Written by Luke Mills-Hicks.

There has been a debate for many years surrounding the use of medical knowledge gathered using inhumane methods by the Nazi Party. The Nazis made some discoveries that nowadays would be impossible, simply because they did not care about the consent or wellbeing of their victims, who were taken from concentration camps and experimented on without forewarning. This presents the important question: Should we use the medical knowledge gained by horrific Nazi experiments?

The Nazi scientists performed many unthinkable experiments on humans. These included: giving people hypothermia deliberately to test the effects on the human body, testing twins after death for their genetic similarities and differences, testing homosexual people to understand a believed ‘difference’, and performing gruesome tests to understand eye colour and inheritance. Any detail about the nature of these experiments will be omitted from this article due to their inhuman and gruesome cruelty. However Nazi scientists made some significant discoveries, such as the fact that X-rays have harmful effects on the human genome, and that pesticides can be harmful to consumers if they are not used correctly. Information such as this is still useful to modern scientists, especially because these tests were carried out on humans so we know their specific consequences on people. Nowadays it would be impossible to carry out these tests on humans, as people would not consent and they are ethically despicable.

The entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp in which over 1 million victims of Nazi terror died and thousands of people were inhumanely experimented on.

Some scientists and doctors believe that we should not use this knowledge as it was gained without patient consent and the victims endured unimaginable pain, blatantly contradicting the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. Nowadays it is compulsory that the patient or subject consents to the experiment or research performed on them, and it argued that we should not use the information gained immorally. “The basic intuition is that if information had been obtained unethically, but we use that information, then we then become complicit in that past,” to quote Doctor Dominic Wilkinson of Oxford University.  Another argument against the use of Nazi medical knowledge is that it was discovered by a regime with a clear agenda that was one of the most antisemitic, homophobic, racist, and morally reprehensible in history. This casts doubt on the trustworthiness of the results, as the scientists that performed these experiments may well have skewed their results or lied deliberately to align with Nazi ideology.

On the contrary, I believe that Nazi medical research should be used because it would be very difficult to gather the same information today as the tests to discover it could not be carried out. As tragic as it is, the research has already taken place, and to best respect the suffering and sacrifice of the victims (be it unwillingly) we should use the information. The damage has been done and we cannot change that. You could look at this from either point of view, but it is important to recognise the sacrifice of victims of and, in my opinion, the best way of respecting their suffering is to use the information that was taken so unjustly.