Nazi Medical Experiment Report: Evidence from the Nuremberg Medical Trial
Confronting a deluge of irrefutable information on Germany’s genocidal campaigns in Europe, the major Allied powers resolved on November 1, 1943, that once Germany was defeated, they would try accused Nazi war criminals before an international war crimes tribunal. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin signed the Declaration on German Atrocities, the stated purpose of which was to identify, judge, and punish those Germans who were responsible for the reported outrages. Originally, the Allied powers hoped to return each of the defendants to the country where the specific war crimes he or she was accused of had been committed. However, such a large-scale international shuffle of alleged criminals eventually proved logistically impossible, In 1945 the Allied powers, which then included liberated France, decided instead to convene what was called the International Military Tribunal in the German city of Nuremberg.
Nuremberg provided an appropriate trial venue for several reasons. American prosecutors persuaded their Allied colleagues that the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, one of the few structures still intact amid the rubble and devastation of Germany’s bombed-out cities, would be large enough to accommodate such proceedings. It was also conveniently located in the American zone of occupation. Furthermore, Nuremberg was historically symbolic: dating back to medieval times, the city had been the site of numerous Nazi propaganda rallies during the rise of the Third Reich and the place where, in 1935, the infamous Nuremberg Laws had been enacted to strip German Jews of their citizenship and legal, political, and economic rights.
No legal precedent existed for an international trial of such a broad scope. In their development of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, which was signed in December 1945, Soviet, British, French, and American officials attempted to establish the legal authority to conduct such trials. Balancing the legal and constitutional precedents of the four nations required much diplomacy. This international legal community thus assembled in Nuremberg was able to define four areas of criminality under which the Nazi leaders would be charged. Specifically, individuals were charged with crimes against peace (waging a war of aggression that violated international agreements); war crimes (acts that violated the rules of war); crimes against humanity (inhuman treatment of civilians, acts of racial persecution, and genocide); and membership in an organization declared criminal in nature by the International Military Tribunal.
The first Nazi defendants to be tried in 1945 and 1946 included the infamous Hermann Goring as well as Rudolf Hess, Wilhelm Keitel, Albert Speer, and 19 others. Employing unparalleled accumulations of documentary evidence seized by the Allies during the siege and occupation of Germany, the international prosecutors exposed the degree of human carnage that had resulted from the application of Nazi racist ideology. Incriminated by their own extensive records, the defendants did not try to challenge documents they had signed but instead attempted to justify their actions by claiming that they were only following orders from superiors. Under the legal leadership of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who served as Chief Counsel for WarCrimes Prosecution, this line of defense was discredited so that individuals were to be held strictly responsible for the crimes they personally committed or authorized. The tribunal sentenced 12 well-known Nazis to death, sentenced 8 others to prison terms, and acquitted the remaining 3. Goring committed suicide on the eve of his execution.
Afterward, U.S. military authorities held an additional series of 12 trials in Nuremberg. Lesser known defendants-including industrialists, judges, lower-ranking party officials, and members of the medical profession-were tried before these American military tribunals. Citing the legal authority established by the International Military Tribunal charter, Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor, who replaced Justice Jackson, tried individual Germans for crimes against the international law articulated by the victors. Prior to the development in the charter in 1945, however, "crimes against humanity" had never been defined by the international community. Critics of the Nuremberg proceedings, including some French and Russian legal scholars present at the initial trial, have questioned the propriety of what might be considered ex post facto introduction of previously uncodified crimes into international law. Because of this question and for economic reasons, only the Americans prosecuted an additional series of trials.
THE MEDICAL CASE
The first of the proceedings to follow the major Nuremberg trial was United States v Karl Brandt, et al. Commonly known as the "medical case," this trial included 23 defendants; 20 were medical doctors who became part of Hitler’s bureaucratic machinery working toward the annihilation of the many people considered subhuman by the Nazis. These Nazi doctors were directly responsible for thousands of phenol injections, which they euphemistically referred to as "mercy killings." In the late 1930s, before the creation of the death camps, German citizens who were deemed "inferior," either physically or mentally, were killed in an attempt to purge the so-called "Aryan race" of all perceived biological weakness. On the other end of Nazi racial ranking, Jews, Gypsies, and other "subhumans" were also killed by injection in various circumstances.
As Hitler implemented his genocidal "final solution to the Jewish question," German medical professionals began performing the "selections" in concentration camps, standing by as the cattle trains of Eastern European Jews arrived-condemning some people to gas chambers and relegating others to slave labor camps. Documentary evidence against these men tried at Nuremberg related principally to their facilitating or performing inhuman medical experiments on unwilling subjects. Nazi medical doctors had no scruples about using people considered racially inferior for any kind of experiment.
American prosecutors proved that many of the defendants orchestrated and performed experiments on concentration camp victims incarcerated in such camps as Dachau, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Ravensbrück, among others. Experiments included infecting already weakened people with diseases like jaundice, malaria, and typhus. Other victims were subjected to torture at high altitudes or freezing temperatures or were forced to ingest sea water. In the high-altitude experiments, Russians, Poles, Jews of various nationalities, and even Germans were used.
In one series of horrifying experiments, doctors surgically sterilized many men and women using radical, unsafe, and unhygienic techniques. The doctors sought to develop an inexpensive and quick method of sterilizing those seen as inferior, yet useful to keep alive. At Auschwitz, doctors sterilized thousands of women with uterine injections; at Ravensbrück, young Polish women were sterilized with surgery, X rays, and chemotherapy. Himmler considered sterilization a means to eventual extermination of Poles, Russians, and Jews. If the experiments proved "successful," the technique would have been used on a wide scale to gradually depopulate conquered areas earmarked for Nazi colonization.
The prosecution presented more than 570 documents, often with annotations and supplementary photographs, detailing the gruesome nature ofthese experiments. The documents featured here, part of the National Archives Collection of World War II War Crimes Records, Record Group 238, relate the effects of a medical experiment involving intended poisoning, which was authorized and witnessed by one of the highest ranking Nazi doctors, Joachim Mrugowsky, the designated Reich Surgeon of the SS and Police and "Supreme Hygienist." Mrugowsky was responsible for ordering the use of Zyklon B—not to fumigate lice, as was its stated purpose, but to intentionally kill large numbers of human beings. He was also instrumental in facilitating the transfer of people interned in concentration camps to serve as subjects for Nazi experiments. As the documents that follow indicate, he also personally participated in many such experiments, carefully and methodically recording the effects.
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Acting as his own defense, Dr. Mrugowsky claimed that experimentation on human beings was perceived as necessary to combat the real threat of chemical warfare being used by the Russians on the front. There was evidence, he stated, that Russian troops were using bullets filled with a similar poison. He argued that knowing the probable results of such a poison on the body was of direct and immediate benefit to the German people during wartime. When asked whether he had seen the required document authorizing the death sentences of the subjects by a valid German judicial body, Mrugowsky responded that verifying the legality of an execution was not part of his job. As a doctor, he claimed, he was simply asked to be present at an execution to record and verify the exact time of death. The documents suggest a more substantial involvement, however. Mrugowsky volunteered the information that the two individuals whose wounds excluded them from taking further part in the experiment (because bullets shot into them during the initial phase of the test had severed central arteries, and they would die in minutes) were "immediately and humanely" shot through the heart.
In his closing statement, Mrugowsky concluded: "My life, my actions, my aims were clean. That is why now, at the end of this trial, I declare myself free of personal guilt." The tribunal did not share this opinion. On August 20, 1947, Dr. Joachim Mrugowsky and nine of his colleagues in the medical trial were sentenced to death by hanging.
NOTE TO TEACHERS
There is a wealth of evidence in the National Archives documenting atrocities committed by Nazis. The Nazis were excellent record-keepers, creating and maintaining them so carefully and profusely that the captured documents were used to convict many of them. With so much evidence available, teachers must carefully choose appropriate materials. Too much clinical information may result in dehumanizing the victims and disconnecting students from the reality of the horror. In the study of Nazi Germany, it is difficult to avoid overexposing students to the degradation and sensationalism of that era, but such study must be done. It is also difficult to hold back from inundating students with too many audiovisual and written accounts of the Holocaust. However, throwing too much information at students without adequate time for reflection and processing of complex and multifaceted issues may lead to an oversimplified understanding (e.g., concluding that all Germans were Nazis, all Germans knew about and approved of Jewish genocide, and Nazi genocidal policies were applied only against Jews).
TEACHING ACTIVITIES
1. On the chalkboard, with the help of students, compile a list of professions generally respected by society. Next, identify and list qualities that set those professions apart. Finally, ask students to freewrite for five minutes about why Americans hold professionals such as doctors and lawyers in such high esteem.
2. Review the untranslated German document with students. Ask them to identify dates, signatures, and physical qualities that make the document unique. Ask students to make logical inferences about the nature of thedocument. Ask them to cite specific words that give them clues to possible meanings. Students might postulate why this document is in the National Archives of the United States.
3. Share with students background information on the Nuremberg trials. Explain that the document they are reviewing was submitted as evidence in Dr. Mrugowsky’s trial. Then hand out the English translation for them to read. Before discussing students’ reactions, ask students to freewrite for an additional five to ten minutes relating their previous thoughts to the new material.
4. Scientific experimentation on human subjects was not unique to Nazi Germany. The U.S. Government is currently disclosing a history of experiments regarding the effects of radioactivity on U.S. citizens. Discuss with students the safeguards, both moral and legal, that protect the rights of citizens from unsafe scientific practices. Ask some students to contact the Food and Drug Administration, the American Medical Association, or a local medical research institution for information about laws regarding experimental procedures involving human beings. Ask students to report their findings to the class.
5. Assign a few students to study and report on research performed by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram. In his startling book Obedience to Authority, Milgram maintains that individuals in a controlled scientific environment will inflict pain on others if instructed to do so by someone they perceive to be an authority figure.
6. Assign several other students to conduct research on the controversy surrounding the use of data obtained during Nazi medical research. Students should use the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature and the resources of a local research library to investigate this ongoing ethical debate. Students should orally report their findings to the class or participate in a videotaped panel discussion on the topic. Medical ethicists from a local university or other medical personnel might be invited as additional members of the panel.
7. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum holds a yearly art and writing competition for middle and secondary school students. Interested teachers can write to the following address for information on the contest: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Education Department, National Art and Writing Contest, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW, Washington, DC 20024-2150.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Markusen, Eric. "Professions, Professionals, and Genocide." In Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, vol. 2, edited by Israel Charny, 264-298. New York: Facts on File, 1991. [Note: This essay includes a lengthy and useful annotated bibliography that lists numerous works germane to the focus of the article.]
Persico, Joseph E. Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial. New York: Viking, 1994.
Taylor, Telford. The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
Trial of Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal. 42 vols. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.