Ethical Violations During The Holocaust

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Genocide is the intentional mass murder of a racial, political, or ethnic group. A word with such a negative connotation, there’s no possible way to make it sound pretty. The faint of heart may even hear this word and shudder a bit. Unfortunately, this crime has been repeated throughout history many times. This begs the question, why would someone even want to do something so monstrous?

Almost everyone has at least heard of the Holocaust, seeing as it’s one of the main topics taught in schools when talking about World War II. However, many classes just teach about the concentration camps and Hitler’s leadership. The Germans committed far worse atrocities than what is commonly mentioned. Many classes barely scratch the surface of the true atrocities that happened during the Holocaust, maybe bringing up concentration camps or even briefly mentioning human experimentation. Shelden Rubenfeld even brings up how serious the “medical ethics violations were in the medical experiments” (Rubenfeld 515) when talking
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The Nuremberg Doctors were some of those Germans that had to face what they’d done. During their trial “the court issued ten points about human-subject research that is now known as the Nuremberg Code” (Rubenfeld 515). The US later “accepted the Nuremberg Code” (Rubenfeld 515), and the US also added extra restrictions of its own by way of “Institutional Review Boards” (Rubenfeld 515). To think, had German doctors never done these human experiments, the law may not have been changed to stop them from happening anymore, and the US may not have adopted the Nuremberg Code. The world may look very different without restrictions on human experimentation. It definitely wasn’t a good thing that happened, but it’s fortunate that it could and has been stopped by the law, which may not have even been thought about before the experiment actually