by World War II was a tragedy of unprecedented proportions, with horrors happening both on and off of the battlefield. The excuse of working towards a better world, and ending the war to save the lives of the soldiers and all they were fighting for, were used as a means to justify atrocities in the name of science. The Nazi command authorized and funded unfathomable numbers of experiments to make use of the vast numbers of available civilians they had imprisoned, using the lives at their hands as a resource for human experimentation. Unfortunately, their meticulous experimentation was thoroughly recorded, and within their data was a comprehensive map of the limits of the human body in adverse and extreme conditions. Their data, while obtained in the most deplorable of ways, was quite simply beyond the reach of researchers anywhere else, for they had slipped the constraints of morality to yield some of the darkest truths of our survival. Years after their work was done, and the Nazi regime had been toppled, the data survived and was collected by other scientists, though there was only one problem. While this data was extensive and would save years of ethical human experimentation, it was obtained inethically, and this quality of the data often led it to be rejected as a valid source of scientific literature.
There are those, however, who argue the contrary – that this data must be used so that we might not turn a blind eye to the unspeakable horror and suffering that went into obtaining such unprecedented information on humans. The undeniable lack of humanity possessed by the Nazi scientists allowed for them to run experiments with no safety net, and no margin of error due to guesswork. They had sent thousands upon thousands to die, either by their own hands, or by the malicious and nightmarish experiments they conducted. They studied transplants and transfusions, hypothermia and the effects of frozen extremities, stimulants, exposure to high altitudes, head trauma, antibacterial medication, and blood coagulants. These experiments, however useful in our understanding of the human body, destroyed so many lives in ways beyond imagination, forever leaving a bloody stain on the history of science and medicine as untold numbers of people were put to their deaths in a search for more information.
These experiments, and this data, cannot be viewed without subjecting the reader to the same horror the scientists concocted for their prisoners, and yet it is useful data still. Many scientific papers made use of this data and used this dark history to supplant their own work, often without making a reference to the true origin of the statistics and figures that were so instrumental in the expedition of treatments and aids to our own lives. While we can reject this data on the grounds that the participants might have been malnutritioned or unwilling, and that might have skewed the data, or that it would run contrary to your own closely held moral values, simply rejecting this data and these experiments on the basis that dealing with it makes you feel bad, or that you might not have the stomach to hear the dark truth behind the numbers, then you are refuting and silencing a section of history simply because you yourself feel uncomfortable about it. No matter your opinion on this data, it is not simply a matter to be swept under the rug, for it has the value of thousands of lives within it, even if this only sees use as a cautionary tale of science driven without morality.