Nazi Human Experiments

The Nazis upheld the belief in the superiority of the German race and perceived Jews as the foremost threat, which extended to Black people, homosexuals, Romani individuals, Polish civilians, Soviet soldiers, Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as persons with disabilities. This also encompassed anyone who opposed the Nazi regime.

This ideology led to a campaign of racial cleansing, executed through imprisonment, sterilization, castration, and murder.

Furthermore, between 1942 and 1945, a series of appalling human experiments were conducted on the prisoners held in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. These experiments were tantamount to torture.



Nazi human experimentation - Wikipedia

Nazi Medical Experiments | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org)

 and here is the awsome book i read that inspired this episode

Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans: Spitz, Vivien: 9781591810322: Amazon.com: Books

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
The Nazis believed in the purity of the German race
and saw Jewish people, black people, homosexuals, Romani people, Polish people,
Soviet soldiers, Jovish witnesses as the ultimate threat, as well
as people with disabilities. And that's not to mention anyone

(00:24):
who tried to stand against the Nazis and not fall
in line. And plans were underway to wipe their enemies
from the face of the earth. It was basically a
racial cleansing, which was often achieved by imprisonment, sterilization, castration,
and murder, but it did not end the Between nineteen
forty two and nineteen forty five, a series of horrific
human experiments were carried out on prisoners of Nazi Germany

(00:48):
who were being kept at Auschwitz and other camps. These
experiments could also be called torture, because that's exactly what
they were. These experiments were carried out in order to
help the German military who may get injured in the field.
The prisoners would go through extensive experiments that were intended
to replicate some of the difficulties a soldier would encounter
in combat. And these experiments were cruel and somewhat sadistic

(01:12):
such as having their limbs cut open and stuff in
the wounds with dirt and ground up glass, or even
amputating a leg from the thigh to reattached to another
poor victim who suffered the same fate. Other experiments included
submerging the prisoners in freezing called water for hours on end,
or making a prisoner endure replicated conditions of a German
pilot being ejected from his aircraft at high altitudes, and

(01:36):
this was achieved by placing the prisoner inside a low
pressurized chamber, and the doctors would simply sit back and
watch as these prisoners slowly suffocated at a simulated sixty
eight thousand feet. Many of these poor souls died whilst
being put through pure hell, and if they survived, many
of them were executed and the experiment just simply continued

(01:58):
to the next poor victim. These experiments, these statistic experiments,
were all carried out by doctors who had simply forgotten
or just didn't cur about the hippocratic oath. And today
on Bizarre Podcasts, we're going to talk about just some
of these human experiments that were carried out during World
War Two. My research today has come from various websites

(02:19):
over the Internet, and I will post the links in
the description, but the main source of my information came
from a book called Doctors from Hell by Vivian Spits.
This lady was only twenty one years old at the time,
and she traveled over to Germany to actually be in
the courtroom when these doctors were being tried, and she
was there for the testimonies, and that she would hear

(02:40):
from the actual witnesses as well who witnessed some of
these crimes, and the actual survivors, and she would take
all of this down. Not only that, she also goes
into her personal experiences in a postponmmed out in Nuremberg,
and it was truly fascinating to listen to her story.
Some people in the reviews for this book actually said
that they didn't enjoy that part she was telling her

(03:00):
personal stories. They only wanted to hear about the court
case and about the experiments. But it really did add
more depth into the world that she was living in
at the time. It's a really good read and I
highly recommend anyone to pick the book up. It's excellent. Now,
first of all, we're going to talk about the high
altitude experiments that replicated how it would feel for a
pilot to abandon his plane at sixty eight thousand feet. Basically,

(03:24):
the doctors would take notes as the prisoners were forced
into this low pressure byed tank and they would slowly
suffocate as the doctors took notes of the victims last
moments before they lost consciousness or just died. This included
a thirty seven year old that was documented in a letter.
Apparently the thirty seven year old was in good health

(03:45):
upon going into the tank, and notes were taken as
a man began to suffocate after four minutes, apparently his
head started to wiggle on his shoulders. A minute later
he started to feel painful cramps before falling to the
floor and conscious. After this is breathing reduced to three
times per minute, and after half an hour of no oxygen,

(04:07):
the mind died, turned blue and formed at the mouth.
An hour later, the body was subjected to an autopsy.
Out of the two hundred victims, eighty died outright, whilst
the rest were just simply murdered. They were executed if
they were no longer necessary. But of course this wasn't
the only experiment that was taking place. We also had

(04:28):
the freezing experiments and these were carried out to treat
German soldiers who would suffer from hypothermia in the field
fighting in very cold temperatures. The prisoners were placed in
a basin of freezing cold water filled with ice for
up to three hours. On one occasion, two Russian officers
who had been taken prisoner were placed in the basin naked,

(04:48):
and they managed to stay conscious for up to two hours.
After that, the pain became too much to bur and
one of the soldiers asked for mercy and to be shot,
but no mercy of any form would be given, and
the other Russian prisoner actually turned to his friend and said,
don't expect any mercy off these people. You're not going
to get it, And so the Russian prisoners just simply

(05:10):
shook hands and accepted the fate. A little later, they
died and the bodies were sent away for autopsies. Other
prisoners were stripped naked and forced to stand out in
the open temperatures of below six and eventually the pain
became too much to bur and they would begin to
scream in agony as their limbs froze. After the freezing experiments.

(05:33):
If some of the prisoners were lucky enough to have
actually survived, they would be reheated, not out of kindness.
Remember this was all part of the research. The Nazi
doctors didn't cur at all about these people. One of
the ways they reheated the victims was by simply placing
them in a hot bath, but there were other ways,
other methods that they used to reheat these victims that

(05:54):
were a little bit strange. Sometimes women were brought in
from the concentration camp brothels. These were women were known
as concentration camp prostitutes. These women had even volunteered to
be in these brothels after being promised an early release
and an easier life within the camp, or they were
simply forced into the brothels. These women were often brought
in to lie with the freezing prisoners to provide body heat,

(06:16):
and it was recorded how fast a reheating process took.
On some occasions, the women were forced to have sex
with the prisoners, which showed positive results when it came
to the warming of the frozen men. It is said
that around three hundred prisoners were used in these freezing experiments,
sometimes not just once, but over and over again, and
they suspect that maybe one hundred people died due to

(06:38):
this experiment alone. On another occasion, a priest was placed
into the basein of ice water. He had been dressed
in an aviation suit and wires were attached to his
back and to his rectum to measure his temperature. The
man asked to be taken out of the water after
a few hours, only to be laughed at by those
running the experiment. After about an hour and a half,

(06:58):
the temperature of the freezing water was at lowered and
a blood sample was taken from the priest's ear. He
was given a shot of snaps and cigarettes and later
some lukewarm grog whilst he was still in the water.
May I add after a while his limbs became rigid
and he broke out in a cold sweat, and it
was not long before the priest lost consciousness. When he

(07:18):
regained consciousness, he was laid down on a stretcher, being
warmed up by lamps and blankets. But once again, may
I remind you this was not out of kindness, for
on the very same day he was taken directly to
the malaria station, where he was told to keep what
happened to him a secret or some for the consequences.
In the malaria station, he was introduced to more horrendous experiments.

(07:41):
This time he would be infected with malaria and studied. Now,
this man was actually one of the survivors, and that's
why we have his personal story. He said that whilst
he was being treated for the malaria that they had
infected him with, they were testing all these kinds of
different drugs, and some of the drugs were basically making
him feel like he was losing his mind, and at
times he actually forgot how to speak. But upon regaining

(08:04):
insanity as a drugs wore off, he then refused to
have any more injections because they made him so ill
and made him feel so bad. And the priest knew
that he was taking a chance by refusing the treatment,
because to refuse would often mean death, would mean execution,
but he'd gone through so much he just refused point
blank that he was not having the injection, only to

(08:26):
be told by the doctor that he was not in
charge of his own life. The doctor was in charge
of his life, and in the end, the priest thought
it was best to comply instead of facing the deadly consequences,
and he accepted the injections. The prisoners that were used
in the malaria tests were forced to place their hands
into a cage of infected mosquitoes that would then bite
the prisoners and infect them, or they were simply injected

(08:49):
with infected blood, which the doctors always had in their possession.
You see, they would make sure that they took blood
from the infected prisoners quite often and they stored it
to infect more prisoners with. The infected prisoners were then
treated with drugs to fight the disease. Some doses were
too high and many of the prisoners died, and the

(09:10):
ones that survived lived their lives with some disabilities due
to the infection and then the treatment. But the priest
was one of the lucky ones, if he can actually
call him that. He was actually liberated and he made
it out alive, although after all those horrific experiments, he
said that he was never the same again. He had
a weak heart and he could no longer walk at
a fast pace, and he sweated quite a lot. In

(09:31):
nineteen forty four, experiments into making seawater drinkable was underway
to help the German Air Force and the Navy in
the event of a plane crashing into the sea or
a ship sinking, meaning that the men would have to
survive by making seawater safe to drink if they were
stranded for long periods of time. During the experiments, the
prisoners were sorted into four groups. The first group received

(09:51):
no water and no food. The second group drank plain
seawater and received the following shipwrecked diet of one ounce
of biscuits sweeping them milk, butter, and chocolate. The third
group drank seawater that had been processed to conceal the taste,
but the saline still remained. They received the following ship
wrecked diet of one ounce of biscuits sweet in dense milk, butter,

(10:13):
and chocolate. And the fourth group were giving water treated
to remove the salt, and they received the following ship
wrecked diet of one ounce of biscuits, sweet indense milk, butter,
and chocolate. It is said that most of the prisoners
actually volunteered for this experiment. You see, they were promised
more rations and an easier workload if they complied, but
none of these folks were ever granted, and if they

(10:34):
refused to drink the water or do as they were
told they were threateting with death, or a tube was
force fed down their throat and the seawater was pumped
down the tube into the stomachs. These prisoners became so
dehydrated that they resorted to looking freshly mopped floors to
get just a little bit of water, as well as
trying to suck water out of rags used to clean

(10:54):
up spilled water. The victims that survived claimed that they
felt they were losing their minds from first, they became
raving mad and formed at the mouth. For yet no
pity was ever offered. And once the prisoners reached this
level of the hydration, the doctors would then perform liver punchers,
and they would do this by sticking a hypodermic needle

(11:15):
into the side of the prisoners, straight into the liver. Now,
like I said at the beginning of the episode, the
Nazis were big into this racial cleansing. The Nazi government
made it compulsory for a mass sterilization program to go
ahead that would sterilize anyone that did not fit the criteria,
which was, in a nutshell, a lot of innocent people
who were genetically diseased, innocent people with disabilities deafness, schizophrenia, epilepsy,

(11:39):
feeble mindedness, blindness, alcoholism, and of course just being Jews.
And even though this program was well under way in Germany,
the medical researchers still wanted to find new ways to
sterilize people more efficiently and quicker and with as little
effort as possible. So of course, more experiments went underway
and the chosen prisoners were put through more tests. The

(12:01):
women had certain chemicals injected into the ovaries and they
had no pain relief. Another way to sterilize the victims
was to expose the men's genitalia and the women's abdomens
to radiation. This was fast and it was cheap. Some
were executed afterwards due to serious X ray burns that
made them incapable of working, and they simply became useless

(12:21):
to the Nazis and they were literally put down like
a dog. And of course all of this was done secretly,
with not even one victim being aware that they were
being sterilized. Some other women were also raped so the
doctors could follow the path the sperm took inside the
woman's reproductive organs. Other horrific experiments were well on the
way to test the effectiveness of the sulfanamide drug on

(12:44):
soldiers who had been exposed to gas gangreen and to
do this they took unwilling prisoners and inflicted wounds upon
their bodies and then they would tie off the blood
vessels to these wounds to simulate a real injury on
the battlefield. After this, they were purposely infect the wounds
with bacteria, and to help speed up the process, they
would pack the wound with wood shavings and ground glass

(13:06):
and then the victim would be treated with the drug
and of course many died during the experiments. Also there
was bone muscle and nerve regeneration experiments and bone transplantation experiments.
In these experiments, the prisoners would have the thighs cut
into and the muscle removed. Then the wound would be
closed up. After only a week, the wound would then

(13:27):
be reopened and more muscle was taken, and in other
cases bones were removed or they were simply broken or shattered.
These were done on not only men but women prisoners,
and the muscles were also removed. The prisoners would also
have their entire limbs removed. This was a cause of
transplantation experiments. Where entire limbs were taken from one postol

(13:48):
and attached to another. It would also add the limb
removed just so that they could attach this other limb
that they had taken from the other victim. And on
many occasion, if the victim survived at the removal of
a limb, they were simply killed, and the ones that
were being observed would receive no sedatives to ease the pain.
In the book Doctors from Hell, it was said that
around ten feeble minded prisoners a term that is no

(14:11):
longer used, were taken to be experimented on because they
were seen as expendable. But I suppose you could say
that about all the prisoners that were experimented on. As
far as these Nazis were concerned, they were all expendable.
Life meant nothing to them, especially the lives of these prisoners.
One woman had their entire arm removed, including the shoulder blade,

(14:32):
which made it impossible to raise a good arm, and
on other occasions bones would actually be broken with hammers,
and bones removed and placed inside the actual muscle of
the same victim, and then studies were then done on that.
Sometimes it seems like these doctors weren't purely doing things
for medical research, although this was their own twisted medical

(14:55):
research that they were performing. Sometimes to me it seems
like they were just doing it to be cruel, to sadistic,
to be evil. It seems like they got a kick
out of it, in my opinion. Experiments were also done
on homosexual men. These experiments went ahead by inserting a
capsule under the skin of homosexual men which released tostesterone

(15:15):
in hopes of making them heterosexual. This, of course, was
a failure, even though some of the homosexual men reported
that the capsule had worked and that they were now heterosexual.
This was of course the men claiming this out of fear,
hoping that they would be released, and of course this
never happened, and of course quite a lot of men
died during the process. Another method that was used was castration,

(15:39):
and this was a commonly used method, and by doing this,
the Nasis believed that the homosexuality could not be spread
by intercourse. This was, of course, the belief at the time,
the ignorant belief at the time. There were also experiments
underway to understand the length of time it took a
person to die from certain poisoning. On one occasion, certain

(15:59):
poisons were given to four Russian prisoners in their food,
unknown to them, whilst the four German doctors stood behind
curtains observing their experiments. The four Russian prisoners actually survived
the poisoning, only to be strangled to death on hooks
and a crematorium. Autopsies were then carried out on the
dead bodies to understand the effects that the poison had

(16:21):
had upon the men when they had ingested the poison. Later,
new ways of poisoning these innocent prisoners was introduced, which
involved being shot by a poison bullet and having poison
injected directly into the skin, which then formed big, black,
liquid filled boils on the bodies which were extremely painful.
And then there were the mustard gas experiments. In these experiments,

(16:44):
the prisoners were wounded and then exposed to the mustard gas,
which formed nasty chemical burns upon their skin and even
caused blindness and extreme pain. On some occasions, prisoners were
then injected with the gas or forced to breathe it in.
The prisoners who died were taken away for autopsy. And
believe me, I'm just skimming the surface. There were so

(17:05):
many other experiments human experiments that were going on at
the time. Experiments were they were trying to change the
color of the eye by injecting dye into children's eyeballs.
And there were also experiments ran on twins where they
would take two twins and try to sol them together
to make conjoined twins. For some bizarre reason, these Nazi doctors,

(17:27):
these medical assistance, these scientists had no shame in what
they did to these innocent people whose only crime was
to exist, to be seen as inferior, as a genetic failure,
and according to the Nazis, that they needed to be
wiped from the earth. The Hippocratic oath meant very little
to these evil men who swore to never inflict harm
and to cur for people, and I think we can

(17:49):
all agree that they failed miserably. There were fifteen, seven
hundred and fifty four documented victims of the human experiment trials,
but they were believed to be even more that went undocumented.
And would you believe that the results that was found
from these human experiments, which saw many people tortured to death,

(18:10):
has actually lent a hand in modern day research. You
see a lot of the findings from the human experiment
research that was carried out by the Nazis has actually
helped to advance medical treatment to this day. And some
people frown upon that. They say that these results should
not be used because it was unethical the way these

(18:30):
results were found. But in my opinion, it's a bit
of a gray area. But as long as those results
are now being used for good, you know, to prevent
people from getting able, to prevent people from dying, then
you know, I think maybe something should be done with
them to turn it into something good, to salvage something

(18:50):
out of these results that caused so much pain and
devastation and make it good. I don't think that's such
a bad thing. And that is all we've got time
for today. Thank you very much for tuning in and
listening to Bizarre Podcasts. Once again, thank you very much
to one of my regular listeners and any new listeners

(19:12):
that may have found me up on this episode. If
you enjoy today's episode, I highly recommend you seek out
the Books from Hell. Like I said at the beginning,
it's what I used for some of the documented cases
for this episode, and it's a really interesting read. It's
very very sad, but it's interesting nonetheless, and I highly
recommend it. It's really really good. Also, if you enjoy

(19:36):
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(19:57):
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