Josef Mengel's Experiment

“Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your children, and to your children’s children.” Deuteronomy 4:9. (USHMM) Were the experiments that the Nazi’s conducted on the Jew’s beneficial or detrimental to the advancement of science? I think to understand the question we must understand the why, of the situation. For example Dr. Fritz Klein’s response to Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner when she asked, “How can you reconcile that (the ash coming from the chimneys) with your oath as a doctor?” His answer was, “Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life,
Mengle’s area of expertise was genetics and twins. He wrote his medical dissertation on how the structure of the lower jaw differed between the races. The twins he kept as pets, isolating them from the rest of the camp, giving them treats of candy and clothes, bribing them for before he would perform horrific experiments on them. The twins would endure daily blood draws and injections in the eye in hopes that he (Mengle) would be able to change their eye color. He even went so far as to sew a set of twins together to see if he could create “Siamese twins”. On Mengle’s orders, children suffering from noma were put to death in order for pathology investigations to be carried out. Organs and even complete heads of children were preserved and sent in jars to institutions including the Medical Academy in Graz, Austria. (Bard 1) More often than not, there was no real medical knowledge gained from any of his experiments. Sigmund Rascher however focused his experiments on high altitude sickness and hypothermia on Dachau camp prisoners. (Harvard) The experiments of high altitude were meant to push the limits of human endurance and existence. Prisoners were often placed in a low pressure chamber and the pressure was