Was Anything Useful Learned From WWII Human Experimentation?

You are likely already aware that both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany implemented extensive programs of human experimentation during WWII, programs that – and there’s no two ways about it – stand unchallenged as the darkest periods of medical history. Conducted in camps, laboratories, and covert facilities across their occupied territories, these experiments saw thousands of men, women, and children subjected to torture so extreme, that it can barely even be comprehended, never mind truly appreciated - and all of it was carried out with a veneer of supposed scientific rigour.

A persistent idea exists in the popular historical zeitgeist, however, and that is that these experiments, for all of their unmitigated horror and barbarism, actually advanced medical science – with some claiming that it did so significantly, and others that it did so only to a small, but still notable, degree.

And I bring this up now, because recently, I was reminded of this fact by, of all people, the formerly beloved and respected tech YouTuber, and now… not that, Boogie2988. It was on one of his many silly comment compilations, you see, where he claimed that, quote:

When you think about it, some good came from all of that… health science was advanced many, many years. The Holocaust is horrible—but some good came from it.

And this got me musing on the matter, because it is a claim you hear repeated with relative frequency in the historical space. So, is it true?

Well, hold that thought, because I’ve been hitting the books, and in the next two(ish) hours, I’ll be sharing everything I’ve found out with you all… so let’s get started!

Chapter 1: The Nazi Experiments

But before we can get into the ‘was’ of the matter, we must first have a right and proper going over of the ‘what’ of the matter. Because if we’re going to weigh the supposed scientific value of this data — and by extension, wrestle with the gut-churning question of whether any of it should be used — then we need to be crystal clear on exactly how that data was obtained.

The methods matter. The context matters. The victims matter. It’s all too easy to slip into abstract debates about ethics or utility if you lose sight of the human cost. And so, therefore, before we even think about what may have been learned, we’re going to walk through what was done — in all of its cold, clinical horror, and deserved detail — so that when we reach the crux of the matter later on, we are able to do so with eyes wide open.

And in doing so, allow me to begin by asking you to imagine, for a moment, the cold, clinical tiles of a Nazi laboratory that doubles as a torture chamber. A prisoner, once a living, breathing person with a family and a name, is now strapped to a table or submerged in ice water, surrounded by men in white coats atop their SS uniforms. Needles, scalpels, and stopwatches in hand, these Nazi doctors hover like curious vultures.

This isn’t a scene from a horror movie – it was reality in 1942, deep inside Dachau concentration camp. There and, and more tragically still, across the Third Reich’s vast network of camps more broadly, some of Germany’s most highly educated physicians plied their warped and perverted craft – a once noble trade, that had been corrupted and fouled into an instrument of unbridled wickedness.

The High-Altitude Experiments

As for a proper example of what their ‘experiments’ could entail, consider the Luftwaffe physicians at Dachau, chief among which was one Dr Sigmund Rascher - an SS doctor ambitious to impress Heinrich Himmler. He had a laboratory grade low-pressure chamber delivered to Dachau – basically a big steel capsule that could simulate high-altitude environments.

And so it was that prisoners found themselves locked inside, with the air slowly pumped out to mimic altitudes of up to 66,000 feet. That, for reference, is both more than double the height of Mount Everest, and a smidge under the cruising altitude of a U-2 Spy Plane - that’d be the one that, for those of you aren’t plane nerds like me, flies so high that its crews basically have to wear space suits to stay alive.

From there, and according to documents later presented at the Nuremberg Trials, Rascher would then watch through a porthole as the victim’s oxygen dwindled. Typically, at around atmospheres equivalent to 30,000 or 40,000 feet, the victim would begin to lose consciousness, and soon enough start to thrash in panic as their blood literally started to boil in the low pressure. This horrifying effect - known as ebullism - occurs when the surrounding pressure drops so low that bodily fluids begin to vaporise at normal body temperature. While blood inside the circulatory system is kept under pressure and doesn’t immediately boil, exposed fluids like those in the lungs, eyes, or mouth can begin to bubble violently, causing excruciating pain, tissue damage, and, inevitably, death.

And just in case the indignity wrought upon them during their passing wasn’t enough, oftentimes, they would be afforded no grace in death either, as Rascher was wont to throw them straight onto the dissection table before their body was even cold. His reason for doing so, well, obviously he wanted to see if his experiment had produced any interesting results, didn’t he? He was just a man of science after all – or so he claimed.

Shockingly too, many of the victims actually did not die in the chamber, as of the 200 people who are believed to have been subjected to it, 120 of them actually survived the ordeal. They were given a brief once over to assess their condition, and then, having outlived their usefulness as forced guinea pigs, they were taken out the back and shot – partly to cover up evidence, but also because the experiments always left them so broken that they’d never be of any use as slave labourers ever again.

Having heard all of that, you’re likely wondering what he was actually trying to learn, or at least, what it was that he claimed he wanted to learn while satisfying an evidently broken and warped set of moral principles.

Well, officially, the Luftwaffe wanted to help its pilots survive high-altitude bailouts, and by conducting those ‘experiments,’ Rascher was supposedly building up a big body of data that either he, or someone else, would be able to use to start thinking of solutions.

They did legitimately have that need, it’s worth pointing out. The human body can typically manage up to about 8,000 feet without much issue—but beyond that, the air gets thin enough that performance starts to degrade. By around 12,000 feet, oxygen deprivation can impair thinking and cause fatigue; by 18,000, you’re dealing with serious hypoxia, and by 25,000 feet—often called the “death zone”—unconsciousness can set in within minutes without supplemental oxygen. And the Luftwaffe really were brushing up against those limits: aircraft like the Focke-Wulf Ta 152 and the Henschel Hs 130 were designed to operate at altitudes of 40,000 to even 50,000 feet.

So yes, there was a military rationale on paper, and that, as far as Rascher was concerned, allowed him to totally wash his hands of the morality of the matter. To him, the living beings he was forcing into the chamber, literally at gunpoint, pulled from the inmate population of a concentration camp, had all the innate value of the microbes he had pushed around in petri dishes while at university.

To see what I mean about his utilitarian disregard for the lives of those deemed unworthy by the National Socialist creed, consider the 1942 medical conference “Medical Problems Arising from Sea and Winter,” as there, he stood up, and with all the detached chill of a man describing cattle yields rather than corpses, presented charts, photographs, and time-of-death tables drawn from men he had personally killed. The room was filled with doctors - educated men - and not one of them reportedly got up and walked out. Rascher spoke without flinching about human beings rendered insensate and limp, and about the point at which life extinguished in their eyes. He spoke, in short, as if the people he had murdered were merely entries in a logbook.

The Freezing Experiments

That also segues us nicely to our next point, because as you likely guessed from the name of that conference, he wasn’t presenting the findings of his low-pressure ‘experiments’ there. No, instead he was presenting the findings of another set he carried out – one in which he froze inmates to death in tubs of ice.

You see, by mid-1942, with the Nazi war machine fighting in the bitter Soviet winter and pilots crashing into the icy North Sea, high command wanted answers on hypothermia. So once again Dachau prisoners became human guinea pigs.

As for what Rascher did specifically, in the blazing Bavarian summer, he constructed big tubs of ice water in the camp, and in went the victims to simulate downed pilots. They would be forced to remain in there for various lengths of time in suffering agony, as to allow Rascher and his team to gather a big spread of data, with various variables thrown in for good measure - which could be being stripped totally naked, or being donned in either a standard issue Luftwaffe flight suit, or some other experimental material or costume they wanted to see the impact of. All the while, Rascher and his colleagues took notes on clipboards, with the same detached curiosity they’d shown during the high-altitude experiments.

Eventually, with the ‘how long it takes someone to die’ question seemingly having been satisfactorily solved, they then moved onto the questions of ‘what is the exact point of un-recoverability’ and ‘what can be done to bring someone back from the brink of death.’ These “rewarming” experiments, as they were called, saw victims be exposed to extreme cold as per the norm, and then have various methods tried to afford a recovery… and these methods were often just as, if not even more brutal, than the initial cold exposure – with being dunked into a vat of (literally) boiling water, conscious or not, being one of the most extreme methods tried.

The most… weird method, however, that was actually the brainchild of Himmler himself. Since Rascher had been so eager to impress the man, he naturally had started to CC him in once ‘results’ of the ‘experiments’ began to come in. Himmler liked what he read, and so, soon enough he was the de-facto patron and sponsor of the whole effort. Therefore he, with his complete lack of any medical or scientific background – he was a farmer by trade actually – came to have decision making power in the ‘experiments.’

As for the frankly peculiar thing he suggested, that would be what he called an “animal heat” method of rewarming, i.e. sandwiching the half dead victim between two women, and seeing if that, somehow, made them recover from deathly cold - and yes, this experiment always was done with a man in the middle and women on the outside, read into that what you will, as you’ll likely be correct.

The Downfall of Rascher

There is, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of silver lining of joy to be found at the end of Rascher’s story however, and it comes in the form of some sweet – and fatal - irony. Because you know his whole trying to rim Himmler’s arse schtick, well, Rascher flew too close to the sun, and like Icarus, found his wings melted, and himself plunging into the void below.

Long story short, ever more desperate for ‘results’ he could wave under the Reichsführer-SS’ nose, he ended up progressing from just committing heinous ‘science,’ to just straight up making shit up – shocking that a man such as him wasn’t more committed to scholarly rigour, I know.

As for what it was he made up, that’d be the fact he, a man whose willy had long since checked out of the game due to his age – had managed to father some children. He straight up called them “miracle” births too, à la Jesus style – that’s just how much of an Aryan superman he was you see.

They were, in reality however, kidnapped babies, which his wife had stolen from local maternity hospitals.

He pulled this scam in 1944, and was rumbled in 1945, after which he was arrested by the Gestapo, at the personal insistence of Himmler. This is where it gets really ironic though folks, because do you know where they sent him? Dachau Concentration Camp – the very institute of evil within which he had crafted his own personal house of horrors. Now on the other side of the razor wire, he got to enjoy about three weeks of the conditions he had had no small part in creating, before he was then dragged out and shot by the SS men he formerly called his colleagues and friends on the 26th of April… three days before the camp’s liberation by the Americans.

Never thought I’d be happy to see someone chucked into a concentration camp folks, but hey – couldn’t have happened to a more deserving cunt.

There’s a double layer of irony in this too, because you know how Himmler wasn’t exactly chuffed to find out Rascher had been kidnapping kids? Well… Himmler himself had been doing exactly that, and on an industrial scale too, via the Lebensborn Program – an SS scheme tasked with increasing the ‘Aryan’ population by any means necessary, the kidnapping of genetically ‘suitable’ children from occupied territories included. Such hypocrisy… I’m starting to think these Nazis just might be the bad guys, you know?

Oh, and it’s also worth saying that even the Nazis themselves came to consider Rascher as a crank and a pseudo-scientific fraud.

For example, in 1942, the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, a research funding organisation, uncovered that a 1936-1938 cancer test Rascher had conducted and lauded as a “spectacular breakthrough” in treatment had yielded results that were totally unreproducible – meaning that in all likeliness they were fabricated. Given that this breakthrough had been the foundation upon which much of his later career had been built – this had dire repercussions for him going forward.

For example, he was scouting for a lecturing side gig in 1943, and not one single university in all of Nazi Germany and its occupied territories did even so much as humour him - his name had become nothing short of poisonous.

And while much of the documentation related to this effort of his didn’t survive the war, some did, and so I am specifically able to name one Professor Wilhelm Pfannenstiel of Marburg University as one of the people who pied him off, stating that he, quote, “did not want Rascher to habilitate with him,” a position that he maintained even when Himmler tried to charm him into changing his mind. Bear in mind too that Pfannenstiel was quite the enthusiastic Nazi himself – his refusal wasn’t even some kind of secret resistance kind of deal.

Similarly, the Sanitätstruppe, the Medical Department of the Luftwaffe also ended up turning on him. Partly, this was due to his wider discrediting, but it wasn’t entirely, because what was the harm in humouring a nutter on the off chance he yielded some useful results? It wasn’t like they cared about the human suffering caused in the process.

What really sealed the deal for them instead was the fact that Rascher, for some reason, ended up totally cutting them out of the loop concerning his trials… you know… the trials that were supposedly being done for their benefit? Between those two factors, they totally wrote him off as a crank and pulled all support – although they did reluctantly continue working with him again when Himmler redirected his charm offensive onto them, at which point it became easier to pretend like they cared just to make him shut up.

Even Rascher’s one-time mentor, one Dr Georg Weltz, turned against him – feuding over credit and slamming Rascher’s use of human test subjects. Not that Weltz cared about his using them full stop, however, oh no no, he only cared that Rascher had poached the ‘best’ subjects for himself.

The Seawater Experiments

Not all Nazi camp experiments, however, came courtesy of unhinged cranks like Rascher chasing glory. Some came from the upper crust of the Reich’s medical elite - men who, in another timeline, might’ve spent their lives healing the sick or lecturing in spotless halls. Instead, in the actual timeline we got, they put their talents toward perfecting the art of torture under the pretext of ‘medical advancement.’ Case in point: the 1944 seawater experiments at Dachau.

This time, the question wasn’t how high or how cold, but how thirsty. Picture the scene: a Luftwaffe pilot is shot down over the Atlantic. He’s bobbing about in a raft, surrounded by miles of undrinkable water. The Reich, sensing a genuine problem, wants to know - can seawater be made safe to drink?

Enter Dr Hans Eppinger, once a respected liver specialist to Europe’s elite, and Dr Wilhelm Beiglböck, a Luftwaffe physician whose ambition outweighed his ethics. Together, they turned Dachau into a laboratory for slow, calculated dehydration.

And so it was that roughly ninety prisoners - mostly Roma men - were selected for the trials. Some were given untreated seawater and nothing else. Others got a chemically treated version dubbed the “Berka method.” No food.

No fresh water. Just salt and sun, until the body gave out. Their tongues swelled. Their skin cracked.

Some licked the floors clean for traces of mop water. Others chewed rags or drank their own urine. One inmate, Joseph Tschofenig, who worked in the camp infirmary, later recalled that prisoners would suck condensation from windows like dying animals. Their organs began to fail.

Some couldn’t even swallow by the end.

And through it all, there was Beiglböck - calmly taking notes, measuring weight loss, jotting down blood sodium levels with the composure of someone testing beakers in a lab, not humans in a hellhole.

This ‘study’ ran from late July to early September 1944, and by its end, many of the subjects were so withered and delirious they couldn’t stand, speak, or eat. Unsurprisingly, many died. Beiglböck, however, claimed later - under oath, no less - that nobody died “directly” from the experiment. A line that, if you’ll pardon some speculation, must have sounded better in his head than it did in court.

The damage, of course, was permanent. Autopsies conducted afterward revealed internal organs so damaged they were described as shrivelled - one prisoner’s liver, for instance, reportedly looked like it had been left in the sun for a week.

And if you’re wondering what became of them, Dr Eppinger, the mastermind of that exercise in calculated cruelty, didn’t live to face trial. With the war collapsing around him, and presumably sensing his story was destined to end with the righteous absolution of a short sharp drop if he was captured, ended his life on his own terms in 1945.

Beiglböck, on the other hand, was arrested and stood trial at Nuremberg in 1947. His defence consisted of two points, A), that the ends justified the means, and B), that people like Rascher had been far worse so cut a man some slack. Shockingly, that defence worked, and he served a mere five years in prison.

The Sulphonamide Experiments at Ravensbrück

And if you thought that was the end of the Reich’s medical depravity, allow me to disappoint you. Because while Eppinger and Beiglböck were killing Roma men through forced dehydration, over at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, a different set of doctors had their own twisted research agenda: cutting open healthy young women and infecting their wounds with disease, all to test antibiotics.

This was the sulphonamide program. On paper, it was meant to test the efficacy of sulpha drugs - one of the world’s first antibiotics. Its reality, however, was a carefully orchestrated horror show.

The victims were Polish women, mostly in their twenties: resistance fighters, students, patriots, and the like. They weren’t picked for medical reasons. They were picked because they were expendable. The Nazis called them “volunteers,” of course, because everything sounds better when you lie about it.

The operation was overseen by Dr Karl Gebhardt - Himmler’s personal physician. His assistants included Dr Fritz Fischer and Dr Herta Oberheuser – the latter of whom would go on to become the only woman tried at the ‘46 through ‘47 Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg, a specific sub trial of the wider Nuremberg effort that dealt specifically with medical crimes.

The procedure went like this: first, they’d surgically slice into a woman’s leg and then pack the wound with every disgusting thing they could find: dirt from the camp grounds, bits of rusty nails, splinters of glass, and bacteria cultures scraped from lab dishes – specifically things like streptococcus, clostridium perfringens, and tetanus. Then they’d tie off blood flow and sew it up. And wait. Wait for the swelling. Wait for the fever. Wait for the rot to set in.

Some of the women were treated with sulpha. Others weren’t. Some received only placebos. A few were operated on multiple times. One woman, Jadwiga Kamińska, who had been part of the placebo group, later testified that her leg oozed pus for months after they’d ‘treated’ her. She wasn’t given pain relief. She wasn’t even told why they were doing it. When she asked, an SS guard told her coldly, “Because you are a Polish patriot.” Which, under Nazi logic, was reason enough.

Dr Oberheuser was also particularly fond of telling the women they should feel honoured to be contributing to medical science. Honoured. As if being used like lab rabbits and left to rot on a straw mattress was some noble calling. And speaking of rabbits - that’s what the women came to call themselves. A bitter joke. They were the “Rabbits of Ravensbrück,” and they knew exactly what that meant.

And for that team, sadly, the sulpha trials weren’t enough. Because right alongside the infection experiment, they also conducted another, far more medieval one: a mutilation experiment. The idea, purportedly, was to explore the regeneration of bones, muscles, and nerves. You know - for wounded German soldiers. But in practice, it meant hacking chunks out of living women just to see what would happen.

The same “supply,” their word not mine, of female Polish prisoners was used. And as for what was done to them, surgeons would saw out several centimetres of leg bone, remove sections of muscle, or sever nerves – things like that. And then they made notes on what happened to them, over what length of time, and what difference certain variables made. Anaesthesia was also used sparingly, if at all. Some victims woke up screaming, and many, of course, didn’t wake up at all.

The results for those who did live? Legs that shrank and twisted. Limbs left permanently limp. Numbness. Gangrene. Sepsis. Survivors were often left with one leg shorter than the other, making walking - or even standing - agonising. Some had to learn how to balance on crutches, hobbling around the camp with their mangled bodies. It wasn’t just an experiment - it was a slow dismantling of human beings.

And if you’re wondering whether this was done to advance science or to punish Polish resistance fighters, well… even the Nazis didn’t bother pretending very hard. The phrase “You are our enemies, so we can do whatever we like” was said aloud more than once, for example.

Remarkably, many of the ‘Rabbits’ survived. They documented their injuries in secret. They smuggled out messages, even photographs. And when the Nazis tried to kill them all in early 1945 - to destroy the evidence before the Red Army arrived - fellow prisoners hid them in false walls, under floorboards, anywhere they could. When the Soviets finally liberated the camp, the Rabbits were still alive – and rightly furious.

After the war, however, the Rabbits would finally get their day. At the Doctors’ Trial, they stood in the same room as the people who had carved them up, and spoke their truth. Women like Jadwiga Kamińska took the stand, rolled up their sleeves - sometimes literally to demonstrate their wounds - and confronted their tormentors with cool, steady rage. They didn’t flinch.

The doctors certainly did though, with none of them managing to be quite so arrogant as they once had been now that the shoe was on the other foot.

Dr Gebhardt tried to defend himself by saying the sulpha experiments were necessary. He claimed he was trying to prove that sulphonamides wouldn’t have saved Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s third man, who died of sepsis in 1942 after an assassination attempt. Gebhardt, you see, hadn’t used sulpha on him - and Himmler had questioned that choice. So, in what might be the most appallingly cynical act of professional self-preservation in medical history, Gebhardt decided to infect dozens of Polish girls with gangrene to prove a point about a dead Nazi’s treatment plan – or so his rather poorly thought out defence plan claimed anyway.

Fortunately, it didn’t work. The tribunal saw through it, and Gebhardt was sent to dangle in 1948.

Fritz Fischer, his right-hand man, got life in prison. He was out in ten years and later went back to work in the pharmaceutical industry - because why would a mega-corporation ever let something as trivial as a crime against humanity get in the way of the sacred growth line and its continual going up?

And then there was Herta Oberheuser. You remember her: the only woman on trial, the one who told her patients they should be honoured, and the one who ignored pleas for help and let wounds fester until they were oozing and pestilent. She got 20 years, and much like Fischer, was out in five. By 1956, she was back in West Germany, practising as a family doctor.

Eventually, however, she was at least denied that liberty, as one of her former victims just so happened to walk into her practice in 1958, and after an ensuing media shit storm of barely describable proportions, the State revoked her license in 1958. She then vanished from the public eye, and died abandoned and alone in an old folk’s home in 1978.

Disease Experiments

And now: diseases. Because the Nazis, never ones to leave a category of cruelty unexplored, deliberately infected prisoners with everything from malaria, to typhus, tuberculosis, and hepatitis – really anything and everything that they thought might be useful for protecting their own troops or, more simply, just feeding their twisted curiosity.

Let’s start with malaria. Enter Dr Klaus Schilling, a tropical disease expert in his seventies. He took up residence at Dachau in 1942, and essentially transformed an entire section of the camp into his own personal malariology institute. He wasn’t picky with his subjects either - priests, political prisoners, whoever was available – and of course, as it never was, consent was not sought even once.

From there, his selected prisoners were either bitten by infected mosquitoes or injected directly with Plasmodium-laced blood. Then, once the fevers kicked in, the ‘treatments’ began. Schilling tested various drugs: atabrine, quinine, whatever was on hand, on some patients, and others – his control group - were simply left to ride it out. He charted every fever spike, every seizure, every descent into delirium, all with the calm detachment of a man conducting a weather study instead of watching someone die of organ failure.

Roughly 1,000 prisoners were used. About half died outright or were executed when they became too weak to be of further use. The rest were released back into the camp population as medical wreckage, shivering and sweating in cycles, destined to relapse again and again.

And still, despite the abject horror of it all, Schilling insisted his work was noble - he was, in his mind, a humanitarian doing essential research for the good of mankind. The Dachau Military Tribunal run by the US disagreed, however, and he was sent to hang in 1946.

And now, Typhus. The Nazis wanted a vaccine you see, mostly for their troops, as in particularly bogged down and drawn out engagements – think the Siege of Leningrad or the Battle of Stalingrad – it really went through their numbers, which didn’t exactly do wonders for their strategic situation. Further, they also really wanted one to roll out in the Concentration Camps, as, owing to their rather less than sanitary conditions at best, and downright putrid conditions at worst, they were absolutely riddled with it – Typhus is actually what most historians believe to have been Anne Frank’s cause of death in the end too, if you wanted a specific example, with her being just one of 17,000 suspected deaths from an early 1945 epidemic that swept through the camp.

Oh, and it probably doesn’t need saying too, but just to be safe, obviously the Nazis didn’t want the vaccine for the inmates – they couldn’t have given two shits about them – it was the staff who worked in close proximity to them that they wanted to protect.

As for where the vaccine trial occurred, that would be at Buchenwald, specifically in Block 46 – the camp’s infamous isolation wing.

Led by SS doctor Erwin Ding-Schüler. The trial saw hundreds of prisoners – a mix of Soviet POWs, political enemies, and Jews - be either vaccinated with experimental formulas or left unvaccinated as controls. And then, they were all deliberately infected – some with blood drawn from actively infected (alive) prisoners, and others with dosages made from the pulverised organs of prisoners who had already fallen to the disease.

The results were about as horrific as you’d expect. Typhus set in. Fevers spiked to 40°C. Patients vomited, hallucinated, broke out in rashes, and slipped into stupor.

Many died choking on their own blood, and those that survived were often left permanently but briefly debilitated – briefly, because of course, with them no longer having use as slave labourers, such survivors were killed, and disposed of once their trial was completed. Ding-Schüler’s team also kept neat little charts tracking who lived, who died, and what the vaccine batch number was.

For once, however, not all of the staff were on board. I’m not entirely sure what sort of person could stomach working as a cog in industrialised genocide machine, but draw the line at infecting its victims with Typhus specifically – but such was the situation.

Led by Dr Zygmunt Mazur, this group of suddenly scrupled staff members would swap out live typhus samples with dead ones in at least one instance that historians have been able to verify – likely saving at least a dozen or so lives. Their small act of resistance however, while no doubt eternally appreciated by those it did save, did little to change the overall picture – as for every one they did save, a further 10, minimum, would still die.

As for Ding-Schüler? He professed his innocence until the very end, as we know from his surviving diaries, claiming that his work had been for the greater good. His actions, however, spoke louder than his words, because when the Americans rolled into Buchenwald, he opted to hang himself rather than try that justification out before a court. In his place, an assistant, one Dr Waldemar Hoven was tried instead, and he went to the rope in 1948.

Chemical Weapons Experiments

And because nothing screams ‘scientific rigour’ quite like discharging poison gas onto forced victims, our next stop is Natzweiler-Struthof - the only concentration camp built on French soil. There, the Nazis decided to trial phosgene gas - a suffocating agent that had been all the rage on the battlefields of WWI - by pumping it into sealed chambers filled with prisoners, to try to get exact and precise data on exactly how, when, and in what concentrations, it killed people.

Roughly fifty prisoners were selected, mostly Roma transferred in from Auschwitz, and exposed to controlled phosgene concentrations inside air-tight test chambers. Many didn’t realise they were breathing a lethal agent until their lungs began to fill with fluid. Some died inside the chamber. Others were dragged out, observed for scientific curiosity’s sake, and then executed so their damaged organs could be dissected.

The man overseeing this horror was Dr Otto Bickenbach, and he didn’t stop at phosgene too, with him also repeating his wicked experiment with mustard gas. Although with that, the experiment was not in gathering data on lethality, but in trialling experimental treatments – particularly for the rather horrific blistering that mustard gas caused on the skin. To do this, he would strip prisoners naked, smear them half in whatever compound he wanted to trial, and then let mustard gas have at them in limited dosages – with him specifically wanting to keep them alive, at least initially, so that they could report their perception of pain and intensity of symptoms.

Many, however, still died during the trial itself, as even a small amount of mustard gas can prove lethal under the right physiological conditions, and either way, when all was done – any survivors were shot anyway so that they could be dissected.

The Mescaline Experiments

And now, to mix things up, the next medically dressed torture I have to tell you about was more… surreal. You see, having thoroughly explored the body, the Nazis then wanted to turn their attention to the mind. Specifically, to whether or not it could be chemically cracked open.

So it was that at Dachau, SS doctors – chief among them Dr Kurt Plötner - began dabbling with mescaline, a hallucinogenic compound extracted from peyote. The goal? To find a truth serum. Something to make prisoners spill secrets, confess sabotage, or simply collapse into a puddle of actionable intelligence.

And in a marked change of pace from what else I have discussed, this experiment was actually conducted covertly, with the victims typically having the mescaline slipped into their drinks – with on-looking guards then being ordered to bring them in once it had kicked in, that moment supposedly being quite apparently evident to even just a guard thanks to the radically different temperament it quickly brought to the fore.

By doing it this way, Plötner reasoned that their reactions would be ‘genuine,’ and circumvent any chance of a victim’s awareness changing how strongly the drug took hold of them. And as for what the victims actually did when laced. Some wept. Some laughed.

Others became paranoid or slipped into mute, terrified silence. A few, apparently, did talk - but not in any way that made sense. Plötner himself noted that the results were chaotic at best, and mostly just left victims in prolonged states of fear and disorientation. That said, the fact it didn’t work didn’t stop the trials from continuing… because of course it didn’t.

After the war, Plötner simply fell off the face of the earth, and it was widely assumed he’d died. In reality, he was living under a new name, still in Germany, and just practising civilian medicine while hidden in plain sight. Do note, some sources claim that he was being protected by the Americans, as the then nascent CIA was interested in building upon his findings for their own purposes, but, and I cannot stress this enough, I did not find this claim repeated in a single scholarly work that I would actually confidently trust… so please take that claim with quite a large pinch of salt.

Sterilisation Experiments

Meanwhile, back in the camps, the focus shifted once again - this time to sterilisation. If the Nazis couldn’t work people to death, shoot them, gas them, freeze them, or infect them, then the next best thing, in their eyes, was to make sure they couldn’t have children. And so an experiment to figure out the most effective way to do so was undertaken.

It happened at Auschwitz, and the work was led primarily by two men: Dr Horst Schumann and Dr Carl Clauberg. Both approached the matter from different angles, but with the same underlying goal - render the ‘undesirable’ populations infertile, quickly, cheaply, and without fuss.

Schumann’s method of choice was X-rays. Male prisoners were brought into small examination rooms and ordered to stand, trousers down, while targeted radiation was blasted at their genitals. They were told it was a routine health check. It wasn’t until the skin started burning and their testicles swelled and split that they realised otherwise. After a few days, they were castrated so the damage could be inspected, measured, and written up. Job done.

Clauberg, on the other hand, preferred a more hands-on approach. He focused on women, injecting caustic chemicals directly into their cervixes, with the aim of scarring the fallopian tubes shut. There was no anaesthetic. The pain was immediate and overwhelming.

Infections were common. Some women collapsed on the spot. Some died. The rest were left sterilised, maimed, and utterly broken.

Many of them, when asked what happened, were simply told: “You’ve been cured,” before being hurried out the door to be shot, and then hoisted up upon a dissection table.

Neither man ever showed the faintest hint of remorse – quite the opposite in fact, they seemed to revel in it. Clauberg, for example, even bragged that once the process was perfected, he could sterilise hundreds of women a day.

The ‘Curing’ of Homosexuality

And in case you were wondering if there were any frontiers the Nazis weren’t willing to violate, they also had a go at ‘curing’ homosexuality – because of course they did.

It happened at Buchenwald in 1944, where an SS doctor named Carl Værnet decided he’d crack the ‘problem’ – his word not mine - of same-sex attraction with a bit of surgical innovation. The solution? Implant a gland in the groin that slowly released testosterone over time. His theory was that if you flooded the body with enough male hormones, the attraction to other men would just… go away.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. Sexuality, in what will be a shock to absolutely none of you I know, isn’t just a light switch you can rewire with a needle and some hormones. It was also logic that depended upon that frankly ridiculous, yet still tragically ever so present today notion that there was something intrinsically feminine about homosexuality. Spoiler, there ain’t: turns out the only thing homosexuality dictates about your person is a preference for willies over front bums – who could have known…

What the implant did do, however, was cause horrific infections. At least one prisoner died from the procedure. Others were left with festering wounds, pain, and shame. None were ‘cured,’ but all were traumatised.

And yet, like so many others, Værnet got away with it. After the war, he fled to Argentina with quiet help from sympathetic figures in Europe and lived out the rest of his life in comfort. No prison. No trial. No justice. Just another Nazi doctor whose crimes were quietly brushed aside and left to rot in the footnotes of history.

The Racial Ideology Behind It All

Throughout all of these atrocities, there was a common thread, and that would be the Nazi regime’s perverse racial ideology. Many experiments were explicitly targeted at Jews, Roma, Slavs, or other groups the Nazis deemed ‘inferior,’ with the goal (if one can even dignify it as a goal) often being to prove that inferiority or to find ways to eliminate or control those populations.

Dr Josef Mengele: The Angel of Death

There is one camp doctor, however, who blows all the barbarity we have seen thus far out of the water, and whose thirst for forsaken ‘knowledge’ sets a new standard for man’s inhumanity to man… and that would be one Dr Josef Mengele. It’s a name which many of you are likely already familiar with, and for tragically warranted reasons.

His particular obsession was with twins you see, as well as a side interest in people with physical anomalies – which could be anything from dwarfism through to people with differently coloured eyes.

Why the particular obsession with twins, though? Well, simply put, he believed that twins held a deep genetic secret that could be used to multiply the ‘Aryan’ race at lightning speed: figure out how twins are made, figure out a way to induce the phenomenon at will, then bosh – all the workers and soldiers the ‘glorious’ Thousand Year Reich could ever need!

Further still, however, Mengele also saw value in twins as a perfect natural experiment: identical genetics, raised in identical environment, and thus, he reasoned, any differences between them would have to be due to the influence of environmental factors.

He arrived at Auschwitz in May 1943: young, immaculately dressed, and armed with two doctorates - one in medicine, the other in anthropology. Mengele was everything the SS loved to imagine itself as: intellectually brilliant, disciplined, and ideologically fanatical. He walked the arrival ramps with a jaunty, almost friendly air, smiling as he waved prisoners left or right - life or death - with barely a flick of the wrist. But if he spotted twins?

His whole face lit up. They weren’t sent to their immediate death, or to labour away until their eventual death. No, their fate was to be all the more worse – yes, that was somehow possible.

Bit of a sidenote folks, but I wanted to point out that here, in Mengele, we are seeing an encapsulation of everything that to me made the Nazis so… well, terrifying as a force and idea. Oh so often, we are prone to write them off as just a bunch of nutters, and while sure, this makes for an easy to process conclusion, as it answers the ‘why’ question nice and easily, the reality, as we have seen not just in Mengele, but in many other examples today too, is actually far, far worse, as many of them were actually strikingly intelligent and rational individuals – meaning that they proactively considered and mused over their actions, and then, in full clarity of mind, decided to do what they did… and that to me makes them far more terrifying than their simply being ‘crazy.’

As for what makes otherwise rational and intelligent people stray so far from the well-trodden moral path… that’s a big matter – so I’ll save it for its own episode some time in the future.

And to bring it back to the matter at hand now, when selected, the twins – often still just children – were immediately separated from their parents, as well as the general camp population more broadly, and were placed in special barracks. There, they were fed slightly better, actually given clean clothes, and even afforded luxuries such as bathing. Such treatment was no mercy however, oh no, all they were to Mengele, was his prized and valuable stock – stock which he wanted to be in the best possible condition for his purposes.

From there, while beset by that eerie semblance of kindness, Mengele and his team would pour all over them; spending untold hours measuring every part of them with callipers, photographing their faces, and cataloguing every minute difference in eye shape, limb length, and posture.

And then, when that initial curiosity had been satisfied, the real horrors – his ‘experiments’ - would begin. Sometimes, it would be transfusing blood from one twin to the other - often repeatedly. Other times, he would inject one of them with diseases – typhus, tuberculosis, whatever he had on hand – in order to track infection and immune response. On at least one occasion for which evidencing documentation survives, he even forced sets of twins to have sex with each other in a grotesque attempt to see whether or not twins would themselves reliably produce twins.

Oftentimes, Mengele’s ‘experiments’ would also be more surgical in nature. Conducted without anaesthetics, because of course they were, he would, in some cases, amputate limbs or remove organs from a twin, while leaving the other with all of the bits that God gave them as a macabre ‘test group’ of sorts. When such an experiment resulted in the victim’s death, which they did basically all of the time, the surviving sibling would be immediately killed, usually via a quick injection of phenol so as not to damage their remains in the way a bullet would, and then both twins would be dissected side by side – the whole process being documented and catalogued, before the remains, now little but bio-waste in Mengele’s eyes – were thrown on the pile of corpses to go through the incinerator. Handily for this purpose, and something that I only figured out when I went to Auschwitz myself and made a point of tracking down his specific block – he even managed to score himself a spot right beside one of the camp’s many crematoria… knowing this fact alone allows you to begin building a picture of just how many people he tortured and killed.

As for the matter of eye colour. Mengele was reportedly fascinated - perhaps even irritated given Nazi ideology - by the fact that so many Roma children had blue eyes, which was, of course, the Nazi ideal. This “natural injustice,” as he saw it, got him thinking – was there a way to change eye colour artificially?

This saw him begin to inject chemical dyes directly into the iris of children to see if the desired change could be brought about. Turns out, it couldn’t, and all that was achieved were horrific infections, searing pain, and in many cases, permanent blindness.

Not that the failure reduced the victims’ value as test materials however. Put it this way: when the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, they found jars full of preserved human eyeballs in Mengele’s laboratory.

On the point of the scale of his crimes, Dr Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish prisoner forced to work as his pathologist, recalled a night when Mengele personally murdered fourteen twins - one after the other - just so he could complete a round of comparative autopsies. Another survivor, Moshe Offer, remembered undergoing a series of painful surgeries and endless blood draws with his twin brother. When his brother died from infection, Moshe knew he was next. Fortunately for him, however, this happened in January 1945, and so he was saved by the ever louder rumbling of Soviet artillery through the surrounding forest – as Mengele and his staff opted to spend the time they would have spent taking his life saving their own by fleeing the camp instead.

And although I have alluded to it already, I want to say it outright to leave no doubt, the vast majority of his victims were, children – many of them under the age of ten. Try to imagine that for a moment if you can: six-year-olds subjected to daily blood draws, amputations, organ removals, chemical injections. Kids who didn’t even understand what was happening to them, only that the once nice man in the white coat with the polished boots kept coming back… and causing indescribable pain.

Among them were the twin sisters Eva and Miriam Mozes, and the Ovitz family of dwarfs. They are among the most well-documented and willing to share survivors of Mengele’s experiments, and so they provide a unique opportunity to really appreciate the horrors that these poor people were subjected to. Eva, for her part, later recalled being injected with an unknown substance that left her with a raging fever and near death. She was dumped in the infirmary, left to rot.

Mengele, ever efficient, told Miriam, “Your sister will die in two weeks.” An autopsy was then to follow, naturally, a prospect that Mengele was described as practically salivating over.

Mercifully, however Eva didn’t die. Through sheer force of will, and perhaps a dash of luck, she pulled through. “I refused to die,” she later said, and so she lived - in defiance of the man who had done everything in his power to change that fact.

Unfortunately, most other victims weren’t so fortunate. It’s estimated that 1,500 sets of twins - 3,000 in all - passed through Mengele’s hands, and that’s to say nothing of those suffering from dwarfism and with other conditions that perked his devilish curiosity. When all was said and done – i.e. when the Red Army smashed through the wire – fewer than 200 of his victims were still alive. The rest had been dissected, infected, bled dry, or quietly murdered once they’d served their purpose.

Concerning the fate of the monster himself, after fleeing Auschwitz he headed deeper into what was left of the Reich, and set up shop anew at Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Fortunately, his setting up a new house of horrors was interrupted, again by the Red Army, as not even a month later they were battering down the gates of there, too. Seeing the writing on the wall, he did what every Nazi war criminal fearing Soviet retribution did, he headed Westwards to flee to the Americans – who were perceived as being the softer of all the touches available – and picked up a new identity as but a humble Wehrmacht Infantry Officer along the way.

He would escape all justice however, as after keeping his head down for a few years, he made it out to Brazil in 1949, and there he lived out another 30 years in near total peace – the only tribulation to befall him being his new neighbours, themselves also Nazis on the run, coming to think he was a bit of a dick as the years wore on.

And if the end to Mengele’s story left you feeling a bit… empty, as it certainly did me. Worry not, because there is a smidge of ironic schadenfreude to be found. You see, after a reallllllllly long and slightly bizarre series of events that I’ll skip over because this chapter is already quite long enough - his skeleton ended up at the São Paulo Institute for Forensic Medicine, where it remains to this very day, and is used as a teaching aid – there’s a certain irony in that, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.

And with that, I can bring the explanation of Nazi experimentation to a close.

It’s been long, yes - but necessarily so if you ask me. Because what we’ve just walked through wasn’t a series of isolated atrocities. It was a methodical, state-sanctioned campaign of medical barbarism, carried out not in the shadows, but under the bright lights of laboratory lamps.

These weren’t fringe actors – well, save for one glaring exception anyway. They were professors, surgeons, military officers, and university-trained researchers, operating with full knowledge and approval from the highest levels of the Nazi regime… and like I said at the beginning, how ever are we meant to start tackling the moral quandary of using the data from these experiments – if indeed anything useful was produced at all – if we don’t understand their true barbarism?

Chapter 2: The Japanese Experiments

In the frigid wilds of Manchukuo – Imperial Japan’s Puppet State in Manchuria, Northern China - whispers carried on the wind about a strange new “lumber mill” in Pingfang, then a small village on the outskirts of Harbin.

In truth however, no timber left its gates, as actually, behind its high walls, the Imperial Japanese Army had quietly constructed a sprawling secret compound. By 1938 this installation, now a smidge under six square kilometres in size, resembled a small city of 76 buildings, spread among which were, laboratories, barracks, even a library, bar, brothel, and Shinto shrine, all linked by private rail lines.

Locals were warned away under threat of gunfire and told the site was merely a sawmill - hence the aforementioned whispers. Most, however, never got so far as to even get the warning, as most had long since learned to simply stay out of their occupiers’ way wherever possible to increase their odds of survival.

For those of you not in the know - because the Pacific War does tend to fall through the cracks in the popular zeitgeist rather – there’s no nice way to say it, the Japanese were complete and utter barbarians in their colonial endeavours. We’re talking burning villages, mass executions, live burials, forced labour, sexual slavery, human trafficking, and decapitations-for-sport levels of barbarity. It was the kind of imperial project where simply making eye contact with the wrong soldier could earn you a rifle butt to the face - or worse.

So, when a military facility appeared out of nowhere, surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire, most civilians didn’t ask questions. They just kept their heads down, their eyes averted, and prayed that whatever was going on inside had nothing to do with them.

In reality though, what lay within that “lumber mill” was the private kingdom of Lieutenant General Shirō Ishii, a brash Army physician whose ambition had birthed a covert program to develop biological weapons. He had swept aside ten villages to build his fortress of science, installing his own brother as prison warden to ensure absolute secrecy.

As for what actually happened in there, Ishii and his handpicked team unleashed and co-ordinated a campaign of human experimentation so grotesque that historian Daniel Barenblatt would later deem it a “hidden genocide,” one that claimed “hundreds of thousands of innocent people.”

Regarding who fell victim to it, in a nutshell, everyone who found themselves in Japanese territory who didn’t happen to be Japanese themselves was at risk of finding themselves bludgeoned and whisked off there: Chinese peasants, Chinese resistance fighters, Communist guerillas, Soviet POWs, and Russian civilians – of which a surprisingly large amount ended up in Manchuria after the Russian Civil War. The Kempeitai – Japan’s Secret Police – really did not discriminate in that regard. Although, for obvious reasons of logistics, Chinese inmates of course made up the lion’s share by far.

And once inside the compound, captives were stripped of identity and referred to only by number, or more often, by the nickname “maruta”—meaning “logs.” It was an in-joke among staff, one that played on the cover story that had been spread locally. As one soldier posted later recounted, if you asked about what went on above the second floor, you’d be told: “That’s the lumber storage. You don’t go up there.”

But of course, the logs were people. And those upper floors weren’t for storage—they were where the real work began.

The Horrors of Unit 731

Inside those upper floors, behind sealed doors and sterile white tiles, the men in lab coats, many of them Ivy League–calibre graduates of Japan’s most prestigious medical schools, set about their work. And of course, what followed was not ‘research’ in any conventional sense. It was systematised torture masquerading as science. Over 3,000 men, women, and children passed through Unit 731’s gates, and not a single one came out.

Some were executed as soon as their usefulness ended. Others died screaming in examination chairs, carved apart in the name of data. A few were kept alive just long enough to be used again. Accordingly, the compound also had its own crematorium… and it ran hot.

The first step for many was infection. Prisoners were deliberately exposed to lethal pathogens - plague, cholera, anthrax, typhoid, dysentery - and then monitored like human petri dishes. Once symptoms appeared, they were dragged into the operating theatre and vivisected alive. No anaesthetic.

No pretence of treatment. “As soon as the symptoms were observed, the prisoner was taken… into the dissection room,” wrote historian Hal Gold, relaying eyewitness accounts. “He was stripped and placed on the table, screaming, trying to fight back… One of the doctors stuffed a towel into his mouth, then with one quick slice of the scalpel he was opened up.”

Even with their abdomen split open, victims often remained alive - alert, aware, and in absolute agony. As Gold also noted, a human being can survive quite a long time under such conditions, just as in surgery - except here, there was no intention to save them. Witnesses described the screams - unearthly at first, then suddenly silent as shock took over. Surgeons rummaged through the still-writhing bodies, extracted whatever samples they wanted, then dumped the remains in shallow pits or fed them to the crematorium.

Some victims bled out. Others were finished off by a bullet or a syringe. What mattered was the data. What didn’t was the body.

The Frostbite Experiments

Elsewhere in the facility, other teams took up the question of human endurance. One of the most notorious trials, in an eerie parallel of the Nazi experiments we looked at earlier, focused on cold exposure. The man in charge of that one was a physiologist by the name of Hisato Yoshimura, and what he lacked in conscience, he made up for in curiosity. He wanted to find out how frostbite set in, how it progressed, and what - if anything - could bring a victim back from the brink.

And of course, his methods were as crude as they were cruel. Test subjects marched outside into the bitter Manchurian winter, stripped to the waist or even entirely naked, and forced to plunge their arms into barrels of near-freezing water. The goal was to observe the exact moment when the limb froze solid, and to check if the flesh had hardened, guards would beat the arm with a stick. If it made a dull, wooden knock, they knew it was ready.

That’s not metaphor too - it was literally the sound they listened for: like tapping a plank of wood.

Once properly frozen, the rewarming trials began. Yoshimura and his assistants, again just like his Nazi counterparts, tried different methods - immersion in warm water, dry heat, rubbing with cloth, or simply leaving the victim out and seeing what nature did. Victims moaned in pain as sensation returned, or didn’t. Blackened skin peeled away.

Gangrene set in. Some limbs ballooned and split open. Others simply died and rotted. One prisoner reportedly had both arms frozen and thawed so many times that the flesh tore off in strips.

At the end of the test, they were taken away to be dissected. None were treated. None were saved. The only question was: what did the chart say?

Further Atrocities

There were also X-ray trials too. Victims were strapped to tables and blasted with radiation. The early sessions were mild, enough to cause burns and nausea. Later, they escalated the dosage.

Skin sloughed off. Internal organs failed. Some subjects were cooked from the inside out. The survivors – the ever so few that there were – were then eventually killed and autopsied to assess organ damage.

And just for good measure, Unit 731 also ran centrifuge tests - yes, really. Victims were strapped into giant spinning machines and subjected to increasing G-forces until their blood vessels burst or their hearts gave out. At the end, technicians hosed the remains off the walls and moved on to the next set.

Water deprivation was another area of interest. How long could a person survive with nothing to drink? What about salt water? Or poisoned rice? Victims were locked in bare concrete rooms and denied water for days. They went quiet after the third or fourth day. Some clawed at the walls. Others licked condensation off the steel bars, or drank their own urine. Eventually they collapsed. Their final moments were recorded - pulse, respiration, organ failure - before being dissected for the data.

Electricity? They tried that too. Hanging people upside down for hours? Standard procedure. Crushing with weights, stabbing, drowning, resuscitating, and starving also – any and all torture was fair game if it could be masqueraded as science.

Sexual Violence as ‘Research’

But the frostbite tanks and decompression chambers were still, in a strange way, clinical. Scientific, at least in theory – even if their actual reality was anything but. What came next was something else entirely. Because perhaps the most depraved chapter in Unit 731’s catalogue of horrors was the one where rape, pregnancy, and sexually transmitted disease became tools of research.

Ostensibly, it came about because the Japanese Army was worried about syphilis. It was rampant among their troops you see – in no small part due to the near constant sexual crimes that they took part in.

And with syphilis at its very worst having symptoms such as chancres - painless open sores, often on the genitals or mouth – in its initial stages, and condylomata lata - large, raised lesions in warm, moist areas of the body – in its secondary stages, all symptoms that can totally put a soldier out of action, finding effective solution was a serious strategic concern.

And to undertake said research, they needed to get people infected with syphilis, didn’t they… and I think you can all guess where this is going – they took the direct approach to causing infections.

So it was that male prisoners known to be infected were ordered to rape uninfected female prisoners. Refusal was a death sentence. Women were told nothing, or lied to, or simply thrown into the cell and locked in. This was then repeated until symptoms appeared.

And just in case that wasn’t horrible enough, pregnant women were also not only not excluded, but were proactively included, as in some experiments Ishii wanted to see if syphilis could pass through the placenta. Oh, and on a particularly misery inspiring extra note, Unit 731 scientists also weren’t averse to raping prisoners themselves – and yes, that did mean they would end up conducting foul experiments upon their own children.

Those who made it to the end of the pregnancy were taken into surgery. Vivisection again, this time to retrieve the foetus while still alive inside the womb. Some of these newborns were infected. Some were malformed. All were killed. I was about to say at this point that no baby ever left Unit 731 alive, but it’d be a moot point, because as I’ve already said, no prisoner left alive – not a single damned one.

It’s also worth saying that, if you can believe such a thing was even possible, women generally had it far worse than the men in the Unit. Chiefly, this was because they were considered “multi-use,” a man would be dragged from his cell, experimented upon, and then vivisected, but women, they could be used in an infection trial, a pregnancy experiment, all before they went to the scalpel – in-between which would be constant sexual attacks by the staff.

On this point, one guard admitted under questioning that during a break in his schedule, he and a colleague once unlocked a cell containing a Chinese woman and raped her. Later, they opened another cell, and inside was a woman who had already been used in a frostbite test. Her fingers were missing. Her hands were black. He was about to rape her too, but stopped when he noticed that her genital area was, in his words, “festering.” He walked away, and she was sent to the vivisection table the next day.

Weapons Testing

Then there was weapons testing. At the proving grounds at the rear of the Unit 731 compound, prisoners were tied to wooden posts at varying distances from bombs, grenades, or chemical canisters. Explosives were detonated and injuries observed. Researchers walked among the dying with notebooks, measuring shrapnel wounds and trauma radius.

Some prisoners were shot in the thigh to test bullet trauma. Others were stabbed repeatedly with bayonets to simulate battlefield injuries. There are accounts of prisoners being burned alive with flamethrowers, of skin being peeled back to study the effects of white phosphorus, and of exposure to mustard gas, chlorine, lewisite. They vomited blood, collapsed with blistered lungs, or lay twitching in their own waste as seizures overtook them.

Some were locked in airtight rooms while the gases were pumped in. Observers peered through glass and took notes on how long it took to die.

There were even tests to simulate emergency battlefield surgery. Which meant prisoners were deliberately injured, left untreated for days, and then operated on without anaesthesia. Sometimes the wounds were also infected on purpose first. Field dressings were applied, removed, reapplied. Infection was tracked. Then came the dissection, or vivisection, if they were somehow still alive.

The Broader Network: Units 100, 1644, 1855, and 8604

It gets worse though, if you can believe it, because Unit 731, as the name suggests, was not the only such institution carrying out that vile work. It was the lead unit, and thus the largest and most notable, sure, but like I say, it was far from the only one, and each supplementary facility had its own remit, and played its own part. They weren’t add-ons or footnotes. They were part of the same system, drawing from the same ideology, answering to the same people.

The first of note was Unit 100, based in Changchun. Its official cover story was agricultural research: veterinary medicine, animal husbandry, epidemic prevention. In practice, it focused on diseases of livestock and how to deploy them against enemy economies. How do you cripple a region? Kill its horses. Kill its cattle. Poison its fields – that was the general logic, and so Unit 100 bred diseases like glanders and anthrax by the kilogram.

And yes, human test subjects were involved once again. Prisoners were exposed to the animal pathogens to see how they might spread between species; and how virulent they became once mutated. At least one former lab assistant, Senior Sergeant Kazuo Mitomo, later admitted to poisoning prisoners with everything from heroin to castor beans to cyanide. He described one Russian prisoner who became “so exhausted” from repeated drug trials that their finale experiment was cancelled, a vivisection was carried out, and then, having survived the procedure, he was given a final injection of potassium cyanide, recorded in a notebook, and then thrown into the pile of bodies to be fed to the furnace.

Then there was Unit 1644, which operated out of Nanjing. It was bigger than Unit 100, having over a thousand staff as compared to a few hundred, and it handled mass production of bacterial agents. Fleas infected with plague. Rats loaded with typhus. Flies smeared with cholera – that kind of thing. The prisoners here, kept naked and in tiny cages so that all symptoms could be fully observed, were infected by proximity to the infected animals, infected by direct injection – any and all ways as per the demands of any given experiment. Then, of course, when they had outlived their usefulness, a vivisection followed.

A doctor named Hiroshi Matsumoto later described the process in detail: recalling one particular infected subject who was chloroformed, sliced open at the groin, and their femoral artery severed. Blood was drained into flasks — used to infect more fleas, or poisoned water, or just dumped. The corpses went into the incinerator, and were replaced – and Matsumoto had not even a single ounce of emotion during the process.

By 1940, they had enough bacteria and delivery systems to go operational, and so Unit 1644 began supplying frontline units in addition to continuing its research. The first attack using its pathogens occurred in autumn of that same year, when Japanese bombers flew over the city of Ningbo and dropped bundles of rice, wheat, and cloth crawling with plague-infected fleas. The locals gathered them, unaware they were crawling with plague-infected fleas, and within days, the outbreak began.

High fevers, swollen lymph nodes, death. Entire neighbourhoods were sealed off and burned to the ground in a desperate attempt to stop the spread. It didn’t work, and thousands, the majority of Ningbo’s population in fact, had died by the time the outbreak waned.

This was also Japan’s first confirmed use of biological weapons in combat – or as much as you can ever call deployment against unresistant civilians ‘combat’ anyway, and tragically, it wouldn’t be its last.

A Pertinent Tangent: WWII ‘Boomerisms’

Before we get into later deployments however, I hope you’ll forgive me a slight, but pertinent tangent folks – if you’ve made it this far into the episode you’re clearly into your WWII history, so no harm as far as I am concerned!

You see, the way I understand it, WWII history, or more rather the common understanding thereof, is plagued by what I have come to dub as ‘boomerisms,’ which is to say incorrect facts that refuse to die, because they were heavily pushed by, and are rooted in, the overly rose tinted and romantic war movies that dominated the 1950s through 1970s, and contemporary history books, that that generation grew up on.

I bring this up because “they never used chemical or biological weapons in WWII you know,” is one of the common ones you come across, and as you have seen, when it comes to biological weapons, that simply is not correct. And nor is it correct for chemical weapons either, as the Japanese first used mustard gas in the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, and would continue to do so right through to the end of the war.

The eagle eared amongst you will have also noticed that I just referred to the 1937 Battle of Shanghai as being a part of WWII – a conflict that is typically given as starting on the 1st of September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. As you have likely ascertained, I happen to think that start date is a big old crock of bollocks, and if you were to ask me, WWII began on the 7th of July 1937 – when Japan commenced its full-scale invasion of China.

If you are wondering why this isn’t the accepted wisdom anyway, the common narrative as it stands goes like this: WWII began on the 1st of September, and on the 7th of December 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour and brought the US into the war, the Second Sino-Japanese War, which had been raging for over four years already, between an Axis Power and an (eventual) Allied one, and had already resulted in over 10 million deaths, then just magically became the Chinese Front of the conflict… perfect logic… right?

And if you ask me, this understanding of the conflict’s start is also one of those aforementioned boomerisms; and possibly one of the more malevolent ones too, as I believe it to be the product of a very intentional effort by early post-war historians to keep the conflict Eurocentric for their own heroic nationalistic narratives, and reduce China, and indeed Japan in many ways too, to mere secondary actors in someone else’s story.

I can name names too, consider: Hugh Trevor-Roper and his book The Last Days of Hitler, to him WWII was very much a story only about Europe and Nazism, with everything else being secondary, and Andreas Hillgruber and his book Germany and the Two World Wars – you know everything you need to know from the title here, both WWI and WWII are presented as German, and by extension, Europe centric stories. These are just two of hundreds as well, it was just the narrative of the time – challenged only by the likes of A. J. P. Taylor in his book The Origins of the Second World War, he was a biiiiiiiiiig socialist you see, and this often led to him taking a ‘little people first’ approach to his histories which led him to some interestingand unconventional conclusions – but even he didn’t argue that it started in 1937 explicitly, only that a conflict cannot be understood without knowing its build up, and so a start date at all is a pointless concept in military history. Fortunately, today, academic history is WAY more open to the idea of WWII starting in 1937, with an example being Rana Mitter, who pushed the idea heavily in his 2013 book Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945. Chinese historians too, unsurprisingly, have been on the tip of the spear, a great example of which would be Chen Jian, who published The Road to a Global War: A Chinese Study of the Origins of the Second World War all the way back in 1989. Ultimately, however, Wikipedia won’t be updating its start date until the idea trickles down to the boomer popular historians and their acolytes who have been pumping out coffee table histories for the last 60ish years. Not going to be naming any of them though, because I love money you see – and I lowkey need to ride on their coattails to get my own works published in a profitable manner! That’s not a bit too, I’ve got two manuscripts ready to send to the printers… but offers for publishing at this point haven’t sparked joy in the old wallet department. And to close off this longer than planned tangent, here’s some other WWII boomerisms I want to see dead and buried in my lifetime: The average German soldier was a square jawed giga-chad who fought with the honour of the knights of old, and it was only those scamps with the runes on their collars who did the naughty shit. No they weren’t: EVERYONE in Germany knew the explicitly murdery deal come ‘41 or so, STOP FEEDING INTO NAZI REVISIONISM. On a similar vein: Rommel was an honourable general who treated his enemy with respect even during their defeat: No he wasn’t, he wanted to start murdering entire French settlements Soviet Union and Yugoslavia style to quell the French resistance – he was every bit the monster as the rest of them. Nazi Germany Had the Most Advanced Technology: No they didn’t. The Me-262 jet fighter had engines that blew themselves up after 10 hours of operation. The Panther tank needed a new gear box pretty much as often as it needed a new tank of fuel. They used horses for lugging stuff far more than they used trucks. Instead, the prize, in my opinion, goes to the Americans: see the B-29, the M1 Garand, the Proximity Fuse, and the Norden Bombsight for more details. Nazi Germany could have won the war. No, they couldn’t, and I can explain it in three words: oil, oil, and OIL – or rather, a lack thereof. No matter the set of circumstances one cooks up for what Germany could have done differently, they ALL fall short when you consider that they barely had enough black gold to put up the defence they actually did – never mind anything more hairbrained. And with that, tangent over – you’re welcome for the little morale break where we didn’t have to think about human experimentation for a brief time! Now, where were we, ahh yes, that was it – other examples of where Japan deployed biological weapons made at Unit 1644. Continued Deployment of Biological Weapons In 1941, for example, the city of Changde was bombarded with plague— this time via contaminated clothing, cotton, and more fleas. Around 7,000 civilians died. Then came the time that they used it, which was during the May to September Zhejiang-Jiangxi Campaign. More broadly, this saw the Japanese Military lay waste to a 50,000 square kilometre area of coastline, killing and burning EVERYTHING they could get their hands on to make the area near uninhabitable, and thus unusable as a staging post for potential raids against the Japanese home islands. 250,000 died in this campaign, and THEN they released cholera, typhoid, plague infected fleas as they retreated, killing many thousand more still. The fall of 1942 did not mark the end of Japan’s ghastly germ offensive however – far from it in fact. Even after the Zhejiang-Jiangxi Operation, the Imperial Army kept right on spreading death by disease wherever it could. That same year, for example, special attack units struck Yunnan province with cholera bacteria, seeding an epidemic in dozens of towns. Within a few months some 120,000 Chinese civilians fell violently ill, and 90,000 of them died as a result. Then, two years later, as Japan’s fortunes waned, they turned bubonic plague loose in western Yunnan on their way out. Outbreaks of the Black Death flared up and kept killing people for years after the war – plague festered in the region until 1953, long after its invaders had been vanquished. In other words, the pathogens didn’t politely clock out in 1945 just because Japan did; the germs Japan seeded kept on gnawing their way through villages and families in peacetime, a lethal legacy of the occupiers’ ‘experiments.’ Japan’s biological onslaught may have even spread outside of China too. In 1942, for example, as the Japanese Army marched into Burma, their agents considered using cholera against British and Chinese troops there – and a mysterious cholera outbreak did strike one Allied unit, hinting that the idea may have been more than just talk - although I cannot stress enough that explicit evidence of the use of biological weapons has NOT emerged for this incident – it’s very much speculation based upon circumstance and correlation. We do know, however, that they were within a whisker of deploying them on American and Filipino troops, as they made their desperate last stand in Bataan, the Philippines. Flea riddled bombs were ready to go – and it was only the garrison’s sudden surrender in April 1942 that spared them from that fate. And still, despite all of that, the Japanese Army was still only just warming up, because as the war went on, and their fortunes quickly went from incredible, to downright disastrous, Ishii began cooking up ever more elaborate and wild schemes for bioweapon deployment. For example, biologically scorching the earth behind retreating Japanese lines – if the Army had to give up ground, why not leave captured cities reeling with cholera and filled with plague-corpses as parting gifts? Testimonies by former unit members later suggested that in at least a few cases, these ‘scorched germ’ tactics were attempted – contaminated supplies or infected prisoners were left behind to ensure conquering forces, be they Chinese, Imperial British, or American, inherited an epidemic or two for their trouble. In short, by 1945 the Japanese military was ready to turn all of East Asia into its petri dish if it could not hold it by force. Although, to be fair, my saying “all of East Asia…” isn’t strictly speaking correct, because they also cooked up a plan to deploy them on the continental US. The plan, euphemistically codenamed Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, involved using submarine-launched aircraft to drop plague-infected fleas over Southern California. It took a fair bit of nagging to get the greenlight, if for no other reason than the fact that Japanese High Command had FAR bigger concerns come then than getting a few token jabs in on the US’ home turf, but by mid-1945, with mere months of the war remaining – said greenlight was given. So it was that a few I-400 submarines - the largest ones ever built during the war in fact, and each capable of carrying three foldable bombers in watertight internal hangers – were destined to set off across the Pacific, surface off the US West Coast, and dump their infected bombs on San Diego, before then crashing into something important at max throttle. It was a grotesque plan – mass terrorism via medieval disease – but thankfully it never came to fruition. The launch date was set for September the 22nd, you see, and Japan surrendered on the 15th of August. And if you happen to think I’ve gone a bit off track here, talking about the deployment of biological weapons as opposed to just their development and testing, don’t worry, I haven’t. Because to those scientists, such deployments were experiments in themselves – with Unit 1644 Scientists always being in the proximity, to make notes and collect data on how they played out, both to improve dispersion strategies, but also to spit ball ideas for how the contagions themselves could be tinkered and fettled with to increase their lethality. Units 1855 and 8604 And speaking of Unit 1644 again, before we ended up going down a pertinent if lengthy spur road in the story, I was just introducing the other units and their ‘specialities’ to you, wasn’t I? First, we have Unit 1855, based out of Beijing – a city which, thanks to its size and status, seemed the perfect spot to host a regional arm of Japan’s rapidly metastasising medical death machine. It was officially formed in 1938, and while surviving documentation from this one is sparse – thanks largely to the destruction of evidence at the war’s end and the passing of time – enough has survived through witness testimony, captured logs, and post-war interrogations to give us a grim picture of what went on behind those walls. The unit’s primary focus was on typhoid, tuberculosis, dysentery, and cholera, but they also dabbled in anthrax and glanders, especially when experimenting on animals and testing cross-species - i.e. animal to human – infection. Its victims found themselves locked in isolation cells, infected by ingestion, injection, or inhalation, and then monitored – until the symptoms became visible enough to justify vivisection. Dissection theatres were used daily, with victims strapped down, often still conscious, as their organs were removed and catalogued. No anaesthetic. No mercy. Just data. There were even reports, brought forward in the 1950s by Chinese investigators, of the unit conducting field experiments – such as infected blankets being distributed to rural villages suspected of harbouring Communist partisans, or cholera-laced food supplies being ‘accidentally’ delivered to resistance-linked communities. One Japanese medic, whose testimony was later used in a classified report, admitted that powdered cholera cultures were loaded into trucks and sent off with the vague instruction to “seed the wells” – as he put it. Whether the target village had any strategic value seemed to be entirely secondary to the urge to test, gather field data, and simply just satisfy a wicked curiosity. In essence, Unit 1855 was a regional clone of Unit 731: same mission, same methods, just set up shop in the north instead of the northeast. And if you thought that was as bleak as things got, allow me to introduce you to their southern counterpart, Unit 8604, which operated out of the occupied city of Guangzhou. Now, Unit 8604 was particularly egregious not just for what it did, but for where it did it. You see, the Japanese set it up in the old Sun Yat-sen Medical School, an actual civilian teaching hospital, which they then converted into one of the most perverse labs in the entire Imperial war machine. From 1939 to 1945, this building – once a place where Chinese doctors had learned to save lives – was turned into a slaughterhouse posing as a research facility. The unit was broken into multiple internal sections, with the Fourth Section, for example, being responsible for plague cultivation, and the Second and Third, for their part, handling anthrax, cholera, typhus and related pathogens. Victims were held in basement cells, infected with cultured diseases, and then examined until they died – or until they were deemed “ripe enough,” the doctors’ words not mine, for vivisection. Corpses lined the walls, pickled in formalin. Some were dissected post-mortem, others while still alive. One anatomical director reportedly carried out multiple vivisections every single day – a routine so regular it became bureaucratic. Their data was logged, their bodies incinerated. One former Chinese prisoner later testified that female captives were routinely raped by guards before being subjected to syphilis infection trials – a grim echo of what we already saw in Pingfang. Infected prisoners were also sometimes forced into sexual contact under the guise of “clinical procedure,” and pregnant women were of particular interest. Not because they were spared, of course – but because they could be used to test trans-placental infection and congenital deformities in utero. Foetuses were surgically removed, catalogued, and either used for further lab work or discarded. In several of the more horrific cases, there’s credible evidence to suggest that newborns were dissected alive, all to see what internal damage syphilis or anthrax had done. And just like its cousins further north, Unit 8604 maintained its own crematorium, its own prisoner registry, and its own dedicated disposal system. According to historian Daniel Barenblatt, Unit 8604 alone was likely responsible for over a thousand deaths – and that’s just what we can reasonably account for given the surviving documentation. The real number, given the presence of unrecorded victims, destroyed logs, and undocumented field deployments, is almost certainly higher. Nor was it strictly confined to Guangzhou – as sub-branches operated in Zhanjiang, Shantou, and even in occupied Hong Kong, where reports suggest that cholera-tainted food was “distributed” in working-class neighbourhoods as part of a covert test. It was all very clean on paper – and utterly filthy in practice. The doctors wore white coats. The labs were well-lit. The data was logged neatly. And yet, behind the procedural gloss, it was just mass murder disguised as microbiology. Same as always. These two facilities – 1855 and 8604 – were not just footnotes. They were not ancillary. They were key components of Ishii’s grand design. With 731 at the centre, 100 handling agricultural pathogens, 1644 handling mass production, and these two running front-line tests in their respective regions, the Japanese Empire had created an entire ecosystem of horror. And all of it – every needle jab, every bacterial smear, every incision into a living chest cavity – was done not to save lives, but to perfect the art of taking them. Science turned sadistic. And medicine turned monstrous. The Cover-Up By mid-1945, however, with the Soviet Red Army crashing through Manchuria from the north and the Americans thundering toward the Home Islands from the south, Japan’s grand experiment in weaponised disease finally began to unravel. The writing was on the wall, and the masterminds behind Unit 731 and its sister units knew exactly what came next. The order went out—swift, brutal, and absolute: destroy everything. Years of meticulously logged human experimentation - gone. Bacterial cultures by the gallon, racks of dissected tissue samples, rooms full of handwritten autopsy records - all fed to bonfires or dumped in acid vats. Laboratories were stripped bare, storage tanks ruptured, petri dishes shattered. At Pingfang, for example, the Japanese Army took the demolition orders literally: they blew the place to bits. Not just the labs, but the barracks, operating theatres, the rail yards, and yes, even the crematorium. It was all reduced to rubble in the space of days. But the most chilling cleanup of all was reserved for the human evidence. Hundreds of remaining prisoners—the final “logs,” as Ishii and his men so dehumanisingly called them - were executed en masse. Some were poisoned. Others bayoneted. A few were shot in the back of the head while still strapped to surgical slabs. Their corpses were burned, buried in unmarked pits, or simply left in the wreckage. The goal was clear: leave nothing behind. No test subjects. No files. No proof. And just in case that wasn’t enough, Ishii’s men went one step further - releasing cages of infected rats and fleas into the surrounding countryside in what can only be described as a biological parting gift. The aim? Distract advancing Soviet forces with plague outbreaks and maybe, just maybe, buy themselves enough time to fully erase all evidence. Before fleeing himself: Ishii gathered his staff and gave them one final directive: disappear. Take the secrets to the grave. To help them along, he issued each man a cyanide capsule and a pistol, with strict instructions to use one or the other if ever caught. To him, suicide was preferable to justice. And yet, despite that intense effort, so rushed had it been, that many stones actually remained unturned, and lots of evidence, and indeed data, would survive the war… and that brings us to the natural follow up question, and indeed the real meat of today’s episode: so, for all that horror and effort, was anything of use actually learned in the process, and if so, what? Chapter 3: So What Was ACTUALLY Learned? In starting this chapter folks, I need to admit that I found myself rather surprised. You see, thanks to WWII – as well as the crimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan as inseparable aspects thereof – being quite the large topic, I hadn’t actually had the chance to dive into the matter of human experimentation in depth before I suggested this topic to Simon. I’ve covered it in passing, as passing details in wider stories of atrocities, sure, but powering through dedicated texts and going into depth in its own right – no. As a result, I went into this piece with a certain preconception: that being that every single human experiment was a-scientific nonsense, and that, as a result, the difficult moral matter of it having any value at all can be completely disregarded, and we could turn our attention to the real matter at hand – the memory and commemoration of those who had to suffer through all of those utterly barbaric, and barely conceivable horrors that I have spent the episode up until now explaining to you all. But then I started strip mining pertinent academic articles on JSTOR, as well as all the PDF-back books I could get my hands on… and that’s when I came across The Nazi Research Data: Should We Use It?, published by Sarah Wilson of Cedarville University all the way back in 2011. In it, she says the following, quote: “Many have questioned the scientific data, and reasonable questions remain. However, at least some of the data is valid, and even useful to scientific inquiry today. … Certainly not all of the Nazi data is accurate, but enough is accurate to justify wrestling with the ethical concerns over using it.” You seeing the problem, folks? “some of the data is valid” – six little words that just made today’s episode a looooooooot more complicated, and, if I may be quite frank, also lowkey made me turn my underpants a healthy shade of brown over the fear that I might catastrophically misread the literature, and accidentally produce some ignorant as fuck ramblings more befitting of one of those mad Nazi apologist and Neo-Nazi channels such as Zoomer Historian, rather than the high standard of research and quality I KNOW me and my fellow writers always try to provide you with – oh, and Simon, feel free to tell the editor to stick a censor beep over the channels name if we aren’t in the mood for any drama… although… if we are… that does give me an idea for a Brain Blaze… So then, with that said, off we go people: once more into the breach where I hopefully will not make a giant tit of myself. What the Nazis Learned And let us begin with the experiments of Dr Sigmund Rascher – you remember, the one who was discredited as a man of medicine even by the Nazis themselves. Why him of all people, in this chapter? Well, it turns out, despite the barbarism of his methods, and very, very questionable methodology often displayed… he did actually end up compiling some useful stuff. For example, he learned that rapid immersion in hot water between 40–50°C is the most effective way to rewarm someone suffering from severe hypothermia. Rascher and his team tried every method going if you recall – rubbing, blankets, heated cradles, even diathermy – but only hot baths worked. As Dr Robert Pozos explains in Military Medical Ethics, Volume 2, “Hot baths between 40°C and 50°C were the most effective in rewarming the hypothermic subjects and reversing the afterdrop”. And conversely, “wrapping a person in blankets gave the least effective results,” unless they were only mildly hypothermic to begin with. Speaking of afterdrop, we can thank Rascher’s ice-bath torture sessions for discovering the full ins and outs of how it actually works, and if you happen to be wondering – “afterdrop” refers to the phenomena where the body temperature of one suffering from hypothermia continues to plummet for a time following removal from cold conditions. Pozos also explains the immediate revelations of this discovery by stating that the Luftwaffe used it to explain “why pilots and sailors who were removed from the cold water and subsequently were rewarmed sometimes died 30 minutes or later after rescue”. Rascher’s team also figured out that hypothermia actually kills by shutting down vital organs one by one, the heart most of all. As people’s core body temperature dropped, to explain further, Rascher and his team noted that their heartbeats became unstable around 30 to 29 degrees Celsius, and once it fell to about 25, that was usually the point of no return, and the heart stopped shortly afterwards. The whole process incidentally - from being put in freezing water to death – was documented as taking between 53 and 106 minutes during the human experiments. Additionally, Rascher and his team managed to disprove a bunch of wartime survival myths, such as the long-held belief that drinking alcohol could help warm you up. Pozos makes it clear: “The ingestion of ethanol before immersion did not change the rate of body cooling,” and in fact may have made things worse by contributing to “cardiac irregularities induced by the hypothermia”. So yeah, whenever you’re in the pub, and someone points out the ‘beer blanket’ is a myth – they’re ultimately citing an understanding with its roots in Nazi human experimentation. So yes, as much as it makes me really uncomfortable to have to say so, some of that absolute demon’s research actually was useful. Pozos says as much when discussing the legacy of Rascher’s data in later medical scholarship, quote: “The hypothermia experiments had bearing in two areas of research: (1) hypothermia effects on the entire body and (2) hypothermia feasibility in open-heart surgery. From (a) brief review of the use of the Nazi data after World War II, it is apparent that the data were of value to understanding the mechanisms of hypothermia, as well as to the use of hypothermia as an adjunct to open-heart surgery.” BUT – and this is a giant, neon-illuminated, visible from orbit but – none of this does anything to change the fact that Rascher was ultimately a crank, and all of those contemporary criticisms of him remain absolutely true. Instead, it’s more of a “fling enough shit and eventually some of it sticks” and “a broken clock is right twice a day” type situation – i.e., he documented his wicked torture in detail sufficient for trends to invariably emerge from the vast body of data accumulated. Dr Robert Berger of Harvard University explained this more eloquently in his work Nazi Science: The Dachau Hypothermia Experiments, which he wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine back in 1990, quote: “The experimental design was poor, the data were shoddy, and the investigator—Rascher—was a murderer, so most of his work could not be trusted.” Keyword there, “most.” Like I say – a broken clock and all that. Interestingly, the same conclusion was reached by Dr Andrew Ivy, an American physician who testified at the Doctors’ Trials, and was described in a contemporary Time Magazine piece as “one of the nation’s top physiologists” and “the conscience of U.S. Science.” Initially, when giving his testimony at said trials, he stated that, quote: “Some of the men who worked in these laboratories were well trained scientists and others were untrained pseudo-scientists. None were motivated by the spirit of the true scientist, namely, to seek truth for the good of humanity…the German scientists had become immoral and dishonest, therefore their achievements were of a pseudo-scientific character…the greatest of all medical tragedies was further magnified by the fact that the experiments performed added nothing of significance to medical knowledge.” Given time to think on the matter however, he would change his tone, as demonstrated by the following which he wrote in a 1954 letter, quote: ”.. some (of the tests had) very worthwhile results … (and I) hoped … to collect all the worthwhile results and have them published”. Again, notice the phrasing however, “all the worthwhile results,” not, “the results.” His claim was not that Rascher’s experiments were scientifically sound, merely that some worthwhile data could be found among the enormous quantity that was produced, again – fling enough and eventually some of it will stick. And while we’re still on the topic of Rascher, let’s pivot neatly into his high-altitude experiments. As for what was learned from them? Scientifically speaking… not a whole lot that wasn’t already broadly suspected to be fair. But what they did do, was prove those suspicions, with a specific example being that without supplemental oxygen, most people lose consciousness somewhere between 18,000 and 25,000 feet – and that death follows pretty quickly after. Again, it’s a revelation borne from how extensively they documented their wider cruelty, recording things like pulse rates, breathing changes, and exactly how long it took for a person to black out. But still, the fact remains, this is data which is used in the real world, every day, today. Take civil aviation, if you’re flying away on your holidays, and the cabin suddenly depressurises for whatever reason, standard procedure is to immediately dive to a breathable atmosphere, while those little dangly respirators provide you with enough chemical oxygen to remain conscious throughout the descent… and where do you think the hard data to know beyond all doubt what was a breathable altitude came from? Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Of course, data was beforehand, and has been since, gathered from elsewhere: animal studies, flight incident reports, and the like… but proper real testing of the matter on human beings, at least to such extremities… it’s only ever been done in WWII human experimentation. And if you’re thinking, but surely nobody would actually use that data, surely? Well, I’m afraid they certainly did. As an example, after the war, copies of Rascher’s findings quietly filtered into Allied hands, and according to historians like Alexander Mitscherlich in Doctors of Infamy, US aviation medicine researchers absolutely reviewed the Dachau altitude data – albeit behind closed doors. It didn’t appear in public journals, he was keen to stress, but it did show up in internal memos and classified reports, especially during the early Cold War when the Air Force was scrambling to understand rapid decompression risks at extreme altitudes. So yes, Rascher’s numbers – pulled from the dying breaths of Dachau prisoners – helped shape post-war aviation safety protocols. They became part of the foundation for pressurisation standards, oxygen system designs, and emergency descent procedures. You won’t find him credited in any textbook… but the data’s fingerprints are still there. Another case where Nazi data slipped into postwar use? Chemical weapons. Specifically, the Reich’s research into phosgene gas toxicity. To explain, decades later, in the 1980s, those very results resurfaced. with John Vandenberg, a senior official at the US Environmental Protection Agency, openly admitted that his team referenced a Nazi-era study on phosgene toxicity when determining safe workplace exposure limits. According to him, there simply wasn’t any other good human data available – and while he acknowledged the experiments obviously had a lot of flaws, the Nazi data still offered what he called a measure of improvement over what they’d had before. In other words, human-derived figures on dose-response thresholds – gathered in the most horrific way imaginable – ended up directly informing Cold War-era American safety standards. The report wasn’t cited in peer-reviewed literature. It wasn’t shouted from the rooftops. But behind closed doors, in the halls of power, it absolutely was utilised. And the disease experiments? Those too found their use. We’ve already seen what was done — the infections, the vaccines, and the sheer brutality of it all — so let’s look at what came after now. Because while most of that work belonged in the bin alongside its authors, some of it didn’t stay buried. Some of it was reviewed. Some of it was quietly cross-referenced. And in a few cases, some of it even slipped back into circulation. Take malaria, for instance. The trials carried out at Dachau under Dr Klaus Schilling were grotesque, but detailed. Hundreds of prisoners were infected, some repeatedly, in a bid to test quinine derivatives and experimental antimalarials. And while Schilling’s methods earned him a war crimes conviction and a death sentence, his data wasn’t entirely discarded. According to internal records reviewed in A History of Concern: The Ethical Dilemma of using Nazi Medical Research Data and Scientific Research by Ross Halpin, Schilling’s work was analysed by US Army medical officers after the war, even though it was never cited in open literature. No novel cure emerged, either from Schilling’s hand or those of those US doctors - but the fever curves, dosage patterns, and drug interactions were read, evaluated, and, at least temporarily, kept. And we’ll stop with the Nazi stuff there, because frankly, you get the idea by now: it was a shitshow of horror, and somehow, some of the shit stuck. What the Japanese Learned Let us shift scenes now then, to have a look at the ‘results’ of Japan’s experiments – because guess what? Turns out the Japanese didn’t just match the Nazis in their depravity – they also matched them in the depressive accidental efficacy and utility of their results. For example, they discovered that starving fleas for exactly 48 hours prior to release significantly increased their feeding aggression and subsequent plague transmission efficacy, a finding that became pivotal to the successful development of Japan’s first operational biological weapon: the plague bomb. The mechanism behind it was simple — fleas that had not fed recently were far more desperate for a blood meal, and upon release, bit human hosts within minutes, injecting Yersinia pestis directly into the bloodstream. This discovery, logged and refined through over a dozen controlled releases at the Pingfang facility, was later weaponised via the ceramic ‘Uji Bomb,’ a cluster-style ordinance designed to rupture mid-air and scatter a payload of roughly 30,000 infected fleas across urban targets. Kishor Johnson, writing in A Scientific Method to the Madness of Unit 731’s Human Experimentation and Biological Warfare Program, goes into detail about that latter point, explaining that during the October 1940 attack on Ningbo, plague mortality peaked precisely where such bombs were dropped, with a confirmed transmission vector traceable back to those fast-starving flea clusters. The bomb itself, he noted, also had to be ceramic, not metal, because the latter killed the fleas via thermal shock He also noted that their deployment was meticulously calibrated too, in a way that was only possible thanks to the Unit trials: fleas were starved for 48 hours, as already stated, then loaded into the bomb casing within 12 hours of detonation, giving the operator plenty of wiggle room to wait for the perfect local atmospheric conditions before dropping them before the fleas started dropping dead from starvation. Sheldon Harris, in Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45 and the American Cover-up, had a lot to say about this, referring to it as “a grotesque but effective entomological solution to a logistical challenge.” He also noted that the Japanese eventually bred over 300 million fleas in plague-compatible rat hosts to fuel this delivery system’s appetite. Moving beyond that though, Johnson also notes how the Japanese discovered that when administering Vibrio Cholerae through contaminated grain supplies — particularly wheat and millet, which retained moisture well — infection rates among civilians increased sharply compared to delivery via tainted water alone, because the foodborne route allowed for prolonged pathogen viability and delayed detection. Mario Merino, in Unit 731: Japan’s Angels of Death, further adds that this approach was refined by adjusting the grain’s moisture content before distribution — they found that slightly damp wheat gave the bacteria a kind of protective cocoon, extending its infectious potential by as much as 72 hours after planting it in the field. They also discovered that Bacillus Anthracis spores, when suspended in finely milled talcum powder rather than liquid culture, retained both structural integrity and infectious potential long enough to be deployed as a dry biological weapon with aerial dispersal capability — a major leap forward in open-air biowarfare logistics. Johnson, to come back to him, also happened to identify this in particular as one of the more rigorously tested innovations to emerge from the Pingfang complex, with extensive comparative trials proving that powdered anthrax not only clung more reliably to skin and clothing but also produced a 40% higher rate of pulmonary infection in test subjects compared to liquid mediums. Harris clarified the matter even further by revealing that this finding came only after multiple failures involving aqueous anthrax dispersal, where ambient humidity and UV exposure rendered the bacteria inert before infection could take hold. The powdered form was also eventually mixed with inert rice husk and starch derivatives, yielding a sort of ‘bio-dust’ that was tested by dropping it on tied prisoners within open-air cages — a process designed to simulate battlefield conditions. The optimum spore concentration was eventually settled at a 10⁸ colony forming units per gram, a figure scribbled into one surviving planning sheet recovered by Soviet forces during their advance into Manchuria. As for the syphilis experiments, they discovered that congenital transmission from mother to foetus was not only possible but alarmingly efficient, with nearly 70% of infected pregnancies resulting in stillbirth or severe malformation — a figure meticulously recorded through repeated vivisections of pregnant test subjects in late-stage gestation. Kishor Johnson, again, notes that the Japanese researchers deliberately infected pregnant prisoners at varying points in their term to track the pathogen’s progression across the placental barrier. We already know that of course, but what we don’t know is the results: that infection within the first trimester was most likely to result in neurological defects or miscarriage, while second and third trimester infections often produced living infants with advanced-stage syphilitic lesions. And coming back to Harris, he confirms that this data was viewed as “clinically robust” within the programme and was later synthesised into unpublished postwar papers on perinatal pathology, some of which quietly circulated within Japanese medical universities in the 1950s under the guise of standard epidemiological research. Turning to the frostbite trials, the Unit researchers found that tissue which had undergone full crystallisation could only be salvaged if rewarming was initiated within a tightly limited timeframe — typically under 120 minutes — and conducted via immersion in water held precisely between 37.5°C and 39°C. Deviations outside this range, even by a few degrees, led to exponential increases in necrosis and nerve damage. They also observed that friction-based warming methods, such as rubbing with cloth or exposure to dry heat, routinely ruptured capillaries and caused blistering that masked deeper structural degradation, making dissection less “useful.” Additionally, they discovered that once a limb had thawed, the presence or absence of pain was a reliable prognostic indicator: those who screamed often survived longer. Those who didn’t usually lost the limb — and sometimes their lives — within 48 hours due to systemic collapse or sepsis. It’s broader in scope, but you’ve got to admit, it lines up with the Nazi findings weirdly well, doesn’t it? In the case of blood loss and shock, it emerged that the threshold for irreversible haemorrhagic collapse in a healthy adult male was roughly 40% of total blood volume lost within 20 minutes — a figure established through systematic exsanguination trials, where flow rate, blood pressure, and organ responsiveness were tracked in real time. They discovered that beyond this threshold, even immediate transfusion failed to restore consciousness or cardiac stability in most subjects. However, if replacement fluids were administered before the 30% mark, survival rates jumped significantly — especially when the fluid used was warmed and isotonic. The trials also revealed that cooling the patient during the bleed — counterintuitive as it seemed — could delay the onset of shock by slowing metabolic demand, although this only worked in the short term and complicated rewarming later. By running comparative autopsies, they mapped the order in which organ systems failed during terminal shock: kidneys first, then the gut, and finally the brainstem. When it came to chemical exposure, they determined that phosgene gas caused death not primarily through suffocation, but by inducing catastrophic pulmonary edema — fluid flooding the lungs so rapidly that blood oxygenation dropped to zero within minutes. The concentration threshold for this outcome, they discovered, was significantly lower when the gas was inhaled in humid conditions, as moisture accelerated the reaction in lung tissue. They also noted a distinct three-stage symptom profile: an initial cough and chest tightness, a deceptive asymptomatic interval of up to 30 minutes, and then a sudden collapse as the lungs filled. This delay, they concluded, made phosgene particularly effective for incapacitating troops without immediate alarm — a trait they considered ideal for battlefield deployment or sabotage. Their internal records recommended that gas be released in early morning fog or enclosed urban zones, where the humidity would maximise lethality before dispersal. Post-mortem examinations further revealed that phosgene exposure did not cause visible damage to the upper airways, allowing the lungs to remain deceptively intact until filled, which meant even medics misread the danger until it was far too late. I’ll end the discussion of what Japan discovered there then I think, because while interesting in their own right to be sure, I am less interested in you all remembering the specifics, than I am the overall vibe of it all, which is to say, actually, it turns out, and there’s no nice way to dress this up: for all of their abhorrent wickedness… the Japanese actually learned a lot from their human experimentation. The Critical Context And having said all of that, I now really, really need to come back to the point I made at the beginning of this chapter, that being that actually useful results such as these, need to be remembered as the shit that actually stuck to the wall, while sticking atop a giant mound of turds that missed the mark, and fell to earth with a splat. It’s a weird way to structure the chapter I know, sandwiching the wider context as crusts, rather than just putting it all at the end – and indeed, in a normal Decoding the Unknown, that is exactly what I would do, as dangling an incomplete answer before yanking the rod away and revealing the full truth of a matter certainly makes a piece more engaging. But here, today, with the subject matter we are covering being so important, I couldn’t run the risk that those who dropped off before reaching this point might walk away thinking that those vile and horrific ‘experiments’ had any more than the rock bottom, and minimal scientific merit that they did as a whole – thus the chapter as it stands right now. That said then, and my apologies for some slight – and necessary as I see it – clunkiness aside, how and why should we temper our opinions when it comes to this data? To explain what I’m getting at, I’ll pull from Berger’s 1990 article again, as in it, he outlines how the Nazi ‘studies’ were total and complete methodological disasters. Basic experimental protocols? Missing. Control groups? Absent. Sample sizes? Unspecified. Subject variables like age, health, clothing, and immersion depth? Largely Ignored. Temperature measurements were sporadic and tampered with - sometimes by assistants desperately trying to sabotage the trial and spare victims’ lives. Documentation was also vague and contradictory. Rascher, for example, would report one thing in his tables, then contradict it in the postscript. Even the physiological conclusions - the supposedly ‘useful bits’ – have major issues. Rascher’s team once reported, for instance, that water temperature had no impact on cooling rate - an absurd claim contradicted by basically every ethical hypothermia trial ever conducted. The descriptions of cardiac arrhythmias read like a drunk student’s flashcards. “Atrial flutter” is mislabelled, “ventricular fibrillation” is omitted entirely, and there’s a weird mix of colloquial and nonstandard medical language suggesting either ignorance or apathy. Probably both. What you’re left with isn’t a dataset - it’s a shambles. A horror show of half-notes and misreadings, documented under duress by men who may have actively sabotaged their own experiments to save lives. This was not the work of genius corrupted. This was the work of mediocrities drunk on power, producing paperwork for promotion. And yet, for all of those issues, some of it, when cross referenced with ethically conducted studies, and was double and triple checked to the degree that was ethically possible, had a smidge of validity, and held a slither of utility. Human experimentation of this… ‘depth,’ I’ll call it, had simply never been done before, and nor have they since, mercifully – and that alone makes the data useful in an objective sense. Chapter 4: Should We Use It? So, now that we have happened upon the uncomfortable realisation that, actually, yes, some useful stuff actually was learned from WWII human experiments, a rather difficult question indeed looms over us: is it right to use it? And, in answering that, I gotta be real with you all folks, a question like this is way, way over my intellectual pay grade. How far you ask? Well, using the metaphor of physical height, picture all five foot eleven of me stood, say, next to my house, and, with it standing about 25 feet tall, nah, that’s still not quite far enough above me. Picture me beside the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on earth, and you’ll find that despite it being 2,711 feet taller than me – you still aren’t quite there yet. In fact, keep going up into the atmosphere, past the International Space Station, blast past Pluto and out of the Solar System, then keep going until you pass the outer rim of our galaxy, and hit the Andromeda Galaxy, and about there, I feel, is about the intellectual height I’d want to reach before I felt comfortable enough throwing my two cents in on this matter. Worry not though, because while I may be but a humble idiot, and a man accursed to walk the earth with a brain marked by a smoothness akin to that of custard – think like Cain out of the bible, but instead of immortality I’m marked by stupidity – there are many clever sorts out there who have given the matter much thought, and whose brains are blessed by rolling and cavernous wrinkles. So, what I can do instead therefore, is assemble some of their thoughts together, gesture enthusiastically in their collected direction, and then say, “The answer’s in there somewhere folks, good luck!” The Deontological View: An Absolute ‘No’ And let us begin doing exactly that by considering contemporary responses in the immediate wake of it all. In Germany, for example, as we saw back in Chapter 1, while many perpetrators ended up getting frustratingly short sentences, many did get sent to the rope for what they had done – and so either way, a firm and clear standard in both legality and morality was established: and that was that it was very, very wrong, criminal in fact – literally. In Japan, however…. yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah… not that. You see, my not mentioning the fate of the Units’ staff earlier was not a whoopsie daisy on my part, no, I wanted to hold it to this very moment, so that while discussing the matter of ethics and morality more broadly, I could reveal the fact that, actually… they basically got away with it – totally scott free. Why? In a nutshell, the data gathered proved to be so useful, and the people who had created it so proficient in their wicked fields, that the US couldn’t help but say – fuck the ethics of the matter, Uncle Sam want, Uncle Sam get, gibs data NOW. As a result, and as historian Sheldon Harris put it, to come back to him, the “American cover-up … sacrificed justice for information.” They knew full well in their hearts that the myriad of former military scientists they had given pardons to likely contained some of the most evil and reprehensible human beings ever to walk the face of the earth… but such was the Cold War – to them, suddenly now presented with a chance to get an edge over their new Soviet enemy, culpability, at least in the Far East, found itself such a tangible and trifling matter. And don’t think I’m flinging shit just at the Americans here too, the Soviets had the exact same convenient hypocrisy as their Capitalist counterparts. But whereas the Americans had more of a, ‘No war criminals to see here move along’ type approach, the Soviets went for more of a ‘Mate, do you know how much justice I dished out? All of it. That’s how much. You’ve never seen so much justice you haven’t. Trust me bro’ type one. To explain what I mean, the Soviets did actually have a trial for the Japanese scientists they captured during their invasion of Manchuria, the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials in 1949 to be precise. And at their conclusion, all 12 defendants were found guilty… and sentenced to hard labour… at a Gulag outside of the city of Sverdlovsk… Sverdlovsk just so happening to be where the Soviets were building a shiny new bioweapons research facility… So yeah, in real terms, they got away with it too, but if you asked Moscow, they were found guilty at a trial, so JUSTICE. For our purposes however, the end result is the fact that the aftermath of WWII didn’t produce a single, unified moral stance on what to do with the data, at least not from the powers that be – their words were absolutist condemnation, but their actions were those of pure pragmatists. Instead then, let us not look towards governments to guide our moral takeaways – a lesson that, if anything, was the key one from WWII and the various regimes involved in it anyway – and instead turn to various clever and insightful individuals, starting with those who said absolutely NOT under any circumstances. This is, to break out the big philosophical words, the deontological view: that there are some things for which the immorality of the matter is absolute, and so, as a result, once that line is crossed, everything else is irrelevant, and any ‘good’ – if you can even call it such a thing – that may objectively be able to be panned out from the wickedness, becomes a null and moot point; it’s accursed and evil knowledge – so let it burn just as the victims produced by its penning did. The first person of note to hold this view is someone we have met before, Dr Andrew Ivy, the very man who, with time, would speak openly about the potential utility of aspects of Rascher’s experiments. You see, for him, said utility was merely a matter of objectivity – not any kind of endorsement, or a call to action either way, and when he said he “wished to collect” the broader data, that was merely a point of academic curiosity. Actually using it for anything beyond that, was a big no as far as he was concerned – with the evil manner in which it had been collected being the end of the matter. This view was shared by his colleague, Dr Leo Alexander, who, along with Ivy, was instrumental in drafting the ‘Nuremberg Code,’ a document that, as the name rather gives away, was produced during the Doctors’ Trials at Nuremberg, and prescribed the standards of ethics, or “code,” with which human experimentation could be ethically conducted going forward. And if you’re interested, here’s the CliffsNotes version of said code: Voluntary consent is essential. The experiment should yield fruitful results for the good of society, and it must be necessary and not achievable by other means. It must be based on prior animal experimentation and knowledge of the disease or problem. Avoid unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury. No experiment should be conducted if there is reason to believe it could result in death or disabling injury. The degree of risk must never exceed the humanitarian importance of the problem being addressed. Subjects must be protected against even remote possibilities of injury or death, with proper facilities and preparations. Conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. Subjects must be free to quit at any time. The scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage. So yeah, when that was their standard for how things should be done, it’s hardly surprising that both Drs Alexander and Ivy found Nazi human experimentation so repugnant, that they considered any knowledge gained from it intrinsically illicit, and beyond absolution. I gotta say too – as much as I’m keeping my own personal opinions to myself in this chapter – a shout out and big love to the good Drs for that there code too, because as a man who regularly gets pumped full of all manner of experimental drugs, because as a self-employed remote worker who firmly believes that money can in fact buy happiness, doing so allows me to significantly boost my income without impeding my day job one bit… I’m rather grateful for it… Bringing it back to the matter at hand, however: not everyone who stands firm against the use of Nazi or Japanese data does so with procedural or professional influences informing their opinion. For many, it’s just that base moral instinct and resulting moral revulsion alone that forms the opinion that using such data would be an act akin to dancing on the graves of its victims. Take Baruch Cohen, a legal scholar who studied this issue in forensic detail, and published his musings in a 1990 paper titled The Ethics of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments. He argued that using data “wrenched so brutally from helpless victims” would make us moral accessories to the crimes themselves. Not just bystanders, not just opportunists - complicit. To take that information and use it, he warned, is to turn the murdered into retrospective guinea pigs, subjects once more in the cold service of science. The killing may be done, but the exploitation would live on. And as much as I don’t want to drown you in a barrage of unending quotes, I would like to say that in reading Cohen’s paper, you get the sense that he is a deeply empathetic fellow – and that this empathy is the keystone of his perspective on the matter. And can you blame him, too? Cast your mind back to Eva Mozes, who we met earlier – who if you recall was one of the few survivors of Mengele’s twin experiments – to help get where Cohen was coming from. She was a woman who knew exactly what it was like to have her being reduced to mere data. It meant being poked, prodded, infected, measured, and mutilated, all without consent, and all without compassion – only to face disposal afterwards as little more than bio waste. Would you be able to look her in the eye and start making a utilitarian argument for the proactive use of what tiny scraps of useful data came from WWII human experimentation? In fact, we can up the ante, because there is one period photo of her, taken immediately after Auschwitz liberation by the Soviets. Front and centre, there she is, the very same little girl who survived torture by internally screaming “I must survive, I must survive” over and over again. Look at her and tell me, yes, or no? Should it or shouldn’t it be used? Lord Immanuel Jakobovits, the former Chief Rabbi of Britain and a towering figure in Jewish medical ethics, certainly didn’t think so. For him, using the data would be a simple desecration. The value of a human life, he believed, is not something you can weigh against a line graph or a statistical insight harvested from the dying. Even in the realm of secular science, this view found strong voices. Dr Henry Beecher, a leading Harvard ethicist and anaesthesiologist, for example, made it clear in his 1966 paper Ethics and Clinical Research that he does not believe the ends can ever justify the means. Publishing or relying on data extracted through torture or coercion, he warned, would inflict a “far-reaching moral loss to medicine” itself. It would corrode the trust between doctor and patient, poison the integrity of research, and hollow out the very soul of the scientific endeavour. And that’s the hard wall of the deontological argument. Not “never again” as a slogan, but as a doctrine. A belief that evil knowledge, like radioactive waste, can’t be scrubbed clean, only buried, no ifs, no buts, and no what abouts. And since I suspect I’ve lowkey given away my stance despite attempts to remain Mr Neutral Purveyor of Other People’s Opinions this chapter, I may as well come out and say it – this is NOT a take I find disagreeable. That raw guttural feeling I got while researching and writing this piece – half burning visceral hate for those who orchestrated it, half gut-wrenching sympathy for its victims – is simply not a feeling I can ignore or overlook. So yeah… I can totally get why people would take this ‘flat no,’ for various reasons, stance. The Utilitarian View: A Conditional ‘Yes’ Of course, not everyone sees this issue in purely black-and-white, never-ever terms. Enter the utilitarians – those who argue that if some scrap of knowledge gleaned from these atrocities could save lives or advance medicine, then maybe, just maybe, it should be used for the greater good. Their rationale is straightforward: why let data gathered at such a terrible price go to waste if it might help someone? Bioethicist Arthur Caplan summarises this grim calculus bluntly: would we rather let people die in the present than taint ourselves by using data from the past? This perspective isn’t just theoretical too. In the 1980s, Pozos – who we have already met more than once today – argued that data is neither evil nor good but exists independently of the methods by which it was gathered, and that ethics and science are not linked. Accordingly, he proposed that from a purely scientific point of view, if one believes the data to be accurate, it is appropriate to use it. He wasn’t alone in that opinion too; he had allies like Dr John Hayward, a Canadian scientist. Their argument hinged on the uniqueness of the opportunity, and the irreversibility of the situation: Nazi experiments had produced certain extreme data points (for example, how long an unanaesthetised human could survive in near-freezing water) that ethical science could never replicate. If that data was unique, why not use it to potentially save pilots or shipwrecked sailors from hypothermic death? It’s not like boycotting the data would bring the victims back, as they saw it. Some go further, suggesting that using the data might even honour the victims in a strange, posthumous way – a kind of redemptive ad hoc justification. For example, Sarah Wilson toys – but does not explicitly endorse – the notion that, quote: “Now that the Holocaust is in the past, no one can do anything to prevent the cruelty. Perhaps now that the data exists, the greatest happiness would be to use it so that others may benefit in spite of the evil that helped cause the data. Maybe saving lives by using the data can begin to redeem the Holocaust deaths in a small way.” Annnnnnnnnnnnnnd I’m fully dropping the neutral veneer to chime in again folks, because, errrr, yeah, I have some THOUGHTS on this one. Make no mistake, I can see what is trying to be said, but alas, us humans aren’t solely creatures of logic, and as a result, when I open the floodgates on my emotions, so that they can blend together with my logic and produce my fully rounded opinion, the resulting soup comes out as a firm, “No, no, no, and just to be clear, fucking NO.” Like I say, however, I see the logic, so I think no lesser of anyone who does have this takeaway, but for me, the second the words “redeem,” “the,” and “holocaust,” are combined together in a sentence, even in a way which was clearly well intentioned – I’m out. I’m going to come back to Jewish theological perspectives now too, because of course, they are not monolithic on this point. In Judaism, for example, the concept of pikuach nefesh (saving a life) is of paramount importance – so much so that it overrides almost any religious law. This has led some Orthodox authorities to conclude that if Nazi-derived data could genuinely save lives, it should be permissible to use – albeit with solemn precautions. We can see this applied in the discourse around Pernkopf Anatomy: The Atlas of Topographic and Applied Human Anatomy. This is an anatomical atlas which was originally published in 1937 by Eduard Pernkopf, hence the name. It’s a work which is nothing short of totemic, as it remains very heavily used to this day. One problem however, Pernkopf was Austrian, and a big old Nazi, so guess where many believe the corpses featured in the book came from? Yeeeeeeeeep – the obvious place. However, when commenting on the morality of its continued use, given… THAT, both Rabbi Joseph Polak and Dr Michael Grodin jointly concluded that “most Jewish authorities would allow the use of the images to save human lives – under the condition the history of the atlas was made known, so the victims were afforded some of the dignity they are owed.” In other words: use it, but never whitewash where it came from. Echoing this, an observant Jewish scientist named Velvl Greene admitted that, had he known of the Nazi research earlier in his career, “I have no doubt… I would have cited the Nazi data, looked for more, and used it” to further his work. It’s worth stating too, that the utilitarians do acknowledge that raw NO feeling that I described in myself, and - although I’m sure this doesn’t need to be said outright, but there’s no harm being absolutely clear – they do NOT condone the methods by which the data was obtained. Rather, they argue that the deed is done; we cannot undo the crimes, and the victims are long dead. As one often-cited commentary asks pointedly: should the data be buried, or could using it actually prevent future suffering? It’s a classic ends-vs-means question, and the utilitarian camp is willing to hold its nose and say that sometimes, yes, the ends might justify the means. One adviser to the US Army bluntly told his superiors in the 1950s that data from Japan’s Unit 731 could be “very valuable to US forces,” effectively saying “we’d be stupid not to use it.” The Cold War American military evidently agreed – don’t forget they struck a secret immunity-for-data deal with Unit 731’s perpetrators, valuing bacteriological intel over prosecuting war crimes. In their calculus, national security and gaining a scientific edge over the Soviets won out over moral scruples. Uncle Sam wanted the data, and so the data he got. It’s not just the military who have put the utilitarian interpretation into practice too – as civilians have also done it. In 1989, officials at the US Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, were quietly weighing whether to use Nazi gas-chamber data to set safety limits for phosgene, a lethal chemical. Nazi doctors had force-exposed prisoners to phosgene, of course, and meticulously noted the lethal concentrations. As a result, some EPA scientists suggested that since human data is so hard to come by, these ghastly findings could fill an important gap. After all, wouldn’t more accurate regulations save lives around chemical plants? By a strictly utilitarian logic, it was hard to deny that if the Nazi data were accurate, it might indeed help to do exactly that. The Academic Consensus Examples such as that do tend to be the exception rather than the norm however, at least in the civilian space, as there, the answer is usually a firm NOPE. To explain how that consensus was reached, we have to turn back to Beecher once again, as it was actually his paper Ethics and Clinical Research that got the conversation started. And with the door on the matter having been opened, one by one, serious institutions started implementing their own formalised NOPE policies. For example, the New England Journal, soon decreed that anything that contained even so much as a bibliographic citation of WWII human experimentation data, would NOT be considered for publication – ever. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, a small working group of medical journal editors who work together to codify publishing standards and norms across the sector, followed suit too, adopting the same standard not long after – and so on and so forth until it basically became the norm. And yet, the academic consensus, clearly, as we have seen, is not THE consensus. And so we are left with a situation where on one side lies the uncompromising stance that such data is irredeemable – “evil knowledge” that, like radioactive waste, must be sealed away forever, and on the other side is the argument that, like it or not, the data exists, and refusing to even look at it could itself be seen as a failure of our duty to save lives or advance understanding. Which side is right, ultimately? Hell if I know – don’t forget this stuff is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay over my intellectual paygrade. Fortunately, however, I know one man whose brain lacks not for wrinkles, and he’s currently reading these very words. So, Simon: what do you think? Where do you stand in this moral quagmire? Chapter 5: And Not Everyone Agrees… And so, following Simon’s no doubt wise words, we are coming towards the end of today’s episode. Before I close things off, however, and very much in the continued spirit of my being terrified of getting something wrong today, I just wanted to discuss something that has most likely become apparent to many of you by now: The fact that, actually, it turns out, this topic is a fucking nightmare to navigate. Not for the morality of the matter, no – but instead for the fact that the scholarly sources just cannot seem to reach a consensus one way or another on whether or not anything useful was actually gained from the experiments to begin with. It’s an absolute methodological minefield, and some sources can’t even seem to agree with themselves, never mind each other. Take Robert Berger’s landmark 1990 article in the New England Journal of Medicine to begin my explanation. He performs a methodical, line-by-line demolition of the Dachau hypothermia experiments, concluding they’re so riddled with contradiction, sloppiness, and probable fabrication that they should be thrown out entirely. In his words, they, “have all the ingredients of a scientific fraud” and cannot, in good faith, be said to “advance science or save lives.” And yet, other respected researchers - sometimes in the very same breath as agreeing with Berger - argue that the data has been useful. Take Robert Pozos, he concedes the data is “deeply flawed,” but insists that some of it may still hold value, if reviewed cautiously and cross-referenced against ethical studies. But he simultaneously calls Berger’s dismissal fair and maintains that the “major findings” haven’t been scientifically debunked. Depending on which paragraph you read him in, he can seemingly have totally contrary opinions. Andrew Ivy is even worse: in 1947, for example, he called the data medically worthless. By 1954, he was calling it “very worthwhile” and wishing to catalogue it for academic curiosity. Scholars have tried to explain this away as the product of political compromise, Cold War priorities, or academic vanity - but it still stands as a whiplash-inducing reversal from a key moral authority of the postwar trials. Then there are people like John Hayward, who openly admit the data is tainted but argue that its sheer uniqueness makes it hard to ignore. “I don’t want to use it,” he said. “But there is no other - and there will be no other in an ethical world.” The implication being: if no other human experiment will ever ethically replicate the extremity of what the Nazis did, then maybe - just maybe - some of it has to be used. Cautiously. Quietly. Almost shamefully. And the use of it at all, of course, implies that it has some scientific value. Even major institutional publications can’t seem to commit. The US Army’s own textbook on Military Medical Ethics acknowledges that hypothermia data from Dachau was consulted by aviation medicine experts after the war. Yet the very same book states outright that the experiments violated all principles of scientific rigour. The contradiction isn’t just tolerated - it’s printed side-by-side, like an open wound in the literature. This fractured consensus created an absolute nightmare for the humble idiot whose words you are currently hearing. ALL I wanted to do, was to go into a deep dive that could be equal parts commemorative as it was informative, about what is, in all likeliness, THE single darkest chapter in medical history. Long term fans of not only this channel, but the Whistlerverse more broadly – have likely ascertained by this point, that I hold both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in quite the low regard, and so the last thing I wanted to do was to relay their history incorrectly to you all, or worse still, end up playing up into the very type of ‘accidental denialism’ that I denigrated in my ‘Boomerism’ tangent. With that said then, and in the spirit of transparency, how did I end up navigating this historiographical clusterfuck – especially when I make no attempt to hide my own intellectual shortcomings? In a nutshell, I put my faith in quantity, i.e., when crafting the ‘So, What Was Actually Learned’ chapter, I just presented the narrative that appears the most often, which, of course, is the ‘fuck, turns out they actually did learn some things’ one. If this turns out to be wrong, I can only apologise, but among the dozens of works I gathered on my hard drive for this piece – the most heavily weighted conclusion was readily apparent. All I could do was trust both my gut, and my skills as a researcher, and in the end – that’s exactly what I did. Conclusion And there you have it, folks. A deep dive into a topic so bleak, so viscerally depressing, and so morally mangled that I now find myself wondering why I ever suggested it in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, this is important history. Vital, even – so I’m very glad we covered it. But it does leave me asking the same question I always seem to arrive at after these kinds of topics: why can’t I ever research anything nice? So, with that in mind, fuck it, on my next episode: expect me to decode an unknown along the lines of ‘Just How Nice is Keanu Reeves’, ‘This is Why Corgis are the Cutest Type of Dog,’ or maybe even, ‘The Tax Deductible Business Expense Special: Just How Luxurious of a Time Can One Man Have on Holiday?’ ‘Till then, I’m out – ciao. Key Takeaways Both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany conducted extensive human experimentation during WWII, which are considered the darkest periods of medical history. The experiments were conducted in camps, laboratories, and covert facilities across their occupied territories, subjecting thousands to extreme torture. Despite the barbarism, some useful medical data was obtained, such as effective hypothermia treatments and insights into high-altitude survival. The ethical debate surrounding the use of this data is complex, with some arguing it should be used for the greater good, while others believe it is irredeemably tainted. The aftermath of WWII did not produce a unified moral stance on using the data, with governments often prioritizing practical benefits over ethical considerations. Frequently Asked Questions What was the purpose of the Dachau hypothermia experiments conducted by Dr. Sigmund Rascher?The Dachau hypothermia experiments were conducted to help Luftwaffe pilots survive high-altitude bailouts and to understand the effects of hypothermia on the human body. What methods did Dr. Rascher use to study hypothermia?Dr. Rascher used methods such as submerging prisoners in ice water, exposing them to extreme cold, and then attempting to rewarm them using various techniques like hot baths, rubbing, and heated cradles. What was the outcome of Dr. Rascher’s experiments on hypothermia?Rascher’s experiments revealed that rapid immersion in hot water between 40–50°C is the most effective way to rewarm someone suffering from severe hypothermia. They also discovered that hypothermia kills by shutting down vital organs, particularly the heart. What was the fate of Dr. Sigmund Rascher?Dr. Sigmund Rascher was arrested by the Gestapo in 1945 and sent to Dachau Concentration Camp, where he was shot by SS men on April 26, 1945. What were the Nazi seawater experiments at Dachau?The Nazi seawater experiments at Dachau involved forcing prisoners to drink seawater and chemically treated seawater to determine if it could be made safe to drink. Many prisoners died or were severely affected by the experiments. What were the Nazi sterilization experiments at Auschwitz?The Nazi sterilization experiments at Auschwitz involved using X-rays and caustic chemicals to sterilize prisoners, particularly Jews and other ‘undesirable’ groups. The experiments were conducted by Dr. Horst Schumann and Dr. Carl Clauberg. What were the Japanese Unit 731 experiments?The Japanese Unit 731 experiments involved conducting human experimentation on prisoners, including deliberate infection with diseases like plague, cholera, and anthrax, as well as studying the effects of frostbite, starvation, and other extreme conditions. What was the purpose of the Japanese Unit 731 experiments?The purpose of the Japanese Unit 731 experiments was to develop biological weapons and to study the effects of various diseases and extreme conditions on the human body. What was the fate of the Japanese Unit 731 staff after the war?The Japanese Unit 731 staff were granted immunity by the U.S. in exchange for their research data, allowing them to avoid prosecution for their war crimes. What was the outcome of the Japanese Unit 731 experiments?The Japanese Unit 731 experiments resulted in the development of biological weapons and the gathering of data on the effects of various diseases and extreme conditions on the human body. However, the ethical implications of using this data remain a subject of debate.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the purpose of the Dachau hypothermia experiments conducted by Dr. Sigmund Rascher?

The Dachau hypothermia experiments were conducted to help Luftwaffe pilots survive high-altitude bailouts and to understand the effects of hypothermia on the human body.

What methods did Dr. Rascher use to study hypothermia?

Dr. Rascher used methods such as submerging prisoners in ice water, exposing them to extreme cold, and then attempting to rewarm them using various techniques like hot baths, rubbing, and heated cradles.

What was the outcome of Dr. Rascher’s experiments on hypothermia?

Rascher’s experiments revealed that rapid immersion in hot water between 40–50°C is the most effective way to rewarm someone suffering from severe hypothermia. They also discovered that hypothermia kills by shutting down vital organs, particularly the heart.

What was the fate of Dr. Sigmund Rascher?

Dr. Sigmund Rascher was arrested by the Gestapo in 1945 and sent to Dachau Concentration Camp, where he was shot by SS men on April 26, 1945.

What were the Nazi seawater experiments at Dachau?

The Nazi seawater experiments at Dachau involved forcing prisoners to drink seawater and chemically treated seawater to determine if it could be made safe to drink. Many prisoners died or were severely affected by the experiments.

What were the Nazi sterilization experiments at Auschwitz?

The Nazi sterilization experiments at Auschwitz involved using X-rays and caustic chemicals to sterilize prisoners, particularly Jews and other ‘undesirable’ groups. The experiments were conducted by Dr. Horst Schumann and Dr. Carl Clauberg.

What were the Japanese Unit 731 experiments?

The Japanese Unit 731 experiments involved conducting human experimentation on prisoners, including deliberate infection with diseases like plague, cholera, and anthrax, as well as studying the effects of frostbite, starvation, and other extreme conditions.

What was the purpose of the Japanese Unit 731 experiments?

The purpose of the Japanese Unit 731 experiments was to develop biological weapons and to study the effects of various diseases and extreme conditions on the human body.

What was the fate of the Japanese Unit 731 staff after the war?

The Japanese Unit 731 staff were granted immunity by the U.S. in exchange for their research data, allowing them to avoid prosecution for their war crimes.

What was the outcome of the Japanese Unit 731 experiments?

The Japanese Unit 731 experiments resulted in the development of biological weapons and the gathering of data on the effects of various diseases and extreme conditions on the human body. However, the ethical implications of using this data remain a subject of debate.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Was Anything Useful Learned From WWII Human Experimentation?
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.