Nazi experimentation is fairly well known even to a layman of history. However, the specific details and the central figures. might be lesser known.
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The Nazis performed several terrible experiments on human subjects in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Most of these experiments were designed under the assumption that the subjects would be killed during the process, and some of them were incapable of producing meaningful scientific information from the start.
These pseudo-scientific experiments were often nothing more than torture disguised as the pursuit of knowledge. Nazi Germany enacted strong legal restrictions on animal abuse and medical experimentation. The humans living in the concentration camps were awarded no such protection, legal or otherwise.
Several of the scientists leading these efforts were extremely well-regarded in the academic community, but many were barely qualified to work in any scientific capacity. The neuroscience division is an excellent example of the lack of qualifications of the people assigned to produce meaningful scientific data.
There were sixty-eight physicians employed by the Third Reich for neuroscience research. Of these, thirty-eight specialized in neuroscience, and thirty specialized in unrelated fields. Twenty-four were professors, two had PhDs and the other forty-two had only recently received their certification to work in the medical field in general. This article will focus on the more notorious scientists and the heinous acts they committed during the Nazi regime.
Rudin was internationally recognized for his research into psychiatric genetics, most notably on the inheritance of schizophrenia, and was a professor of the notorious Josef Mengele. His research was used to justify the enforced eugenic sterilization program, which sterilized approximately 50,000 people a year beginning in 1934. He helped design the program and decide who should be sterilized. Rudin’s work was able to remain relevant in the scientific community after the way, and his research on schizophrenia was cited in medical journals well into the 1980s.