"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]

"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]

"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]

"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]

"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 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]

"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]

"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]

"[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]

"[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]

"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]

"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]

"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]

"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]