brown (04/21/83)
This seems to be a Big Year for getting rich or getting publicity on "The Holocaust," and all the column-inches started me wondering if anything ever came of the medical research that was part of the death camps. The Nazis were up to all sorts of interesting things, like novel airframe designs, V-2 rockets, and so forth...anyone know what medical advances were interrupted by the Allies? --Chris Brown @ Rochester
leichter (04/21/83)
The Nazi "medical research" in the death camps was "scientific research" only by a long stretch of the imagination. Most of it was little more than an excuse for torture - unless you want to consider things like the extensive research on just how much poison gas is needed to ensure that everyone in the "showers" dies as useful science (engineering?) There is an unwritten agreement among most of the world's researchers not to cite or in any way use the Nazi results; the feeling is that to do so would be to justify atrocities. Apparently, hardly anyone has felt a need for this data that was strong enough to overcome the revulsion involved; the data can be obtained in other ways if it is really needed. The only specific example of Nazi "research" that I can remember reading about involved throwing people into ice water and determining things like survival times and best ways of re-warming them afterward. (As an example of the level of scientific research here, there were extensive "experiments" in which a frozen man was put in bed with one or more women who were supposed to "warm" him - with the experimenters watching, of course.) As far as I know, German medicine did no better than anyone elses at saving freezing victims. -- Jerry decvax!yale-comix!leichter leichter@yale