The first category consisted of finding out how military personals could survive at extreme conditions. The second category aimed to find treatments for injured Germans. The last category the doctors tried to find out if the Germans were really the superior race, infecting Jews with various diseases and viruses ("Nazi Medical Experiments").
The Nazis one category of experiments was to try to find out how men in their military could stay alive at dangerous conditions. In 1942, Dr. Sigmund Rascher and other Nazis conducted high altitude experiments on prisoners at Dachau. They set out to try and figure out how best to save German pilots who were forced to eject at high altitude. In this experiment they forced inmates into pressure chambers that simulated altitudes as high as 68,000 feet and recorded and monitored their physiological responses to them. Rascher would dissect these victims brains while they were still alive to show the affect the high altitudes did to their brains. Eighty out of the 200 who were chosen for this experiment died outright and the rest were executed (Tyson).
Dr. Sigmund Rascher also conducted experiments with freezing and hypothermia. Prisoners were immersed into tanks of ice water for hours at a time, often shivering to death, to discover how long German pilots downed by enemy fire could survive the frozen waters. Rascher tried to recreate these scenarios at Dachau. The victims were forced to remain in tanks full of ice for up to three hours at a time. In another experiment of freezing Rascher also would strap his victims down to boards and leave them out in the freezing winter all night. They were forced to lay naked for up to fourteen hours at temperatures below freezing. The shrieks of these freezing victims was said to have been unbearable resulting in Rascher moving his experiments to somewhere else. After they were out all night freezing Rascher would try to reheat them with a variety of methods.