Some people point to “The Holocaust” and think that was the cruelest part of World War 2. As a Jew, I am biased in that direction as well, but I have to admit… there was worse.
I’m going to include a pic to help our more sensitive readers. If you don’t want to see some of the worst people can do to each other, please don’t expand this answer.
For me, it is all the human experimentation. On the… more benign end of the spectrum, we have drugs given to soldiers to keep them awake, including the methamphetamine Pervitin. Why is that “benign?” It is only benign on the spectrum when at the other end we have the horrors of…
- Sewing twins together to create “Siamese twins.”
- Tying a young boy down in a chair and having a mechanized hammer smash him in the head over and over to generate brain damage.
- Generating diseases in people including botulism, malaria, typhoid, gangrene, etc. This even included injecting their bone marrow with bacteria.
- Putting people in low-pressure chambers to simulate high-altitude. This caused people to suffocate or have blood vessels burst.
- Amputations of healthy limbs, usually performed while the victim was still awake.
Induced hypoxia.
Induced hypothermia.
You can see more here, including videos:
These were all experiments carried out by the Nazis. They’re pretty well-known to the West. What isn’t as well known are the same horrors perpetrated by Unit 731 by the Japanese. Those included…
- Infecting victims with pathogens and then subjecting them to, again, vivisection while the victim was awake and without anesthetic. This vivisection was usually to remove organs. This included syphilis so that the victim’s reproductive organs could be studied… but cutting them open while the victim was still alive and aware.
- Widespread testing of diseases like cholera, the bubonic plague, smallpox, and paratyphoid fever. Remember that this is largely (but not completely) pre-antibiotic.
- Constant rape, often with the intent of impregnating women to then vivisect them later to study reproductive development.
- Testing various weapons, including fire and chemical weapons.
- Freezing body parts of living victims.
Fingers injected with pathogens.
Induced frostbite.
The people who would do these things to other humans don’t deserve to be called people.
Incidentally, once the war was over, a lot of the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity were scooped up and protected instead of executed. Apparently, we thought we needed their data.