The treatment of prisoners during the Holocaust violated all conventions of human behavior. Prisoners were starved, beaten, used in experiments, randomly shot, worked to death, and many were ultimately gassed and cremated.
Political hunger strikes raise many issues for governments, physicians, prisoners and the groups that support the prisoners. A recent article in the Times of Israel enumerates the nature and the complexity of these issues for contemporary medicine. If only Nazi physicians had paid attention to the welfare of their “prisoner patients.”