Medical Experimentation at Dachau

[alex revision]

Medical Experimentation at Dachau

They All Did It - Who Could, at Least

By John Wear

Published: 2018-12-31

The onset and escalation of World War II provided the rationale for most of Germany’s illegal human medical experimentation. Animal experimentation was known to be a poor substitute for experiments on humans. Since only analogous inferences could be drawn from animal experiments, the use of human experimentation during the war was deemed necessary to help in the German war effort. Applications for medical experimentation on humans were usually approved on the grounds that animal tests had taken the research only so far. Better results could be obtained by using humans in the medical experiments.

Inmates at the Dachau Concentration Camp were subjected to medical experimentation on humans involving malaria, high altitudes, freezing and other experiments. Such has been documented in the so-called Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg, which opened on December 9, 1946, and ended on July 19, 1947. Also, Dr. Charles P. Larson, an American forensic pathologist, was at Dachau and conducted autopsies, interviews, and a review of the remaining medical records to determine the extent of the medical experimentation at the camp...

https://codoh.com/library/document/6354/?lang=en