical twins with the same amount of typhus bacteria, and took blood several times for chemical analysis in Berlin to follow the course of the disease and see how it progressed. According to Dr. Nyiszli (a Jewish prison doctor and forced assistant), they also worked with tuberculous twins. The letters and reports written by Dr. Mengele to Professor Von Verschuer (a Nazi medical researcher) were destroyed by the latter, in order to hide the brutalities and unethical procedures applied to the prisoners held captive. Since no original documentation of the experiments has survived, we rely on a variety of eyewitness accounts. Doctor Mengele and Professor von Verschuer have not solved their problem. In an attempt to research photogenic eye pigmentation and the heredity of eye color, Mengele used twins in (painful) experiments to try to change eye color. The Nazi goal was to find out whether the structure and color of the eyes could be used to determine the "race" (Aryan or Jewish) of the test subject. Although it may seem incredible, many of Mengele's theories are still in development and have been subjected to further research to this day. His focus on twin births showed up in studies of fertility drugs, which led some women to give birth to quadruplets up to octuplets. His earlier research in genetic engineering morphed into what is now called gene editing, which led scientists to remove parental defects in DNA sequences. Instead of testing on humans and animals, fortunately the technology we have today has allowed scientists to turn to robotic testing where computers are used to analyze traumatic effects on mammals and come up with protective measures. There are two important things to remember when reflecting on the research conducted by Joseph Mengele and the rest of the "Mad Doctors." One is that the Nazis supplied concentration camp prisoners for experiments as an intense form of torture; No one in the SS took the research seriously, and Mengele regularly submitted reports to Nazi medical departments, but kept most of his findings to himself. This has led to developments remaining unknown and unexplored. Second, the Nazis provided almost no funding for the program for which Mengele was responsible. They spent almost alltheir funds for development in military research. Going back to some of the more important experiments that have been conducted, the hypothermia experiments are what have allowed us to now have the full capacity to send people into space. The central aim of the experiment was to understand how to help the human body cope with the cold and how much pressure it could withstand. They were very eager to study hypothermia and wrote a book about it; the book explains how to survive in cold weather conditions and is still used today, almost unchanged, by all NATO troops. Some say it was the most useful because it taught the Nazis how the cold affected their soldiers. They also attempted to find vaccines for diseases commonly found in the camps such as polio. They were able to cure other diseases common in the camps such as typhoid and tuberculosis. Their experiment on rapid pressurization and depressurization of the human body was conducted for studies on submarine operations. The human body could experience the sensation of pressure in submarines at great depths. The results of research conducted by doctors gave them answers on how to avoid bends when swimming from a sunken submarine. People were injured, paralyzed, and killed during these experiments, but those deaths were not entirely in vain. Many horrific experiments on Jews, gypsies and other unfortunate people led to the development of the G-suit. This is a suit used to help pilots in high-speed dives prevent them from suffering the effects of increased gravitational pressure on the body. The Germans, particularly the Nazi doctors, were the people who introduced this technology and it seems that few of their experiments on reluctant human subjects, in order to obtain this information, were helpful in the technology and developments that we get today. Without these experiments we would not have been able to send people into deep sea or space. This research is still used today to save countless lives. A good number of the experiments arose since they were not part of a continuous study like the previous two. There are no original documents surviving from the other experiments. Therefore, we rely on several eyewitness accounts. The peculiar experiments involved doing things like: sewing twins together with the goal of creating conjoined twins, castration surgeries, organ removal, and amputations. Experts in the fields of history, medicine and law gathered to discuss human experiments. All they had to say was that Mengele's research was futile. In some cases this is true and the research did not even comply with the scientific methods of the time. There are some cases of prisoners' bodies continuing to be used after death. Some of the most enduring useful knowledge includes something called "Pernkopf's Atlas," which is a medical text of color plates of the human body that was given in such fine detail that it has never been improved upon and is still used in medical texts. . Pernkopf and his apprentices acquired over 1400 cadavers to dissect for their drawings. Nearly all of the corpses were mistreated prisoners, most of them Jews or political prisoners, many of whom may have been executed solely for the purpose of creating the drawings. Once the drawings were completed, the artists signed them with tiny swastikas and SS runes, which were then removed in more recent editions. Tens of thousands of doctors have been trained in human anatomy using this Atlas. Drug therapies, surgical techniques, and transplant techniques designed to study war medicine were adopted, but the work was performed sloppily with.