Article ID: CBB421393123

Pandora's box closed: The Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine and Nazi medical experiments on human beings during World War II (2020)

unapi

In the months before and after the final surrender of Nazi Germany on 8 May 1945, British aviation medicine specialists were sent to the European continent to learn the progress that German aviation medicine had made since September 1939. For the medical officers at the Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine at Farnborough in Hampshire, the dilemma over whether the medical data from the Nazi aviation medicine experiments at Dachau concentration camp should be exploited presented profound moral and ethical problems. Their deliberations paralleled those of the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trial, which revealed the crimes that were committed under the Nazi regime. At the same time, the British medical establishment debated the morality of publishing the Nazi medical research to serve humanity. This article shows that on the basis of British wartime and post-war research, and determinations that were made by the British Advisory Committee for the Investigation of German Medical War Crimes, by 1948 the RAF IAM had essentially rejected the results of the Nazi aviation medicine experiments on scientific and ethical grounds.

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Authors & Contributors
Jones, Edgar
Sammer, Christian
Reichelt, Bernd
James Esposito
Sheffer, Edith
Macleod, Sandy
Concepts
Medicine and the military; medicine in war
World War II
Medicine and ethics
Human experimentation
Psychiatry
National Socialism
Time Periods
20th century, early
20th century
21st century
19th century
Places
Germany
Great Britain
Japan
United States
England
France
Institutions
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
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