Who Hitler and the Nazis experimented on other than the Jews…
The victims of unethical human experiments and coerced research under National Socialism
The occurrence of unethical research provides insight into the structure of Nazi medical research. The project traced how Nazi coercive research began in the context of eugenic research in the mid-1930s. After numbers of experiments dipped in 1940 due to military call-up of medical researchers, the research rapidly intensified both in terms of numbers of experiments and victims, and in terms of severity for victims. This can be seen from 1942 with the notorious and often fatal experiments on low pressure, exposure to freezing temperatures, and infectious diseases when research could be taken to the point of death. Pharmacological experiments on therapies for tetanus, typhus and typhoid were spurred by the realisation that Allied military medical research on infectious diseases was outstripping German military medical expertise. From November 1942 racial priorities came increasingly to the fore, as exemplified by Schumann's X-ray sterilisation experiments on Jews in Auschwitz.
Victims were a highly international group. The above table (Table 1) shows numbers of nationalities, using nationality as in 1938. The table indicates the distribution of nationalities. The largest national group, that of Polish victims, includes both Roman Catholics and Jews. There were high numbers of German and Austrian victims, in part as a result of the experiments and dissections that accompanied the killing of psychiatric patients. While there were other large groups, there are also smaller national groups, as Swiss, British and Irish, all highly remarkable in how their citizens became caught up in the experimentation. We find victims include a Swiss conscientious objector used for malaria experiments at Dachau, and British commandos captured in Norway used for amphetamine and high performance experiments on the shoe track at Sachsenhausen, and subsequently executed.
There has been no full evaluation of the numbers of victims of Nazi research, who the victims were, and of the frequency and types of experiments and research. This paper gives the first results of a comprehensive evidence-based evaluation of the different categories of victims. Human experiments were more extensive than often assumed with a minimum of 15,754 documented victims. Experiments rapidly increased from 1942, reaching a high point in 1943. The experiments remained at a high level of intensity despite imminent German defeat in 1945.
There has been no full evaluation of the numbers of victims of Nazi research, who the victims were, and of the frequency and types of experiments and research. The one partial estimate is restricted to experiments cited at the Nuremberg Medical Trial. This paper gives the first results of a comprehensive evidence-based evaluation of the different categories of victims. In 1945 liberated prisoners from German concentration camps began to collect evidence of the experiments.
The scientific intelligence officer John Thompson then pointed out not only that 90% of all medical research under National Socialism was criminal, but also the need to evaluate all criminal experiments under National Socialism, and not just those whose perpetrators were available for arrest and prosecution
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4822534/