Here, MailOnline looks at some of the most horrifying mass human experiments carried out in the 20th century.
WARNING: Contains graphic images and descriptionsThroughout the 20th century, the world's biggest powers inflicted horrific pain on their own citizens in the form of mass human experimentation.
Furthermore, in the early days of the Cold War as fears mounted over atomic war, the Soviet Union conducted a terrifying test to establish how it could win on the battlefield in the event of nuclear strikes across Europe. The racial policies developed by Nazi Germany determined that Jews, Roma and Slavs - including Poles, Czechs, Russians and Serbs - were 'racially inferior sub-humans', and should therefore be removed from society.
As millions of Jews and people of other races were rounded up across the Third Reich and sent to their deaths at Nazi death camps, doctors were tasked with carrying out experiments on a selection of those prisoners. A low pressure chamber was used to simulate conditions of altitudes up to 68,000 feet. Of the 200 subjects, 80 died outright, while it was rumoured that German SS doctor Sigmund Rascher performed vivisections on patients who initially survived.
The Nazi medics also tested methods to warm subjects, with one assistant later testifying that some victims were 'thrown into boiling water for rewarming'. At the Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Natzweiler, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme concentration camps, scientists used prisoners to test immunisation compounds and antibodies for the prevention of contagious diseases - including malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis.
The Nazis also carried out head injury experiments and experiments to test the effects of various poisons. The third and final category of human experimentation according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum was the Nazis working to advance Nazi racial ideology and eugenics. Mengele's cruel tests included the amputation of healthy limbs, deliberately infecting twins with diseases such as typhus, blood transfusions from one twin to the other and sewing twins together to create conjoined twins.
While roughly ten per cent of the German population became Nazi Party members by 1945, that figure was more than half of all German doctors. Other doctors, such as Walter Schreiber, were covertly moved to the US during 'Operation Paperclip' in 1951. Overseeing all of these unspeakable crimes was Unit 731's Dr Death - Shiro Ishii - a charismatic surgeon and ultra-nationalist fanatic who is considered the architect of the now notorious death camp's atrocities.
Ishii, an army surgeon, established the biological warfare research unit in 1936 to study germ warfare, weapons capabilities and the limits of the human body. 'It was the secret of all secrets - trains could only pass with their curtains drawn; the Air Force would shoot down any plane that came too close.'
The effects of various remedies were tested on their frostbitten limbs, which were also painfully heated up by the sick surgeons as they tested the effects on victims Vivisections were also common practice, with former workers revealing what they saw - and even did themselves - decades later. Inmates also had limbs amputated and organs removed before the depraved surgeons reattached their body parts - often in the wrong place - to see the effects.
Enough germs were created to kill everyone on earth many times over, according to reports, with 300 kilos of plague bacteria produced every month, 500 kilos of anthrax, and nearly a tonne of dysentery and cholera. What's more, women were forcibly impregnated for them and their babies to be used in these experiments.The hundreds of prisoners who were alive when Japan surrendered at the end of the war were murdered and buried as the imperial army tried to cover up its crimes.
The site of the Japanese Unit 731 in Harbin, which was opened to the public to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II Soviet forces invaded the former Manchuria in August, and Unit 731's staff retreated back to Japan, with many never revealing their crimes and going on to enjoy relatively normal lives.
After the war, Supreme Commander of the Occupation Douglas MacArthur handed Ishii immunity in the name of the United States - and all members of the units - in exchange for all of the results of the experiments. The first Soviet nuclear weapons test came in 1949, and the country would test another 17 over the next five years, including ten in 1954.In September 1954, the Soviet Army carried out an aerial detonation of a 40-kilotonne RDS-4 nuclear bomb in Russia's southern Orenburg Oblast.
The area had been chosen especially because it shared some similarities with the Fulda Gap, found in West Germany, where it was planned that Soviet forces would drive through NATO lines in the event of war against the West. The film also shows that troops were exposed to high levels of radiation for an extended time without sufficient protection against the effects.
Soldiers were seen staging a mock battle through the plains, still smoking - the air thick with dust. Red Army soldiers are seen in footage of the experiment running through fields close to where the bomb was detonatedThe soldiers had been carefully selected from Soviet military servicemen. The US, UK and France all also sent troops to witness blasts, albeit from a greater distance than the Soviet soldiers in 1954.
The objective of the programme was to develop procedures and drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken suspects and force confessions out of them through brainwashing and psychological torture. CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, who headed up the agency's secret MK-ULTRA program, is seen in 1973 - the year the project was shut down after 20 years
To back up this argument, American historian Stephen Kinzer - who extensively studied the programme - cited the several German scientists who were hired by the US as part of the aforementioned Operation Paperclip. Research into biological, chemical and nuclear weapons soared in the early days of the Cold War, including the CIA's MK-ULTRA program
'Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realised it was a two-part process,' Kinzer told NPR in 2019. In the nine years of MK-ULTRA's existence, Gottlieb sponsored projects in prisons across the country in which inmates would be bribed by the promise of better cells, even heroin, for submitting to hideous tests.
Brothels were set up and wired to study how the combination of sex and drugs impacted men's willingness to divulge secrets.Frank Olson, who fell to his death in 1959. He is thought to be one of the MK-Ultra subjects Blauer was injected with a concentrate of mescaline derivative which was without explanation or warning.
They wrote as little down as possible and prided themselves on the fact that the right hand, quite deliberately, didn't know what the left hand was doing. Gottlieb would always maintain that he sent Olson on his fateful trip to Manhattan, accompanied by Lashbrook to receive psychiatric treatment and that his death was suicide or an accident.
He wrote, 'The most efficient accident… is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. It will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. A rock or heavy stone will do… Blows should be directed to the temple.' The stated purpose of the study was to observe the effects of the sexually transmitted infection when left untreated - despite the disease being entirely treatable long before the experiment came to an end.
Starting in 1932, the Public Health Service - working with the famed Tuskegee Institute - began recruiting Black men in Macon County, Alabama. Instead, they were provided disguised placebos, ineffective methods of treatment and diagnostic procedures as treatment for the so-called 'bad blood'. The story was broken by the Associated Press after 29-year-old reporter Jean Heller was handed an envelope containing details by Edith Lederer.
He knew immediately that the study was unethical, he said, and sent reports to his superiors telling them so, twice.'I knew that I could not do this,' Lederer said during a recent interview. 'AP, in 1972, was not going to put a young reporter from San Francisco on a plane to Tuskegee, Alabama, to go and do an investigative story.'At the time, Heller was the only woman on the AP's fledgling Special Assignment Team, a rarity in the industry.
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