JTA — A major European cosmetics firm has vowed to reexamine its Nazi-era history amid revelations that it benefited from gruesome human experiments in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust.

Weleda, founded in 1921 in Germany by a Swiss parent company, claimed that its skin cream could protect German soldiers from frostbite. To prove the claim, Nazi doctors and their assistants — some of them with connections to Weleda — used the cream in brutal experiments on some 300 prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp, in which they were submerged in water with ice blocks for hours on end.

About 80 to 90 prisoners died as a result, in one of countless examples of inhumane medical experimentation to which the Nazis subjected their victims.

The German historian Anne Sudrow exposed the Weleda experiments in a new book published Monday under the auspices of the Dachau memorial. They were first reported publicly in Der Spiegel magazine last week.

In response to the revelations, the company, now headquartered in Arlesheim, Switzerland, said it will reexamine its Nazi-era history. An in-house study, published last year, failed to uncover Weleda’s role in human experiments.

“All of this new research gives us reason to revisit our history in depth with a large, independent study,” Weleda CEO Tina Müller said in a statement. The new study is expected to take two years to complete.

Sudrow found that the company had close ties to the SS and benefited from Dachau’s slave labor,........

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