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Victims of Human Experiments and Coercive Research under National Socialism: Gender and Racial Aspects

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Human Subjects Research after the Holocaust

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Abstract

The analysis presented in this chapter shows that multiple types of unethical human subjects research occurred under National Socialism. Not only were large numbers of victims affected, but also the number of surviving victims was far higher than anticipated. During the war, prisoners clandestinely documented coerced experiments. On liberation, former prisoners documented the effects of experiments, including the sulfonamide experiments on 74 Polish women at Ravensbrück. These efforts to document Nazi medical experiments had a profound impact on the Allied scientific intelligence and war crimes investigation teams during the immediate postwar aftermath. The British liberators of Bergen-Belsen encountered survivors of Auschwitz experiments. The medical trial at Nuremberg was the only one of the United States-mounted successor trials at Nuremberg that relied extensively on victims’ evidence. At the same time, the scientific intelligence officer Thompson set out to document all coerced Nazi experiments as “medical war crimes” in an International Scientific Commission. The aim of fully documenting the experiments is now being carried out by a comprehensive project, which is reconstructing the life histories of over 20,000 victims. The results are discussed here in terms of gender and the Nazi category of race.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a Treite victim deposition, see Kormornicka (1952).

  2. 2.

    I acknowledge here Anna von Villiez (database design), Aleksandra Loewenau (Polish victims), Marius Turda (Greek victims), and Nichola Farron (Russian/ Soviet victims).

  3. 3.

    My thanks to Aleksandra Loewenau for this data from the Victims of Human Experiments project. For the victims of Schumann and Clauberg, see Weinberger (2009).

  4. 4.

    The Nazis abolished Austrian nationality in March 1938. Therefore, our project takes March 1938 as the date for when nationality is given.

  5. 5.

    As of October 8, 2013.

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Acknowledgements

Wellcome Trust Grant No 096580/Z/11/A on research subject narratives. AHRC GRANT AH/E509398/1 Human Experiments under National Socialism. Conference for Jewish Material Claims Against Germany Application 8229/ Fund SO 29. My thanks also to CMATH for the opportunity of visiting archives in Majdanek and Auschwitz.

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  1. Department of History, Philosophy and Religion, Oxford Brookes University, Gypsy Lane, Headington, Oxford, Oxon, OX3 0BP, UK

    Paul Weindling (Wellcome Trust Research Professor in the History of Medicine)

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  1. Baylor College of Medicine, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Nursing, Center for Medicine after the Holocaust, Houston, Texas, USA

    Sheldon Rubenfeld

  2. The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Nursing, Houston, Texas, USA

    Susan Benedict

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Weindling, P. (2014). Victims of Human Experiments and Coercive Research under National Socialism: Gender and Racial Aspects. In: Rubenfeld, S., Benedict, S. (eds) Human Subjects Research after the Holocaust. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05702-6_11

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