Sometimes even if a person was in really good health and was strong you were chosen. You were then selected to be put under horrific experimentations to determine why you were the way were and what you could stand to go through and still survive.
There are four main parts to the reasons why the Nazi doctors did the experimentations. The first was to do experiments on people to help the German armies be stronger and to know what living conditions a human could endure and still survive (USHMM). "In Dachau, physicians from the German air force and from the German Experimental Institution for Aviation conducted high-altitude experiments, using a low-pressure chamber, to determine the maximum altitude from which crews of damaged aircraft could parachute to safety." (USHMM 1) They also conducted experiments to see how long a person could suffer extreme cold temperatures. The Germans were not as used to cold weather as the people on the Eastern front and the German forces were dying of the cold .
conditions (Remember 1). In the Auschwitz death camp, doctors would take prisoners and strap them completely naked to a cot. They would then make them stay out there for hours until they saw fit for them to come back inside or until they died from hypothermia. They would insert a rectal thermometer, held in place by an expandable metal ring, to tell the temperature of their bodies immediately after death or after a time period set for them. Another method was to put them in a icy vat of water. The person was put in the cold water, along with the probe in place, and made stay there until they froze to death. This proved to be the fastest way to drop a persons body temperature to 25 degrees Celsius where they would lose consciousness and die (Tripod 2). Strong Russian men were known to withstand the cold temperatures the longest (Tripod 2). Some of the time, the freezing experiment victims were stopped short of dying and were put through the just as painful process of being warmed up and resuscitated.
