The Doctors Behind Nanking and Nazi Camps

Two doctors of World War II that most people don’t know about are Dr. Joseph Mengele and Dr. Shiro Ishii. These two men you may or may not know and I would go out on a limb and say most of you have no idea who they are. These men were doctors trying to find out ways to test ideas that they had conjured up in their minds. What better way for they thought to do it was to test them on people that the German or Japanese armies were already going to execute. These men tested theories that would make your heart skip a beat hearing about them and how horrible they were, but this is one of the good reasons we have history is to learn from mistakes of the past like theirs and never make them again. I suppose I should tell you a little about these men and why they are so horrible.

First off are a few things that are very similar about these men. They both were skilled doctors before the war began; the military found them and wanted them to test their hypothesis on some of their prisoners. For instance the Germans always wanted more Aryians which were blonde hair blue eyed people so they had Mengele work on trying to genetically change the prisoners that had twins to make more Aryians. Through most of these procedures he ended up killing off most of the little kids and twins. Now Ishii on the other hand also tortured his prisoners by testing out theories we know today such as putting them in a hypothermic state, giving them frostbite, simulating heart attacks and strokes, forced abortions, and vivisections. He mostly worked with psychological ideas but he also worked with the idea of a germ warfare where he would unleash plagues and other devastating diseases to kill of entire populations.

The reason these two men were not treated the same way after the war was due to the different ways they handled their situation. Mengele wasn’t not remorseful for what he had done, and that eventually landed him in the court system. On the other hand Ishii had made an earlier agreement that if he told everything about his practices and about germ warfare that they couldn’t not jail him after the war was finished.

These two men were very bad people and I believe they both should have been jailed for what they had done and honestly I believe they should have been executed as well. On a final note, I believed that the Nanking was worse for the prisoners than the holocaust. In the Nanking there was much more brutality such as the raping and beating of the ones being raped.  In the holocaust they made the prisoners usually work and they got fed less but the torture aspect wasn’t nearly as bad as being raped to death or near death during the Nanking. I enjoyed the movie and am glad we watched it, it helped me learn more about WWII and what really happened.