NOVA Online (click here for NOVA home)
Holocaust on Trial
Results of Death-Camp Experiments: Should They Be Used?
All 14 Counterarguments

If you answered No the first time:
What if you knew that not publishing and/or using the data could strengthen the arguments of those who say the Holocaust never happened?
So-called Holocaust deniers maintain that the Holocaust itself never took place. Many who find such arguments absurd and detestable feel that failing to cite or use the Nazi data might only fan the flames of Holocaust denial. As such, most scholars, whether or not they advocate using the Nazi data, hold that the fact that the experiments happened should never be forgotten, lest such atrocities recur. Thus, Dr. Jay Katz of Yale Law School, who opposes use, would publish the data in full detail, then condemn them to oblivion [31], while Ronald Banner of the Jewish Ethical Medical Study Group in Philadelphia, who does not oppose citation of the data, nevertheless feels "chagrined that someone would refer to those experiments without mentioning something about the way the information was gained. It shows a lack of conscience. There are times that something, morally, stinks so bad that you have to hold your nose even while you refer to it." [32]
"It sends a chill down every normal human being's spine to think of the horrible things the Nazis did there, but I'm separating the results and the circumstances. Actually, if the U.S. doctor [Pozos] dedicated his study to the memory of those victims of the Nazis, it would serve as a nice way of reminding people about the horrible experiments."
Ephraim Zuroff, Israeli representative to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles [33]

"I submit that we must put the Holocaust and the Nazi experiments directly under the floodlights and on center stage even if some of us and our past and present are partly illuminated by the glare. Instead of banning the Nazi data or assigning it to some archivist or custodial committee, I maintain that it be exhumed, printed, and disseminated to every medical school in the world along with the details of methodology and the names of the doctors who did it, whether or not they were indicted, acquitted, or hanged. ... Let the students and the residents and the young doctors know that this was not ancient history or an episode from a horror movie where the actors get up after filming and prepare for another role. It was real. It happened yesterday. ... They tried to burn the bodies and to suppress the data. We must not finish the job for them."
—Dr. Velvl W. Greene, professor of medical ethics at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel [34]

"The best argument I've heard for preserving the Nazi data is to keep evidence that those experiments were carried out. As long as the data are available, evidence that at least some people did some bad things in Nazi Germany cannot be denied."
—Howard M. Spiro, M.D., Department of Internal Medicine, Yale University [35]

If you answered No the second time:
What if you knew that such data could not be obtained today?
Hypothermia expert Dr. Robert Pozos had immersed hundreds of volunteers into ice water in the years after he founded the University of Minnesota's Hypothermia Laboratory in 1977. (He is no longer affiliated with the university.) But he never let a participant's temperature drop more than 3.6°F (i.e., below 95°F). Unburdened by even the slightest sense of humanity, the Nazi hypothermia experimenters, on the other hand, let their victims' interior body temperatures drop to 79.7°F before attempting to revive them. Most died an excruciatingly painful death as a result. However, some did revive, and the Nazis found that rapid rewarming in hot water proved the most effective way to revive them. In an ethical world, such data would not exist, but they do exist and could benefit humanity. Should they simply be lost to science?
"Dr. Rascher, although he wallowed in blood ... and in obscenity ... nevertheless appears to have settled the question of what to do for people in shock from exposure to cold ... The final report satisfies all the criteria of objective and accurate observation and interpretation ... The method of rapid and intensive rewarming in hot water ... should be immediately adopted as the treatment of choice by the Air-Sea Rescue Services of the United States Armed Forces."
—Maj. Leo Alexander, U.S. Army doctor who served as aide to the chief counsel of the Nuremberg war-crimes trial and authored an oft-cited 1945 report on the Dachau hypothermia experiments. While Alexander later concluded the results were undependable, other medical experts, most recently hypothermia researchers Robert Pozos and John Hayward, have claimed that the data are useful [36]

"The goal of science is to produce new knowledge. If, during unethically conducted experiments, one valid scientific fact is produced, should that information be used as it has been, referenced in the literature as it has been, or just discarded?"
—Jay Katz (Yale University School of Law) and Robert S. Pozos (hypothermia expert) [37]

"I don't want to have to use this data, but there is no other and will be no other in an ethical world."
—Dr. John S. Hayward, hypothermia expert at University of Victoria University, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, on why he used Nazi hypothermia data in his research [38]

"To justify the use of Nazi data in a research article, I would expect scientists to use the findings only in circumstances where the scientific validity is clear and where there is no alternative source of information."
—Kristine Moe, journalist [39]

If you answered No the third time:
If you feel that the Nazi results are tainted because of the way they were obtained, what if you knew that many deem information morally neutral?
Many scientists might argue that while the Nazi experiments were nothing short of bestial, their results can only be judged scientifically, not morally; data are neither good nor bad, they are just data. Even if scientists, journal editors, and others were to judge results on moral grounds, Dr. Eleanor Singer, editor of Public Opinion Quarterly, considers it "nonsense to talk about 'enforcing ethical standards' as though these were clear and agreed-upon." Until the scientific community reaches a consensus on the degree to which ethical concerns should govern the spread of scientific knowledge, Singer maintains, "I would argue that open dissemination, not censorship, affords the best chance for developing agreed-upon principles of what constitutes ethical research procedures, and of how potential conflicts among ethical principles, and between such principles and scientific goals, are to be resolved." [40]
"The most powerful argument in defense of the use of the data gathered by unethical methods is that the information gathered is independent of the ethics of the methods and that the two are not linked together. In essence, data are neither evil nor good."
—Dr. Robert Pozos, hypothermia expert [41]

"Perhaps the most intriguing question on which the issue of proper use turns is whether or not scientific data can acquire a moral taint. Common sense seems to indicate that a parcel of information about the physical world is morally neutral."
—Brian Folker and Arthur W. Hafner [42]

"We are talking of the use of the data, not participation in these heinous studies, not replication of atrocities. The wrongs perpetrated were monstrous; those wrongs are over and done. How could the provenance of the data serve to prohibit their use?"
—The late Dr. Benjamin Freedman, formerly a bioethicist at McGill University in Montreal [43]

If you answered No the fourth time:
What if you knew that the data might help save lives today?
Hypothermia expert Robert Pozos believes Nazi data on rapid rewarming could save lives, while Dr. John Hayward, also a specialist in hypothermia, has used Nazi cooling curves to determine how long cold-water survival suits would safeguard people at near-fatal temperatures. As journalist Kristine Moe has pointed out [44], scientists and physicians have gained valuable insights from other horrific events in history. Jewish doctors locked inside the Warsaw Ghetto took copious clinical notes on how their compatriots, many of them children, perished from starvation; smuggled out of the ghetto, those notes were later published as a landmark study on hunger disease. Survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki offered a valuable, albeit tragic, opportunity for specialists to learn more about radiation sickness. With human lives at stake, should we consider the Nazi data any differently?
"The argument that the information [from the Dachau hypothermia experiments] could be used to save human lives is a powerful one...."
—Dr. Robert Pozos, hypothermia expert [45]

"I'm trying to make something constructive out of it. I use it with my guard up, but it's useful."
—Dr. John S. Hayward, hypothermia expert at University of Victoria University, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, on why he used Nazi hypothermia data in his research [46]

"We won't argue that the experiments were well reported or well designed, but compared to what we had, they offered a measure of improvement. They obviously had a lot of flaws. But we felt compelled to use it because it provided dose-response data."
—John Vandenberg, EPA project manager in charge of regulatory review of phosgene gas, on why he condoned citing data from the Nazi phosgene experiments [47]

If you answered No the fifth time:
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]

If you answered No the sixth time:
What if you knew that many survivors of the medical experiments feel that the data should be used?
The first three opinions given below come from survivors of Dr. Josef Mengele's twins experiments at Auschwitz. Dr. Nancy L. Segal, a psychologist, quoted the survivors in her article "Twin Research at Auschwitz-Birkenau: Implications for the Use of Nazi Data Today." [52]
"If these experiments will be of any help to humanity, then I am in favor of them being used as needed."

"I think that the data collected in experiments conducted on us should by all means be used, since there were a variety of methods used, and I am certain that the data can be very beneficial to today's doctor."

"It appears that, at least in some cases, there was an attempt to induce illness by injecting bacteria and then an attempt to cure these illnesses, that is to say, we served as laboratory animals in the hands of the criminal, Mengele, and this type of research should of course be made available to the world."


"I wore a number in Dachau. I have two Belgian friends who went through the procedures of Dr. Rascher ... I see no reason why the results obtained should not be used for further research."
—Unnamed concentration-camp survivor [53]

If you answered No the seventh time:
Might not using the data lend a belated dignity to the victims, so that their lives were not lost for nothing?
"Of course, nobody in their right mind condones the experiment. The question is, Given that this fiendish thing was done, what do you do with the information that exists. ... I suspect that the prisoners would have wanted to have the information used to help somebody."
—Todd Thorslund, vice president of ICF-Clement, an environmental consulting company that wrote a risk-assessment report for the Environmental Protection Agency that cited Nazi phosgene experiments [54]

"The suffering is done—let someone benefit from all the pain."
—Lucien A. Ballin, member of a military intelligence assault force that helped unearth Nazi medical-experiments data in 1945 [55]

If you answered Yes the first time:
What if you knew that the medical competence of the Nazi doctors has been questioned?
The Hippocratic Oath, penned by the father of medicine and held by medical professionals as a sacred tenet to this day, states in part: "I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing...." The Nazi experimenters not only violated the oath in the foulest way, causing them to relinquish forever all rights to be considered doctors, but their expertise has been called into question, even by their own countrymen in their own day.
"Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind."
—Dr. Fritz Klein, Nazi physician, responding to a concentration-camp inmate who asked, while pointing to smoking chimneys in the distance, "How can you reconcile that with your [Hippocratic] oath as a doctor?" [1]

"I wouldn't trust the man who produced the data [from the Nazi experiments]; how can you trust a man who would do that?"
—Seymour Siegel, Executive Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council [2]

"Their actions were clear, direct violations of both the Hippocratic Oath as well as the public's belief that doctors always look after their patients' well-being."
—Lauren Howell, in "Nazi Medical Experiments: Murder or Research?" [3]

"One characteristic feature of Heissmeyer's experiment is his extraordinary lack of concern, add this to his gross and total ignorance in the field of immunology, in particular bacteriology. He did not then, nor does he now, possess the necessary expertise demanded in a specialist [on] TB diseases ... He does not own any modern bacteriology textbook. He is also not familiar with the various work methods of bacteriology ... According to his own admission, Heissmeyer was not concerned about curing the prisoners who were put at his disposal. Nor did he believe that his experiments would produce therapeutic results, and he actually counted on there being detrimental, indeed fatal, outcomes to the prisoners."
—Dr. Otto Prokop, Germany's forensic authority, on the competence of Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer. Heissmeyer conducted tuberculosis experiments on 20 Jewish children from Auschwitz whom he later had hung so they could not bear witness. [4]

If you answered Yes the second time:
What if you knew that many in the medical and scientific communities consider the Nazi experiments bad science?
Those who judge the Nazi experiments poor science cite several reasons. First, drawn as they were from the death camps, experimentees were usually malnourished, emaciated, and severely weakened, and thus their physiological responses to the experiments would likely be different from those of normal, healthy people. Second, Nazi doctors had political aspirations and sought results that supported Nazi racial theories. Third, the data were never replicated and, in an ethical world, can never be replicated. Finally, soaked with the blood of their victims, the experiments were morally tainted, which renders them scientifically invalid. For these reasons, many dismiss the experiments as pseudoscience.
"[The experiments were] a ghostly failure as well as a hideous crime ... [They] revealed nothing which civilized medicine could use."
—Brigadier General Telford Taylor, chief counsel for the prosecution at Nuremberg "Doctors Trial," 1946-47 [5]

"Injecting a half-starved young girl with phenol to see how quickly she will die or trying out various forms of phosgene gas on camp inmates in the hope of finding cheap, clean, and efficient modes of killing so the state can effectively prosecute genocide is not the sort of activity associated with the term research."
—Dr. Arthur Caplan, bioethicist now at the University of Pennsylvania [6]

"I don't see how any credence can be given to the work of unethical investigators. Given the source of the information and the way in which it was obtained, how can anyone believe it? How can anyone want to believe it?"
—Dr. Arnold S. Relman, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, on the Nazi hypothermia work [7]

"[The Dachau hypothermia experiments were] conducted without an orderly experimental protocol [and] with inadequate methods and an erratic execution. ... There is also evidence of data falsification and suggestions of fabrication. Many conclusions are not supported by the facts presented. The flawed science is compounded by evidence that the director of the project showed a consistent pattern of dishonesty and deception in his professional as well as his personal life, thereby stripping the study of the last vestige of credibility. On analysis, the Dachau hypothermia study has all the ingredients of a scientific fraud, and rejection of the data on purely scientific grounds is inevitable."
—Dr. Robert L. Berger, New England Deaconness Hospital and Harvard Medical School [8]

If you answered Yes the third time:
What if using the Nazi data could set a dangerous precedent, sanctioning unethical human experiments and possibly encouraging similarly deplorable acts?
A brief review of history indicates that the evil perpetrated by the Nazi doctors is one of degree, not of type. White South African physicians falsified medical reports of blacks tortured or killed in prison. From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, New York University researchers infected mentally retarded children with hepatitis in order to track the course of the disease and search for a cure. In 1963, doctors at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, injected 'live' cancer cells into 22 chronically ill and debilitated patients; they did not inform the patients that they were participating in an experiment completely unrelated to treatment of the disease for which they were hospitalized. These cases may not be as heinous as the Nazi experiments, but if researchers cite and use results from the latter, might that not give tacit encouragement to further unethical studies using human beings?
"[U]sing information from the death camps might be seen as sanctioning the use of results from current unethical research and thus encourage more of it."
—Marcia Angell, M.D. [9]

"Doctors in general, it would seem, can all too readily take part in the efforts of fanatical, demagogic, or surreptitious groups to control matters of thought and feeling, and of living and dying."
—Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, after listing numerous instances of cases in which doctors throughout the world have conducted evil acts in the name of nationalism or racism [10]

"To declare the use of the Nazi data ethical, as some of the American scientists and doctors advocate, would open a Pandora's box and could become an excuse for any of the Ayatollahs, Kadafis, Stroessners, and Mengeles of the world to create similar circumstances whereby anyone could be used as their guinea pig."
—Eva Mozes Kor, survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's twins experiments at Auschwitz [11]

"While using such data could save lives in some situations ... in a much larger context it could lead to a way of thinking that would condone taking some lives in order to save others."
—A reporter paraphrasing comments made by Dr. Judith Bellin, an Environmental Protection Agency toxicologist, about using data from Nazi phosgene experiments [12]

If you answered Yes the fourth time:
What if you knew that many feel that using the data would make us the Nazi experimenters' moral accessories?
Many hold that making use of the data wrenched so brutally from helpless victims would not only validate the Nazi doctors' unthinkable acts, but also make us the victims' "retrospective torturers" (attorney Baruch Cohen) and them our "retrospective guinea pigs" (Dr. Harold M. Spiro, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale University). [13 & 14] Indeed, Lord Immanuel Jakobovits, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth of Nations and an expert in Jewish medical ethics, felt use would only serve to further dishonor the victims [15], while the late Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Henry Beecher believed publishing unethically obtained medical data would cause a "far-reaching moral loss to medicine." [16]
"The idea behind the negative reaction now is that the Nazis were criminals; we are decent. That's not true. What we've done is not as evil, but it's in the ballpark."
—Dr. Arthur Caplan, bioethicist now at the University of Pennsylvania, commenting about uproar surrounding physiologist Robert Pozos' proposed use of Nazi data on hypothermia [17]

"The conduct of Nazi physician-scientists was barbarous, revolting, monstrous, devoid of any decency. Their research defiled human beings, medicine, science, and humanity. They dragged through bloody mud an honorable profession to which contemporary physician-scientists who now wish to make use of these results belong."
—Jay Katz, M.D., Yale University School of Law [18]

"Today some doctors want to use the only thing left by these victims. They are like vultures waiting for the corpses to cool so they could devour every consummable part. To use the Nazi data is obscene and sick. One can always rationalize that it would save human lives; the question should be asked, at what cost?"
—Eva Mozes Kor, survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's twins experiments at Auschwitz [19]

"We must not add our numbers to the multitudes of onlookers who slept peacefully through the nights of anguished cries while dreaming their sweet dreams of a better tomorrow."
—Dr. Willard Gaylin, psychiatrist and former president of The Hastings Center, a biomedical ethics thinktank [20]

If you answered Yes the fifth time:
What if you knew that many survivors of the Nazi experiments feel strongly that the data should never be used?
Among the small minority of those experimented upon who survived to bring shocking details of the atrocities to the outside world are a vocal group who would consign the data to oblivion. Many make the same arguments that modern doctors and scientists opposed to the data's use make, namely, that using the information would legitimize the Nazi experimenters and their damnable undertakings, make us moral accomplices, further demean the victims, etc. Responses from survivors asked whether the data should be used ranged from the calm and reasoned to the incredulous: "No! No! No! I (we) suffered, and it is no 'medical data' or 'information' whatsoever!!!" [21]

"As much as I am for scientific research for the betterment of humanity, I do feel that the scientific data collected from experiments done on inmates of Nazi concentration camps should not be used. If I would agree, I feel I [would] give a stamp of approval to the ways and means [these] experiments have been conducted and quasi-legalize [them]."
—Anonymous survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's twins experiments at Auschwitz [22]

"[T]he scientist who reuses these data aligns himself with the values and methods of the Nazi scientists/doctors by extending their work into contemporary research, thereby giving it credibility and sanction. He too is saying first and foremost, 'for the sake of science' and for the sake of 'progress,' ignoring the case for humanity."
—Sara Seiler Vigorito, survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's twins experiments at Auschwitz. Just three years old when she arrived at Auschwitz, Vigorito spent a year in a wooden cage a yard and a half wide with her twin sister, who died from repeated injections to her spinal column [23]

"In the case of the Mengele Twins, copies of the data should be given to those twins who are still alive. The data of the victims who are dead should be shredded and placed in a transparent monument, as evidence that they exist but cannot be used. It should be a lesson to the world that human dignity and human life are more important than any advance in science and medicine."
—Eva Mozes Kor, survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's twins experiments at Auschwitz [24]

"I consider it inexcusable to dignify those murderers with the word 'scientist' or dignify what they did with the word 'research' ... The data should be thrown to the winds and forgotten."
—Gisela Konopka, concentration-camp survivor [25]

If you answered Yes the sixth time:
What if you knew just how much victims of the experiments suffered?
"One cannot fully confront the dilemma of using the results of Nazi experiments," the attorney and ethicist Baruch Cohen has written, "without sensitizing oneself to the images of the frozen, the injected, the inseminated, and the sterilized." [26] One could add without sensitizing oneself to eyewitness testimony. Obviously, the hundreds who died at the hands of Nazi death-camp doctors cannot tell their story of unfathomable fear, unbearable pain, and senseless death. One must rely on those who survived and those who witnessed the execrable atrocities that occurred in the concentration camps. Here is some of that testimony:
"The third experiment ... took such an extraordinary course that I called an SS physician of the camp as witness, since I had worked on these experiments all by myself. It was a continuous experiment without oxygen at a [simulated] height of 12 kilometers [39,283 feet] conducted on a 37-year-old Jew in good general condition. Breathing continued up to 30 minutes. After four minutes the experimental subject began to perspire and wiggle his head, after five minutes cramps occurred, between six and ten minutes breathing increased in speed and the experimental subject became unconscious; from 11 to 30 minutes breathing slowed down to three breaths per minute, finally stopping altogether."
—From a report by Dr. Sigmund Rascher to Heinrich Himmler dated April 5, 1942 concerning his high-altitude experiments on prisoners at Dachau concentration camp [27]

"Fifteen girls aged 17 to 18 years old. The girls who survived the following operations are in German hands and little is known about them. The subjects were placed in an ultra-short-wave field. One electrode was placed on the abdomen and another on the vulva. The rays were focused on the ovaries. The ovaries were consequently burned up.

Owing to faulty doses several had serious burns of the abdomen and vulva. One died as a result of these burns alone. The others were sent to another concentration camp where some were put in hospital and others made to work. After a month they returned to Auschwitz where control operations were performed. Sagittal and transverse sections of the ovaries were made.

The girls altered entirely owing to hormonal changes. They looked just like old women. Often they were laid up for months owing to the wounds of the operations becoming septic. Several died as a result of sepsis."
Sterilization experiment at Auschwitz, as described by two Dutch doctors who had been prisoners there [28]

"It was the worst experiment ever made. Two Russian officers were brought from the prison barracks. Rascher had them stripped and they had to go into the vat naked. Hour after hour went by, and whereas usually unconsciousness from the cold set in after 60 minutes at the latest, the two men in this case still responded fully after two and a half hours. All appeals to Rascher to put them to sleep by injection were fruitless. After the third hour one of the Russians said to the other, 'Comrade, please tell the officer to shoot us.' The other replied that he expected no mercy from this Fascist dog. The two shook hands with a 'Farewell, Comrade' ... These words were translated to Rascher by a young Pole, though in a somewhat different form. Rascher went to his office. The young Pole at once tried to chloroform the two victims, but Rascher came back at once, threatening us with his gun ... The test lasted at least five hours before death supervened."
—Testimony given at the "Doctors Trial" at Nuremberg by Walter Neff, an Auschwitz prisoner who served as Dr. Sigmund Rascher's medical orderly during hypothermia experiments [29]
If you answered Yes the seventh time:
What if the Nazi experiments had been conducted on your mother, your brother, your child?
"I offer this challenge to the hypothermia researchers. As you page through the research, have next to it actual photos of Jews being tortured in the name of research and see how long you are able to analyze data. Better yet, think of your mother or father floating in that tank and see if your beliefs about this subject hold up."
—Rod Martel, whose grandmother died in a concentration camp [30]



References
1. Lifton, p. 16.
2. Moe, p. 6.
3. See www.hklaw.com/holocaust/essays/1999/993.htm.
4. Lifton, p. 457n.
5. Cohen, p. 14.
6. Caplan, Arthur L. "How Did Medicine Go So Wrong?" In Caplan, p. 65.
7. Associated Press. "Minnesota Scientist Plans to Publish Nazi Experiment on Freezing." The New York Times, 5/12/88, p. 28.
8. Berger, pp. 1439-1440.
9. Angell, Marcia, M.D. "The Nazi Hypothermia Experiments and Unethical Research Today." New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 322 No. 20, 5/17/90, p. 1462.
10. Lifton, p. xii.
11. Kor, Eva Mozes. "Nazi Experiments as Viewed by a Survivor of Mengele's Experiments." In Caplan, p. 7.
12. Shabecoff, Philip. "Head of E.P.A. Bars Nazi Data in Study on Gas." The New York Times, 3/23/88, p. 1.
13. Cohen, p. 27.
14. Spiro, Howard M., M.D. "Let Nazi Medical Data Remind Us of Evil" (Letter to the Editor). The New York Times 4/19/88, p. 30.
15. Cohen, p. 30.
16. Beecher, Henry K. "Ethics and Clinical Research." The New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 274 No. 24, 6/16/66, p. 1360.
17. Siegel, p. 1.
18. Katz, Jay. "Abuse of Human Beings for the Sake of Science." In Caplan, p. 265.
19. Kor, Eva Mozes. "Nazi Experiments as Viewed by a Survivor of Mengele's Experiments." In Caplan, p. 7.
20. Gaylin, Willard. "Commentary" (responding to "Nazi Data: Dissociation from Evil"). Hastings Center Report, Vol. 19, July/August 1989, p. 18.
21. Segal, Nancy L. "Twin Research at Auschwitz-Birkenau: Implications for the Use of Nazi Data Today." In Caplan, p. 292.
22. Ibid., pp. 292-3.
23. Vigorito, Sara Seiler. "A Profile of Nazi Medicine: The Nazi Doctor—His Methods and Goals." In Caplan, p. 13.
24. Kor, Eva Mozes. "Nazi Experiments as Viewed by a Survivor of Mengele's Experiments." In Caplan, p. 7.
25. Konopka, Gisela. "The Meaning of the Holocaust for Bioethics." In Caplan, p. 17.
26. Cohen, p. 2.
27. Katz, Jay. "Abuse of Human Beings for the Sake of Science." In Caplan, p. 233.
28. Gilbert, p. 374.
29. Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960, p. 987.
30. Siegel, p. 1.
31. Cohen, p. 13.
32. Moe, p. 7.
33. Associated Press. "Minnesota Scientist Plans to Publish Nazi Experiment on Freezing." The New York Times, 5/12/88, p. 28.
34. Greene, Velvl W. "Can Scientists Use Information Derived From the Concentration Camps? Ancient Answers to New Questions." In Caplan, pp. 169-70.
35. Spiro, Howard M., M.D. "Let Nazi Medical Data Remind Us of Evil" (Letter to the Editor). The New York Times 4/19/88, p. 30.
36. Siegel, p. 1.
37. Katz, Jay and Robert S. Pozos. "The Dachau Hypothermia Study: An Ethical and Scientific Commentary." In Caplan, p. 137.
38. Moe, p. 5.
39. Ibid.
40. Singer, Eleanor. "Commentary" (responding to "Ethics and Editors"). Hastings Center Report, Vol. 10, April 1980, p. 24.
41. Pozos, Robert S. "Scientific Inquiry and Ethics: The Dachau Data." In Caplan, p. 104.
42. Folker, Brian and Arthur W. Hafner. "Commentary" (responding to "Nazi Data: Dissociation from Evil"). Hastings Center Report, Vol. 19, July/August 1989, p. 17.
43. Wilkerson, Isabel. "Nazi Scientists and Ethics of Today." The New York Times, 5/21/89, p. 34.
44. Moe, p. 7.
45. Pozos, Robert S. "Scientific Inquiry and Ethics: The Dachau Data." In Caplan, p. 106.
46. Moe, p. 5.
47. Sun, Marjorie. "EPA Bars Use of Nazi Data." Science, Vol. 240 No. 4848, 4/1/88, p. 21.
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.
52. Caplan, pp. 291-92.
53. Siegel, p. 1.
54. Shabecoff, Philip. "Head of E.P.A. Bars Nazi Data in Study on Gas." The New York Times, 3/23/88, p. 1.
55. Siegel, p. 1.


The Director's Story | Timeline of Nazi Abuses
Results of Death-Camp Experiments: Should They Be Used?
Exposing Flawed Science | Resources
Transcript | Site Map | Holocaust on Trial Home

Editor's Picks | Previous Sites | Join Us/E-mail | TV/Web Schedule
About NOVA | Teachers | Site Map | Shop | Jobs | Search | To print
PBS Online | NOVA Online | WGBH

© | Updated October 2000
/wgbh/nova/holocaust/textindex.html /wgbh/nova/holocaust/