Ethical practices in medicine have always been a topic of debate. Personal beliefs are what a scientist tends to rely on when thinking about whether or not to perform a certain experiment, or certain research projects. One such scientist is Dr. Josef Mengele. Born in 1911 Mengele become a German SS soldier and later a physician in the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. His main duties in the camp were to determine who was fit for forced labor, and who was to be put to death. His other main duty involved performing experiment on humans, which is where he received the nickname “Angel of Death.” This paper will examine him practices, as well as discuss the ethical issues surrounding them.
Pure cruelty was something else the Mengele was known for. One such example of this is when he drew a line on the wall of the children's block between about 5 feet from the floor. He later sent those children whose heads could not reach the line to the gas chamber (Lifton.) There were even times when Mengele would kill a patient so that he could dissect them afterwards in order to perform an autopsy.
Another focus of Mengele’s was Norma, a disease the primarily affected Gypsy children in the camps. From his inhumane research Mengele was able to determine that Norma primarily affected children who were malnourished and had weak immune systems. He would separate these children from the rest of the population and let them slowly suffer through the disease in order to see its affects. (http://www.auschwitz.dk/ Mengele.htm)
Dwarves were also of interest to Mengele and his research. He had a “favorite” family, the Ovitz family, a Jewish Romanian family who had previously traveled throughout Europe on tour with the Lilliput Troupe. What made this family so special was the seven of its ten members suffered from dwarfism, and Mengele called them his “dwarf family,” as if they belonged to him. Although there were no specific cruelties brought upon them by Mengele, they were nonetheless brutalized in the camps.
Many of Mengele’s experiments were of no scientific value whatsoever. In one such experiment Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of children to see if this would change the color of their eyes (Garfield Library). In another experiment Mengele would amputate various limbs to see the effect on the patient (Garfield Library). Sterilization is another such experiment that Mengele performed on young girls that he personally selected. Several other grotesque operations followed: Mengele’s “patients” were placed in pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated and frozen to death (Garfield Library).
The following passage is from the book “Children of the Flames,” which was written by Lucette Matalon Lagnado, and is of a little girl remembering the death of her brother: “Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not sure why - perhaps because he was the older twin. Mengele made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore. I cannot tell you how I felt. It is impossible to put into words how I felt. They had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers - and now, my twin ...” These are just a few of the experiments that were performed on approximately three thousand twins (Children of the Flames; Joe E. White)
Mengele’s main focus in his experiments was twins, who he personally selected out of the prisoners. He would draw blood from one twin and re-inject it into the other; at times he would let the children bleed to death. One memorable experiment that Mengele enjoyed to perform on twins was to put them to sleep and inject chloroform into their hearts which would kill them instantly. After this he would begin “dissecting and meticulously noting each and every piece of the twins’ bodies.” Another experiment Mengele did was to sew a pair of Gypsy twins together in order to create Siamese twins. All of these experiments were also done with no anesthetics (Garfield Library).
Many of the twins called Mengele, “Uncle Mengele.” He used deception to trick the children into trusting him. He would be gentle towards the children so that they would befriend him. He would follow this by giving them candy and chocolate. The younger children bought into this but many of the older children saw through what Mengele was doing. (http://www.auschwitz.dk/Mengele.htm)
Although there are many negative aspects of what Mengele was doing there were also certain positive points. The housing for the people Mengele was using in his experiments was by far nicer than that of the remaining prisoners. These people were also better fed, and were temporarily saved from the gas chambers. However, from many of these experiments people died, from either the shock it caused to their bodies, or simply from the experiment itself. Although there are no known numbers to be exact, seeing as how not all of his records were found, it is safe to say the Mengele tortured hundred upon thousands of people during his time working for the Nazi’s.
Elie Wiesel, a concentration camp survivor and an awarding winning author once rhetorically asked, “Is it not a gratuitous insult to those pathetic human guinea pigs, and to the memory of the dead, for journals and textbooks to site date acquired in such an odious manner?” (The Scientist 1989) Is it ethical and moral to use the work to physicians such as Mengele in today’s society? Does the fact that the people who were experimented on were considered subhuman? Some say that it is. In the case of hypothermia research, it has been found that the work of Sigmund Rascher, another physician of Mengele’s stature, is relevant to the information that is known today.
Whether or not researches chose to use research done in concentration camps is many times a personal choice, once again, based on the personal beliefs of those people. As John S. Hayward of the University of Victoria in British Columbia once said, "I don't want to have to use this data, but there is no other and will be not other data of this type in an ethical world.” An excerpt from “Should Nazi Research be Cited,” says that an important thing to remember is that if the Nazi research is used, it must first be considered scientifically valid, and it must be cited properly. As stated in “Moral Analysis and the Use of Nazi Experimental Results,” researchers must be able to distinguish where the scientific research ended and when the torture aspect of it began.
I personally do not think that it is right to use any of the research that was performed by doctor Mengele, or any other doctor like him. I do not believe that it is morally, or ethically right to use information gained from the research, knowing the methods in which it was performed. I am more than certain that many people can be helped using that information, yet nonetheless it is not something that I would personally agree with.
Work Sited
3 Nov. 2007
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele
3 Nov. 2007
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v14p328y1991.pdf
3 Nov. 2007
http://www.geocities.com/pennpuab/foundations/naziresearch.html
3 Nov. 2007
http://www.auschwitz.dk/Mengele.htm
3 Nov. 2007
http://www.auschwitz.dk/Anker/Mengele/ (in German but was translated for me by a friend)
3 Nov. 2007
http://history1900s.about.com/od/auschwitz/a/mengeletwins.htm
3 Nov. 2007
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/history/mengele/index_1.html
Freedman, Benjamin. "Moral Analysis and the Use of Nazi Experimental Results." When Medicine Went Mad, pp. 150.
Moe, Kristine. "Should Nazi Research be cited?" The Hastings Center Report, vol. 14, December 1984. pp. 5-7
Mostow, Peter. "Like Building on Top of Auschwitz," Journal of law and Religion, vol. 10, no. 2, 1993-1994., pp. 416.