Nazi human experimentation

conducted medical experiments on prisoners in its concentration camps mainly between 1942 and 1945. There were 15,754 documented victims, of various nationalities and ages, although the true number is believed to be more. About a quarter of documented victims were killed and survivors generally experienced severe permanent injuries.
At Auschwitz and other camps, under the direction of Eduard Wirths, selected inmates were subjected to various experiments that were designed to help German military personnel in combat situations, develop new weapons, aid in the recovery of military personnel who had been injured, and to advance Nazi racial ideology and eugenics, including the twin experiments of Josef Mengele. Aribert Heim conducted similar medical experiments at Mauthausen.
After the war, these crimes were tried at what became known as the Doctors' Trial, and revulsion at the abuses led to the development of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics. Some Nazi physicians in the Doctors' Trial argued that military necessity justified their experiments, or compared their victims to collateral damage from Allied bombings.

Experiments

The table of contents of a document from the subsequent Nuremberg trials prosecution includes titles of the sections that document medical experiments revolving around food, seawater, epidemic jaundice, sulfanilamide, blood coagulation and phlegmon. According to the indictments at the subsequent Nuremberg Trials, these experiments included the following:

Blood coagulation experiments

experimented with the effects of Polygal, a substance made from beet and apple pectin, which aided blood clotting. He predicted that the preventive use of Polygal tablets would reduce bleeding from surgery or gunshot wounds sustained during combat. Subjects were given a Polygal tablet, shot through the neck or chest, or had their limbs amputated without anesthesia. Rascher published an article on his experience of using Polygal, without detailing the nature of the human trials, and set up a company staffed by prisoners to manufacture the substance.
Bruno Weber was the head of the Hygienic Institution at Block 10 in Auschwitz and injected his subjects with blood types that differed from their own. This caused the blood cells to congeal, and the blood was studied. When the Nazis removed blood from someone, they often entered a major artery, causing the subject to die of major blood loss.

Bone, muscle, and nerve transplantation experiments

From about September 1942 to about December 1943, experiments were conducted at the Ravensbrück concentration camp for the benefit of the German Armed Forces, to study bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration, and bone transplantation from one person to another. In these experiments, subjects had their bones, muscles and nerves removed without anesthesia. As a result of these operations, many victims suffered intense agony, mutilation, and permanent disability.
On 12 August 1946, a survivor named Jadwiga Kamińska gave a deposition about her time at Ravensbrück concentration camp, describing how she was operated on twice. Both operations involved one of her legs and although she never describes herself as having any knowledge as to what exactly the procedure was, she explained that both times she was in extreme pain and developed a fever post-surgery but was given little to no aftercare. Kamińska describes being told that she had been operated on simply because she was a "young girl and a Polish patriot". She describes how her leg oozed pus for months after the operations.
Prisoners were also experimented on by having their bone marrow injected with bacteria to study the effectiveness of new drugs being developed for use in the battlefields. Those who survived remained permanently disfigured.

Freezing experiments

In 1941, the Luftwaffe conducted experiments with the intent of discovering means to prevent and treat hypothermia. There were 360 to 400 experiments and 280 to 300 victims, indicating that some victims suffered more than one experiment.

Attempt no.	Water temperature	Body temperature when removed from the water	Body temperature at death	Time in water	Time of death
5				66'	66'
13				80'	87'
14				95'
16				60'	74'
23				57'	65'
25				51'	65'
				53'	53'

Another study placed prisoners naked in the open air for several hours with temperatures as low as −6 °C. Besides studying the physical effects of cold exposure, the experimenters also assessed different methods of rewarming survivors. "One assistant later testified that some victims were thrown into boiling water for rewarming."
Beginning in August 1942, at the Dachau camp, prisoners were forced to sit in tanks of freezing water for up to three hours. After subjects were frozen, they then underwent different methods for rewarming. Many subjects died in this process. Others were also forced to stand naked outside in below freezing temperatures, with many screaming in pain as their bodies froze. In a letter from 10 September 1942, Rascher describes an experiment on intense cooling performed in Dachau where people were dressed in fighter pilot uniforms and submerged in freezing water. Rascher had some of the victims completely underwater and others only submerged up to the head.
The freezing and hypothermia experiments were conducted for the Nazi high command to simulate the conditions the armies suffered on the Eastern Front, as the German forces were ill-prepared for the cold weather they encountered. Many experiments were conducted on captured Soviet troops; the Nazis wondered whether their genetics gave them superior resistance to cold. The principal locales were Dachau and Auschwitz. Sigmund Rascher, an SS doctor based at Dachau, reported directly to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and publicised the results of his freezing experiments at the 1942 medical conference entitled "Medical Problems Arising from Sea and Winter". Himmler suggested that the victims could be warmed by forcing them to engage in sexual contact with other victims. An example included how a hypothermic victim was placed between two naked Romani women.

High altitude experiments

In early 1942, prisoners at Dachau concentration camp were used by Sigmund Rascher in experiments to aid German pilots who had to eject at high altitudes. A low-pressure chamber containing these prisoners was used to simulate conditions at altitudes of up to. It was rumored that Rascher performed vivisections on the brains of victims who survived the initial experiment. Of the 200 subjects, 80 died outright, and the others were murdered. In a letter from 5 April 1942 between Rascher and Heinrich Himmler, Rascher explains the results of a low-pressure experiment that was performed on people at Dachau Concentration camp in which the victim was suffocated while Rascher and another unnamed doctor took note of his reactions. The person was described as 37 years old and in good health before being murdered. Rascher described the victim's actions as he began to lose oxygen and timed the changes in behavior. The 37-year-old began to wiggle his head at four minutes; a minute later Rascher observed that he was suffering from cramps before falling unconscious. He describes how the victim then lay unconscious, breathing only three times per minute, until he stopped breathing 30 minutes after being deprived of oxygen. The victim then turned blue and began foaming at the mouth. An autopsy followed an hour later.
In a letter from Himmler to Rascher on 13 April 1942, Himmler ordered Rascher to continue the high altitude experiments and to continue experimenting on prisoners condemned to death. He also ordered specific tests to "determine whether these men could be recalled to life". If someone condemned to death was successfully resuscitated, Himmler stated he should be "pardoned to concentration camp for life".

Sterilization and fertility experiments

From about March 1941 to about January 1945, sterilization experiments were conducted at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and other places. The purpose of these experiments was to develop a method of sterilization which would be suitable for sterilizing millions of people with a minimum of time and effort. The targets for sterilization included Jewish and Roma populations. These experiments were conducted by means of X-ray, surgery and various drugs. Thousands of victims were sterilized. Sterilization was not limited to these experiments, with the Nazi government already sterilizing 400,000 people as part of its compulsory sterilization program.
One prominent scientist in this domain was Carl Clauberg, who initially X-rayed women to make sure that there was no obstruction to their ovaries. Over the next three to five sessions, he injected caustic substances into their uteruses without anesthetics. Many died, others suffered permanent injuries and infections, and about 700 were successfully sterilized. The women who stood against him and his experiments or were deemed as unfit test subjects were sent to the gas chambers.
Intravenous injections of solutions speculated to contain iodine and silver nitrate were similarly successful but had unwanted side effects such as vaginal bleeding, severe abdominal pain, and cervical cancer. Those who developed cancer were vivisected, with their cervixes and wombs removed. Therefore, radiation treatment became the favored choice of sterilization. Specific amounts of exposure to radiation destroyed a person's ability to produce ova or sperm, sometimes administered through deception. Many suffered severe radiation burns.
The Nazis also implemented X-ray radiation treatment in their search for mass sterilization. They gave the women abdomen X-rays, men received them on their genitalia, for abnormal periods of time in attempt to invoke infertility. After the experiment was complete, they surgically removed their reproductive organs, without anesthesia, for lab analysis.
M.D. William E. Seidelman, a professor from the University of Toronto, in collaboration with Dr. Howard Israel of Columbia University, published a report on an investigation on the medical experimentation performed in Austria under the Nazi regime. In that report, he mentions a Doctor Hermann Stieve, who used the war to experiment on live humans. Stieve specifically focused on the reproductive system of women. He would tell women their date of death in advance, and he would evaluate how their psychological distress would affect their menstruation cycles. After they were executed, he would dissect and examine their reproductive organs to investigate this hypothesis. Allegedly, some of the women were raped after they were told the date when they would be killed so that Stieve could study the path of sperm through their reproductive system. However, this has been called into question as there is no evidence that Stieve ever studied sperm migration, a subject not mentioned in his papers.