Was any medically useful data taken from the experiments being performed on Nazi concentration camp prisoners?

by Scrotie_

I've heard many times of the absolutely horrendous experiments that were performed on the victims of these concentration camps, but was any useful medical/scientific data actually taken from these experiments?

FireRavenLord

Yes, but mostly no. While the camps did conduct tests that had not been done before, their method was unscientific. One good example is the study of hypothermia.

The immersion hypothermia project began in 1942 for the stated purpose of finding ways to protect German airmen and sailors who ended up in the freezing North Sea. The experiments were conducted by immersing concentration camp prisoners into vats of ice water. In order to simulate a variety of possible scenarios the prisoners were in various states of dress and were sometimes unconscious. After removal from the water, various rewarming methods were tested. Throughout the process, experimenters recorded measurements such as body temperature. Autopsies were sometimes conducted after the death of the subject.

The usefulness of this data has been disputed due to structure of the experiment and some sloppiness in data collection. Many important basic variables were not measured. The age and prior health conditions of the roughly 300 subjects were not measured. In other words, it's unknown whether a subject was a starving 12 year old or a healthy adult. In the collected data, there's no breakdown into experimental subgroups. Whether an individual subject was conscious, the exact temperature of the ice bath, and time spent in the bath is not recorded. Sometimes it's not even recorded whether a subject died.

While several different rewarming methods were attempted, lack of specific data collected makes the results ambiguous. The time between immersion and the ice bath and attempts at rewarming are not recorded. While testing rewarming by immersion in warm water, the temperature of the warm water was recorded only twice. One assistant later testified that water was sometimes boiling.

Not only was the data collected in experiments with numerous flaws, but it was often manipulated. Several test subjects and assistants testified that they fabricated some temperature recordings in order to protect lives. Near the end of the war, much of the documentation was destroyed in an attempt to conceal the cruelty of the experiments from the Allies and prevent the experimenters from being tried for war crimes.

While these experiments were unique in using human test subjects to study hypothermia, the experiments were too sloppy to be useful. During the "Doctor's Trial" at Nuremberg, the experiments were considered to be an exercise in torture rather than science. Other "experiments" were even more questionable. Is there any useful scientific data that can be gathered from shooting prisoners with poisoned bullets or sewing together twins?

Sources: New England Journal of Medicine http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199005173222006

The Doctor's Trial at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum http://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-features/special-focus/doctors-trial