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Holocaust on Trial

Dachau Altitude Experiment "Perhaps justice would ultimately be served if we were to allow life to emerge from the Nazi murders," says the ethicist Baruch Cohen. Pictured: A prisoner during a high-altitude experiment at Dachau.
If the data have a chance to benefit people today, are we not morally obligated to use them?

The United States produces about one billion pounds of phosgene gas a year for use in manufacturing plastics and pesticides. Yet phosgene causes lung irritation and fluid build-up and can making breathing difficult if not impossible. To assess the risks to factory workers and those living nearby, the Environmental Protection Agency thought of using Nazi data on phosgene-gas experiments, but decided it was immoral. As one writer commented, "Is it fair to those people currently being exposed to the chemical to pretend that applicable data do not exist? Can the ethical questions be so compelling that we ignore information that might conceivably reduce the amount of human suffering and misery currently being experienced?" [49]
"We cannot imply any approval of the methods. Nor, however, should we let the inhumanity of the experiments blind us to the possibility that some good may be salvaged from the ashes."
—Kristine Moe, journalist [49]

"As a child of survivors of the Holocaust, I have strong empathy for those opposed to the data's use. Nevertheless, as a physician who deals with children and has seen them comatose, brain damaged, and dead from hypothermia, my sense is that to save one child through the use of this information is worthwhile."
—Anonymous medical doctor [50]

"Perhaps justice would ultimately be served if we were to allow life to emerge from the Nazi murders."
—Baruch Cohen, attorney and ethicist [51]
Based on what you now know, do you think doctors and scientists should be able to use data from Nazi death-camp experiments?
Yes | No


References
48. Katz, Jay. "Abuse of Human Beings for the Sake of Science." In Caplan, p. 264.
49. Moe, p. 7.
50. Siegel, p. 1.
51. Cohen, p. 20.


Photo: National Archives, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives

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