Did Nazi Research Actually Contribute Anything Valuable To Medical Science?

Published February 25, 2016
Updated May 4, 2018

Long-Term Impact Studies

Auschwitz Birkenau Concentration Camp.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

So what, if anything, came from all this horror?

Not much. In what might be the cruelest irony of the Nazi reign, the scientists most likely to experiment on unwilling human beings tended to be the most careless. Many of them joined the SS because they couldn’t find respectable work elsewhere. As a result, experiments were designed with slapdash abandon and few controls; variables were rarely isolated, crazy ideas got tested while more practical research went begging, and many doctors’ lab notes were found to be gibberish.

A few things did come from the experiments, however, though for obvious reasons modern scientists can’t verify the results with experiments of their own.

Trauma/Hardship Experiments

Directed research into hypothermia and low-pressure environments might have been the most productive research done during the twilight of the Nazi era. Rascher’s freezing experiments got generally reliable data that can’t be obtained today. No willing modern test subject would volunteer to have their eardrums ruptured by low pressure, so the results of the Dachau tests are still unfortunately the gold standard for predicting high-altitude exposure results.

Drugs/Surgical Procedures

Most of the Nazi research into drugs was badly designed and useless (not to mention the fact that they also gave drugs like Pervitin to their own soldiers). Even the few useful studies, such as research into antibiotics, mostly duplicated the non-atrocious work of ethical scientists elsewhere. The problem is compounded by the fact that most test subjects were not representative of the public. Starved, overworked, highly stressed individuals make poor test subjects for medicines intended for fit, well-fed soldiers or members of the general public.

As far as anybody knows, none of the Nazi organ or tissue transplant procedures were successful. When heart, liver, and kidney transplant techniques were eventually developed, they were done with informed consent and within stern ethical guidelines.

Eugenics

Nazi Medicine Children

Child victims of Nazi medicine Image Source: Pinterest

Fascist notions of Aryan supremacy or Slavic degeneracy were falsified as soon as they were uttered. Lacking even an intelligible premise, none of the work on race theory was ever going to go anywhere. Sterilization research did yield some results, but they had been known for millennia. Everybody knew castration worked as far back as ancient Egypt, and that radiation was unbelievably dangerous for something as mundane as sterilization.

Add to that the fact that modern societies treat irreversible sterilization as a private medical decision that’s exclusively done at the request of the individual, whereas Nazi Germany treated it as a solution for alcoholism, congenital disease, and chronic unemployment. Given the dramatically different attitude toward the procedure today, it’s hard to imagine what use mass-sterilization techniques would have now.

Nazi Medicine Children Posed

Children who have been infected with tuberculosis show the scars from where their lymph nodes were removed.
Image Source: Twitter

Medical research in the camps was, like everything else in the Nazi empire, chaotic and disorganized. Much of it came to nothing because it was built on faulty ideas about race, and some of it was indistinguishable from pointless torture.

The few experiments that did turn up results are still problematic to this day. Some of the papers using data from Dachau have been rejected for publication because there is simply no humane way to duplicate the experiment.

Society will be wrestling with the implications of “useful” experiments performed on the Nazis’ victims for generations. Ultimately, with the alternative being to in some way endorse them, it’s possibly just as well that most of what the Nazi doctors did was, medically and scientifically speaking, a complete waste of time.


Next, learn about the most evil science experiments ever performed, and the ins and outs of Ravensbruck, a women’s concentration camp. Then, read up on the horrific experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Finally, check out ten fringe sciences that are as fascinating as they are terrifying.

author
Richard Stockton
author
Richard Stockton is a freelance science and technology writer from Sacramento, California.
editor
John Kuroski
editor
John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of interest include modern history and true crime.