The impact of Nazi medical experiments on Polish inmates at Dachau, Auschwitz and Ravensbruck

Polish citizens of various backgrounds, gender and religion suffered greatly during the six years of Nazi occupation (1939-1945). Thousands of members of the country's elite, including physicians, priests, writers and politicians, were executed during the first months of World War Two along with nearly three million Polish Jews who perished in the years that followed. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of Polish men and women were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. All incarcerated Poles experienced humiliation, hunger, mistreatment and torture; moreover, selected Polish prisoners participated in medical experiments both as victims and as assistants of Nazi doctors, which not only affected their health, behaviour and reputation within the camp but also hugely influenced their post-war life in Poland or abroad. This thesis examines three interrelated issues in relation to Polish prisoners: priests at Dachau, physicians at Auschwitz and women at Ravensbruck, taking a biographical approach for the wartime and post-war periods. First, it presents the way they coped with medical experiments and with everyday life in their respective concentration camps; secondly, it analyses the purposes of, and reasons for, the experiments and how the process of the prisoners' participation in Nazi medical research changed their behaviour; finally, this thesis explores the measures victims took after the war to draw attention to Nazi crimes and the injustice of which they were victims.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2012

Author dc:creator

• Loewenau, Aleksandra

Contributors dc:contributor

• Weindling, Paul
• Turda, Marius

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/sg4r-z296

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:9d879111-9654-403a-9bb2-dba750e1d555:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1