Yeah, the animals were put under anesthesia.

I have a hunch future generations will look back on our animal experimentation similar to how we look back on human experimentation, horrified but with a silver lining (and most people just prefer not to think about it much at all). I'm very much against both, but I recognize the important advances they've made for medicine. I also recognize that most of the advances for animals don't translate to humans, and some even argue it's slowing progress overall.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/04/10/5227754...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation

The japanese experiments on human beings were just as bad or worse: body part swaps, person merging, survival time studies for various death scenarios, there was a lot of extremely messed up stuff.

I recently read about Shirō Ishii, a Japaneese microbiologist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirō_Ishii) who conducted human experiments during World War-II which resulted in death of close to 10000 humans. More interestingly he was given immunity from war crimes in exchange for full disclosure about his experiments. And the information he provided was deemed invaluable. From the wiki

  it (experiment information) "could never have been 
  obtained in the United States because of scruples 
  attached to experiments on humans," and "the information 
  was obtained fairly cheaply."

Yep. I'm not sure how pervasive it is, but there are leaks of medical experiments being done on Uighurs today in China (including experimental coronavirus vaccines).

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-xinjiang...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/china-forcing-experimental-cor...

Nazi human experimentation was torture done under the auspices of junk-science. It was recognized as such even by the people of that time period.

Nothing that they studied is taught in science programs anywhere today.

My point is many will say the same thing about animal experimentation today. And there are doctors that reference the Nazi experiments, even if most refuse to ever look at the data.

http://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/learn-from-nazi-medical-rese...

While the theories they developed were junk, both Nazi and Imperial Japanese torture experiments play a big role in our modern safety standards and guidelines.

E.g. modern guidelines on how long a human can be safely exposed to cold, or how much blood they can lose were founded on data the USA took from Japanese researches in exchange for pardons.