The beginning of medical experimentation on prisoners for the advancement of science coincided with the rise of the Second World War in the 1940s. During times of national crises, it is not uncommon for state leaders to lower their concerns for civil liberties. Since prisoners were already not recognized as full citizens, they were first in line to be sacrificed for the greater good of the war effort. The ethical debates over medical experiments on prisoners came to a head in the aftermath of World War II in the Nuremberg trials when Nazi Germany and the United States were confronted with the ugly truth of their wartime prisoner experiments. Observing both of these prison medical experiments and the arguments used in the Nuremberg trials to justify or condemn them shows the affect wartime rationalization had on the suspension of prisoners’ rights in the 1940s and on the context in which to understand prison experiments for the rest of the 20th century.
The Nazis used their extensive system of concentration camps not just for labor but also for medical experimentation. For example, camp Dachau was used to conduct hypothermia experiments. These experiments were directly linked to the war effort because hypothermia contributed significantly to the death toll of German soldiers. Specifically, Robert L. Berger’s article, Nazi Science-The Dachau Hypothermia Experiments[1], states that the purpose of these experiments was to establish an effective treatment to immersion hypothermia for crew members of the German air force who were being shot down into the North Sea during battles. These experiments generated data on unanaesthetized prisoners’ responses to immersion hypothermia by collecting their responses to lethal temperatures and their reactions to cooling and rewarming methods.
The experiments were conducted by submerging prisoners in a tank of ice water and using several different rewarming methods to try to revive them. An assistant in the experiment later testified that one method for rewarming participants was “throwing them into boiling water.”[2] The subjects of these experiments were male civilian prisoners of various religions and nationalities and included Soviet prisoners of war. Participation was mostly forced, but there were some “volunteers” in response to rarely fulfilled promises of release from the camp or reversal of a death sentence. Dachau’s experiments became central to the prosecution of the Nazis’ human experiments in the Nuremburg trials.
In defending their experiments at the Nuremberg trials, Nazi doctors and scientists justified their actions by referring to prisoner experimentation in the U.S., particularly the malaria “project” of Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois. Finding a treatment for malaria was critical for the United States in WWII because of the disease’s immense impact on the death toll of soldiers fighting in the Pacific Ocean theater. According to Katelyn Kalata in The Exploitation of Inmates: Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Experiment [3], one of the most common treatments for malaria at the time was Quinine. However, it was not widely available during the war since the United States no longer had access to where it grew in the East Indies. The goal of the malaria “project” of Statesville was to find a synthetic treatment for the disease that could be mass-produced and given to soldiers.
The prisoners who participated in this project were required to be in good physical health and were white males between the ages of 21 and 40. The project itself was conducted by having the prisoner participants bitten by mosquitos carrying malaria to contract the disease. Once they were infected, the prisoners faced chills, extreme fevers, and violent illnesses as the disease ravaged their bodies. One of the most infamous prisoners to participate in this project, Nathan Leopold, stated that he had a headache that made him feel like his “head was going to split” [4] and that other test subjects would shake “the bed with [their] chills [while] saturating the mattress with the sweat of a 107-degree temperature.” [5] After the prisoners had contracted malaria, the experimentation of medications was arguably even worse. Since the prisoners were being experimented on with unknown drugs, there was much “trial and error.” The doses either were ineffective against the disease or had even worse side effects. One drug known as “Sontochin Analogue” gave subjects terrible headaches, hives, nausea, vomiting, and sometimes even a bleached head of hair[6]. Despite the side effects of the experimental medications, the project had a low mortality rate. The only death brought up as being related to the project was one case of long-term heart failure caused by the medication.
The Stateville and Dachau experiments were both examples of prisoner experiments in which a wartime crisis prompted their creation and rationalized their existence. Hypothermia was killing as many German soldiers as their enemies were in battle, and malaria was doing the same for American soldiers. In both cases, wartime created these problems and was also used to justify the medical experiments done in response to these problems. Bernard E. Harcourt in Making Willing Bodies: The University of Chicago Human Experiments at Stateville Penitentiary[7], coins the term “war rationale” to describe this phenomenon of wartime crises being catalysts for increased prisoner experimentation. The war rationale continued to be used to initiate and validate prison experimentation for decades after the Nuremberg trials. A historian of human experimentation named Allen Hornblum also observed that the “war years had become the transforming moment for human experimentation in America and particularly for penal institutions as a site of such scientific endeavors.”[8] The wartime rationale of the 1940s expanded and justified prisoner experimentation in a way that was before unseen. Wartime has proven to be a unique time in history in which any number of things that violate human rights are justified. In the case of prisoner experimentation in WWII, the need to win the war outweighed the ethical red flags of conducting prisoner experimentation.
Germany used the war rationale only at the highest levels to justify and authorize the conduction of prison experiments. On the other hand, the United States expanded the use of the war rationale to convince not only leaders but also the public and prisoners themselves that the experiments were for the greater good of the war effort. The truth about German concentration camps was kept very secret from the public, whereas the American malaria “project” was intentionally spread to the public. By presenting the experiments through the lens of the war rationale, it put them in the patriotic context of prisoners sacrificing their bodies for the war, just as American soldiers were doing overseas. This appeal to American patriotism made the public and the prisoners themselves much more receptive to the malaria experiments.
The extent to which the war rationale was used in each country had a substantial impact on the experiments’ lasting narrative and how the public and the prisoners themselves remembered them. Framing the prisoners as sacrificial soldiers in the war effort[9] made American prisoners more willing to participate in the experiments because of their patriotism to their country and the alluded possible benefits from participating in such a patriotic cause, such as special consideration for paroles or executive clemency. It also made the prisoners and scientists seem noble in the eyes of the American public for their contribution to the war effort. The fact that the experiments successfully found a synthetic treatment for malaria and had a low mortality rate also helped how the public perceived it. When prisoner and participant Nathan Leopold was asked to look back on the experience during the time of the Nuremberg trials, he remembered the experiments positively. He claimed that he “enjoyed the experience” and said it was “a pleasure of his to be able to participate.” [10] Using the war rationale on the prisoners and the public largely impacted how the malaria experiments were positively viewed in American society for decades to come.
The Nazi doctors and scientists did not use the war rationale to make patriotic appeals to their prisoners, such as the U.S. The Dachau prisoners were subjected to much more lethal experiments with higher mortality rates than American prisoners without even the illusion that the experiments were for a greater good that benefited them. These factors are the main reasons why the two experiments were remembered differently by American prisoners and Nazi prisoners. It was no surprise that the former Nazi prisoners immediately sought retribution for the crimes committed against them immediately after the war. Alternatively, due to the influence of the war rationale, American prisoners volunteered to testify in defense of the medical experiments done to them.
Human experimentation during wartime became intimately tied to penal institutions because of how states viewed the citizenship status of prisoners at the time. In Nazi concentration camps, prisoners were stripped of their citizenship because of perceived crimes or their status as a Jew or Roma. Alternatively, some Nazi prisoners were never citizens, to begin with, such as Soviet prisoners of war. In both cases, these prisoners’ lives were perceived as more expendable in the war effort because of their lack of recognized citizenship. When medical experimentation began in the U.S., prisoners were not considered full citizens. That was why they were first in line to have their bodily rights stripped from them during a wartime crisis. Medical experimentation was also justified as a means for prisoners to repay their crimes against the state and fulfill their debt to society. Especially during wartime, prisoners’ service as test subjects was viewed as a noble repayment for their crimes because their participation could turn the tide in the fight.
Another advantage of using prisons for medical experiments was the scientists’ ability to have a definite control group. To conduct sound experiments, the scientists needed to continually monitor and observe the effects of their experiments on the participants. The prison system structure benefited this experimental environment due to the constant surveillance prisoners were already subjected to[11]. In addition to being constantly surveyed, the prisoner participants’ confinement meant they were also isolated from outside variables and, in some ways, gave the scientists a “pure” scientific field for experimentation. Other sources from this period suggest that using inmates in human experiments in the U.S. was also convenient because it did not affect the wartime economy since inmates were incarcerated and could not contribute[12]. Contrarily, Nazi concentration camps were themselves cites of economic production. The German concentration camps had other unique motivations for experimenting on prisoners connected to their lethal nationalist motivations of exterminating the Jewish population and others they deemed inferior to the “Aryan” race. That difference is what American scientists used to separate the Nazi experiments from their own in the Nuremberg trials.
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1192339
The criteria of the Nuremberg Code were not created out of the judicial procedures of the trial but, in fact, underwent a constant process of revision from August 1946 until August 1947. Creating the Code took this amount of time because the American doctors involved needed to formulate a code that would condemn the Nazi experiments but not their own. One of the first arguments brought forward against the malaria project’s similarities to Dachau was the fact that the American prisoners volunteered. This argument was not convincing because even though the scientists and doctors presented the prisoners with a “choice,” there was a certain level of coercion influencing their decision to volunteer. When considering the use of the sacrificial soldier narrative, the alluded but largely unfulfilled promises of shorter sentences and consideration for executive clemency, and the position of power scientists had over prisoners, the prisoners’ decision to volunteer no longer seems as free as it sounds. In this case, what Bernard E. Harcourt called “manufacturing consent”[13] was not much more ethically just than the flat-out denial of choice at camp Dachau.
The conclusion that many American scientists came to in the trial was not to condemn the ethical flaws in German science itself but to claim that Nazism poisoned ethically acceptable German science. This narrative became dominant among the public and the media, as one historical newspaper of 1945 called the Dachau experiments a “perversion of the experimental method,” [14] thereby perpetuating the idea for years to come that, inherently, the act of prisoner medical experimentation was not ethically wrong. The Nuremberg Code may have ensured the prosecution of Nazi experiments, but it, in turn, enabled American experimentation to continue and grow more deadly as the country shifted from WW11 to the Cold War. Although the Nuremberg Code’s creation did not provide enough ethical safeguards for future prisoner experiments, it was a first step in opening up a conversation about critically examining ethical flaws in medical experimentation on prisoners, and this conversation would continue well into the 1970s. Through both the American and German experimentation examples and the subsequent Nuremberg trial, we can see how in both totalitarian and democratic countries, wartime was a powerful force in the decision to suspend the rights of prisoners.
Written by: Natalie Riddick, Sophomore, History Major
For Further Reading:
Primary Sources:
Kaempffert, Waldermar. “Science in Review: German Experiments in Freezing and Reviving Prisoners at Dachau Concentration Camp.” New York Times (1923-Current File), Nov 18, 1945. http://electra.lmu.edu:2048/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.electra.lmu.edu/historical-newspapers/science-review/docview/107092628/se-2?accountid=7418
Leopald, Nathan. Life Plus 99 Years. New York: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1958.
Testimony of Pacholegg A. In: “Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, International Military Tribunal.” Suppl. A. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1947: 414-22.
“Transcript for Nuremberg Trials 1: Medical Case.” Harvard Law School: Nuremberg Trials Project., ed. 2016. http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/transcripts/1-transcript-for-nmt-1-medical-case?seq=9274&q=Stateville
Secondary Sources:
Berger, Robert L., M.D. “Nazi Science — the Dachau Hypothermia Experiments.” The New England Journal of Medicine 322, no. 20 (1990): 1435-1440.
http://electra.lmu.edu:2048/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.electra.lmu.edu/scholarly-journals/nazi-science-dachau-hypothermia-experiments/docview/223956669/se-2?accountid=7418
Harcourt, Bernard E. “Making Willing Bodies: The University of Chicago Human Experiments at Stateville Penitentiary.” Social Research 78, no. 2 (2011):443-78. http://www3.law.columbia.edu/bharcourt/documents/harcourt-social-research.pdf
Hornblum, Allen M. “They Were Cheap and Available: Prisoners as Research Subjects in Twentieth Century America.” British Medical Journal 315 (1997): 1437–1441.
https://www-jstor-org.electra.lmu.edu/stable/25176378
Kalata, Katelyn. “The Exploitation of Inmates: Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Experiment.” Western Illinois Historical Review, vol. XI, (2020): 1-18. http://www.wiu.edu/cas/history/wihr/pdfs/WIHR%20spring%202020%20Kalata%20final%20version.pdf
Masterson, Karen M. The Malaria Project: The U.S. Government’s Secret Mission to Find a Cure. New York: New American Library, 2014.
Weindling, Paul. “The Origins of Informed Consent: The International Scientific Commission on Medical War Crimes, and the Nuremberg Code.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75, no. 1 (2001): 37-71. doi:10.1353/bhm.2001.0049.
https://muse-jhu-edu.electra.lmu.edu/article/4648
[1] Robert L. Berger, M.D. “Nazi Science — the Dachau Hypothermia Experiments,” The New England Journal of Medicine 322, no. 20, (1990): 1439.
[2] Testimony of Pacholegg A. In: Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, International Military Tribunal. Suppl. A. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, (1947): 419.
[3] Katelyn Kalata. “The Exploitation of Inmates: Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Experiment,” Western Illinois Historical Review, vol. XI, (2020): 9.
[4] Nathan Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years, 321.
[5] Nathan Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years, 307.
[6] Karen M. Masterson, The Malaria Project, 304.
[7] Bernard E. Harcourt, “Making Willing Bodies: The University of Chicago Human Experiments at Stateville Penitentiary,” Social Research 78, no. 2 (2011):451.
[8] Allen M. Hornblum, “They Were Cheap and Available: Prisoners as Research Subjects in Twentieth Century America,” British Medical Journal 315, (1997): 1439.
[9] Bernard E. Harcourt, “Making Willing Bodies: The University of Chicago Human Experiments at Stateville Penitentiary,” Social Research 78, no. 2 (2011):470.
[10] Nathan Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years, 307.
[11] Katelyn Kalata. “The Exploitation of Inmates: Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Experiment,” Western Illinois Historical Review, vol. XI, (2020): 9.
[12] Bernard E. Harcourt, “Making Willing Bodies: The University of Chicago Human Experiments at Stateville Penitentiary,” Social Research 78, no. 2 (2011):470.
[13] Bernard E. Harcourt, “Making Willing Bodies: The University of Chicago Human Experiments at Stateville Penitentiary,” Social Research 78, no. 2 (2011):470.
[14] Paul Weindling, “The Origins of Informed Consent: The International Scientific Commission on Medical War Crimes, and the Nuremberg Code.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75, no. 1 (2001): 45.
