1946-12-09, #5: Afternoon Session

GENERAL TAYLOR: I come now to charges stated in Paragraphs 7 and 11 of the Indictment. These are perhaps the most utterly repulsive charges in the entire Indictment. They concern the defendants Rudolf Brandt and Sievers. Sievers and his associates in the Ahnenerbe Society were completely obsessed by all the vicious and malignant Nazi racial theories. They conceived the notion of applying these nauseous theories in the field of anthropology. What ensued was murderous folly.

In February 1942, Sievers submitted to Himmler, through Rudolf Brandt, a report from which the following is an extract:

We have a nearly complete collection of skulls of all races and peoples at our disposal. Of the Jewish race, however, only very few specimens of skulls are available with the result that it is impossible to arrive at precise conclusions from examining them. The war in the East now presents us with the opportunity to overcome this deficiency. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars, who represent the prototype of the repulsive, but characteristic subhuman, we have the chance now to obtain a palpable, scientific document.

The best, practical method for obtaining and collecting this skull material could be handled by directing the Wehrmacht to turn over alive all captured Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars to the Field Police. They in turn are to be given special directives to inform a certain office at regular intervals of the number and place of detention of these captured Jews and to give them special close attention and care until a special delegate arrives. This special delegate, who will be in charge of securing the 'material' has the job of taking a series of previously established photographs, 9-12-46 - A - 10-2 - LJG - Lesser anthropological measurements, and in addition has to determine, as far as possible, the background, date of birth, and other personal data of the prisoner.

Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head should not be damaged, the delegate will separate the head from the body and will forward it to its proper point of destination in a hermetically sealed tin can, especially produced for this purpose and filled with a conserving fluid.

Having arrived at the laboratory, the comparison tests and anatomical research on the skull, as well as determination of the race membership of pathological features of the skull form, the form and size of the brain, etc., can proceed. The basis of these studies will be the photos, measurements, and other data supplied on the head and finally the tests of tho skull itself.

After extensive correspondence between Himmler and the defendants Sievers and Rudolf Brandt, it was decided to procure the skulls from inmates of the Auschwitz concentration camp instead of at the front. The hideous program was actually carried out, as is shown by a letter from Sievers written in June 1943, which states in parts:

I wish to inform you that our associate, Dr. Boger, who was in change of the above special project, has interrupted his experiments in the Concentration Camp Auschwitz because of the existing danger of epidemics Altogether 115 persons were worked on. 79 were Jews, 30 were Jewesses, 2 were Poles, and 4 were Asiatics. At the present time these prisoners are segregated by sex and are under quarantine in the two hospital buildings of Auschwitz.

After the death of these wretched Jews had been "induced," their corpses were sent to Strasbourg. A year elapsed, and 9-12-46 - A - 10-3 - LJG-Lesser the Allied armies were racing across France and were nearing Strasbourg where this monstrous exhibit of the culture of tho master race reposed.

Alarmed, Sievers sent a telegram to Rudolf Brandt in September 1944, from which I quote:

According to the proposal of February 9, 1942, and your approval of February 23, 1942, Professor Dr. Hirt has assembled a skeleton collection which has never been in existence before. Because of the vast amount of scientific research that is connected with this project, the job of reducing the corpses to skeletons has not yet been completed. Since it might require some time to process 80 corpses, Hirt requested a decision pertaining to the treatment of the collection stored in the morgue of the Anatomie, in case Strasbourg should be endangered. The collection can be de-fleshed and rendered unrecognizable. This, however, would mean that the whole work had been done for nothing -- at least in part-- and that this singular collection would be lost to science, since it would be impossible to make plaster casts afterwards. The skeleton collection, as such, is inconspicuous. The flesh parts could be declared as having been left by the French at the time we took over the Anatomie and would be turned over for cremating. Please advise me which of the following three proposals is to be carried out:

1) The collection as a whole is to be preserved.

2) The collection is to be dissolved in part.

3) The collection is to be completely dissolved.

The final chapter of this barbaric enterprise is found in a note in Himmler's files addressed to Rudolf Brandt stating that:

During his visit at the Operational Headquarters on 21 November 1944, Sievers told me that tho collection in Strasbourg had been completely dissolved in conformance with the directive given him at the time.

He is of the opinion that this arrangement is for the best in view of the whole situation.

Those men, however, reckoned without tho hand of fate. The bodies of these unfortunate people were not completely disposed of, and this Tribunal will hear the testimony of witnesses and see pictorial exhibits depicting the charnal house which was the Anatomy Institute of tho Reich University of Strasbourg.

I have now completed the sketch of some of the foul crimes which these defendants committed in the name of research. The horrible record of their degradation needs no underlining. Cut German medical science was, in past years, honored throughout the world, and many of the most illustrious names in medical research are German. How did these things come to pass? I will outline briefly the historical evidence which we will offer and which, I believe, will show that these crimes were the logical and inevitable outcome of the prostitution of German medicine under the Nazis.

German Medical Organization Before 1933.

Two years after the reconstitution of the German Reich, in 1871, the German Medical Association (Deutscher Aerztovereinsbund) was created, which tied together the older local medical associations. This Society existed until it was abolished by the Nazi Government. Its structure was democratic, and its interests included problems of hygiene and public health, and to an increasing extent, socio-medical problems especially in the field of sickness and disability insurance.

Bismarck's legislation of 1881 established compulsory sickness insurance for workmen. In the course of the ensuing years, the vast bulk of the workmen were insured, and consequently most of the ordinary physician's patients came to be insured patients. There were lists of physicians authorized to treat insured patients, and it was a matter of vital moment to every practicing physician to be listed.

To protect their interests with respect to listing, fees and other such problems, the German doctors founded a voluntary association for the defense of their economic interests known as the Hartmann Bund.

Questions of professional ethics, medical malpractice, etc. were handled in Germany in two distinct sets of medical boards or "Courts." An entirely unofficial and voluntary system was established by the German Medical Association. The other, which was endowed with semi-official status, was called the Reich Chamber of Physicians. These chambers were elected by vote of the members and were supported by an assessment.

In addition to these organizations, there existed in Germany purely professional societies of doctors, where papers concerning scientific and practical problems were read and discussed, and which established connections with similar societies abroad.

The German Government agencies which supervised the certification and licensing of physicians as well as their professional activities were the Ministry of Education and the Reich Health Office (Reicbsgesundheitsamt) in the Ministry of the Interior. The latter supervised medical practice and licensing through the channels of the Ministries of the Interior of the various German states, although licensing was a federal function rather than a state function.

Medical education and training was rather standardized but good. The students spent five or six years at one or several of the medical universities, they took a final examination covering their clinical studies and then spent a year at an authorized hospital under supervision. Thereafter the interns were licensed, and permitted to establish a practice. After two more years they became eligible to treat insurance patients, and, after submitting a thesis, could obtain the degree of doctor from a university.

The Immediate Impact of Nazism on German Medicine In the years immediately preceding the Third Reich, physicians' organizations devoted to party politics sprang up.

One of these was the Nationalist Socialist Physicians' Society, founded in 1929, in which Conti played a leading role. There was a rival Association of Social Democratic Physicians and a Socialist Society of Physicians. These societies proposed candidates for election to the Physicians' Chambers, and thus the National Socialist Physicians' Society and the Socialist associations came to compete with each other.

April, 1, 1933, the notorious "boycott day" in Berlin, was a day of disgrace for German medicine. Members of the National Socialist Physicians' Society, who knew the membership lists of the socialist societies and the lists of Jewish physicians, broke into the apartments of their socialist and Jewish colleagues in the early morning hours, pulled them out of their beds, beat them and brought them to the exhibition area near the Berlin Lehrter Station. There, all of them, including men up to 70 years old, were forced to run around the garden, as in a hippodrome, and they were shot at with pistols or beaten with sticks. There they had to stay for several days without sufficient food, and then were handed over to the SA, which carried part of them to the cellars at the Hedemannstrasse jail for further tortures.

Thereafter, the members of the Socialist Society of Physicians were barred from all insurance practice because of "Communist and subversive activities." In the subsequent listings of physicians issued by the insurance companies, the Jewish physicians were included in a separate list headed "Enemies of the State or Jews." Soon, the insurance companies, even private ones, were no longer permitted to pay fees to the Jewish physicians. Immediately thereafter, Jewish physicians were excluded from all professional and scientific societies. At first, those who were war veterans were nominally allowed to carry on their insurance practice, but patients who kept going to them were threatened and exposed to all kinds of unpleasantness on the part of the insurance officials.

After the war began, certification and licensing was withdrawn from all Jewish physicians and they were degraded to the status of lay therapists. These physicians were forced to wear a blue shield with the Star of David and had to add a middle name such as "Sarah" or "Israel." Their prescriptions likewise had to bear the Star of David, which exposed their patients to all kinds of unpleasantness when filling them at pharmacies, most of which had signs in their windows reading "Jews not wanted."

At first, the Aryan physicians were allowed to treat Jewish patients, but finally they were prohibited from doing so. Hospitals refused admission to Jewish patients, apart from a few courageous ones who admitted them in defiance of the law. Jews were admitted to mental institutions in separate wards, but usually were quickly transported elsewhere for extermination.

In the early summer of 1943, Conti instigated and directed a wholesale persecution of doctors who were either foreigners or persons of so-called mixed blood and these related by marriage to Jews. At first, they were removed from their practice and sent off to posts under inferior party doctors. In 1946, Conti went a step further and forbade these physicians to practice. They were drafted, into the Speer organization, in which they were employed solely at manual labor, their living conditions being little better than those of concentration camp inmates.

The Prostitution of German Medicine under National Socialism

The totalitarian structure of the Nazi State demanded fundamental subordination of all principles of medicine to national-socialist population policy and racial concepts.

The most emphatic and repelling expression of those new aims and goals came from the Nazi Director of Public Health in the Ministry of the Interior. Dr. Arthur Guett, who took office in 1933. In a book published in 1935, entitled, "The Structure of Public Health in the Third Reich", Gütt announced that "the ill-conceited 'love of thy neighbor' has to disappear, especially in relation to inferior or a social creatures. It is the supreme duty of a national state to grant life and livelihood only to the healthy and hereditarily sound portion of the people in order to secure the maintenance of a hereditarily sound and racially pure folk for all eternity. The life of an individual has meaning only in the light of that ultimate aim; that as, in the light of his meaning to his family and to his national state."

The entire public health policy of the Third Reich was put in line with this pronouncement of principles. The Minister of the Interior, Frick, reorganized the Health Department in his Ministry in such a way that police, public health, welfare administration and social services were all coordinated in pursuit of these goals. The beginnings of this reorganization started already in the summer of 1933, and were substantially completed by 1936. All these activities were concentrated under Dr. Gütt, who was thus enabled to coordinate the practical application of his policy with his theoretical principles. Even psychiatric social service agencies, which did thorough and well-organized work prior to 1933, were reduced to mere screening stations for hereditary and racial selection.

All government-employed physicians had to take a special new course lasting 18 months and had to be party members. The German Red Cross was likewise drawn into the orbit of the Nazi party and the SS, in view of Dr. Grawitz' appointment as President of the Red Cross. In 1945, after Grawitz' suicide, the defendant Gebhardt succeeded him.

The Third Reich also completely reorganized the professional medical societies. The German Medical Association and the Hartmann Bund were abolished. All German physicians were reorganized through an organization derived from the Reich Physician's Chamber. This National Physicians' Chamber was placed directly under a medical "fuehrer" with the title of Reichsaerztefuehrer.

This position was also hold by Conti. All doctors except those on active military duty were subordinate to him. His regional deputies were selected from the ranks of active national socialists who terrorized the district branch societies. These deputies, who usually strutted about in SA or SS uniforms, were recruited mainly from the early members of the National Socialist Medical Association. It was their job to bring pressure on physicians to join and take part in various party organizations, such as the SA and SS.

A command performance, especially for younger physicians, was attendance at the so-called Fuehrer-School of German Physicians at Altrhose in Mecklenburg, which had been organized by the defendant Blome. There physicians were indoctrinated in the national socialist point of view and way of life. The so-called comradely association and sports activity were merely window dressing for political apying. These courses finally became compulsory and had to be attended for several months annually.

The general respect in which doctors were held sunk in view of the decreasing level of general education and ability of the doctors. This was partly duo to the constant occupation of the physicians' time with party functions, especially the time-consuming party formations and marches which made it impossible for young physicians to develop scientific interests, so that recent graduates increasingly lost understanding and inclination for serious scientific study and long-range research.

Medical School and Medical Training under the Nazis

On paper, medical training under the Nazis differed little from that of the pre-Nazi era.

However, its fundamental spirit was ruinously distorted and medical standards suffered a dismal decline.

Medical students had to be "Aryan", and were required to belong to the National Socialist Students'League. The student's entire course of studies was constantly interrupted by the demands of the various party organizations to which they were forced to belong.

A student whose knowledge of the racial theories and Nurnberg laws was not sufficient would fail his medical examinations.

Chairs in the universities were filled in many cases by Nazi so-called "professors" who might or might not have a scientific background. The true scientific societies under the Nazi Regime became less and less active, and the Nazi professors in the universities devoted more time and interest to their SA or SS organizations than to the teaching of medicine. These Nazi professors would on their brown SA or black SS uniforms on all possible occasions, exchanging them proudly for their academic gowns at all academic celebrations and meetings.

The worst Nazi politicians, like Streicher, were given the free run of university clinics, such as at Erlangen. This submissiveness to lay politicians led to a general decline of respect for German academic medicine not only on the part of their own public and abroad, but even on the part of the very same politicians before whom they kowtowed. This went so far that Streicher, when addressing a full faculty meeting at the University of Erlangen in 1936, called the assembled professors "complete idiots" to their faces. This was by no means an isolated occurrence.

Particularly deplorable was the degradation of psychiatry. Psychiatric university teaching declined to the level of a more rehearing of the Nurnberg and sterilization laws. The modern techniques of psychotherapy had been abandoned, and treatment deteriorated to pep talks full of Nazi indoctrination admonitions and threats.

No wonder that these methods backfired against the best interest of the German war effort which they were foolishly intended to serve. The lack of proper understanding and treatment of German soldiers who developed combat fatigue or neurosis, on the part of their own medical personnel, drove many of them to surrender to the enemy; efforts to rehabilitate then and restore them to duty were frustrated by the ruin us infusion of Nazi doctrine.

Summary

The general decline of German medical conduct and the poisoning of German medical ethics which the Nazis brought about, laid the basis for the atrocious experiments of which the defendants are accused.

THE PRESIDENT: Will you kindly slow down you reading?

GENERAL TAYLOR: Many of these were experiments in name only; we will show them to have been senseless and clumsy and of no real value to medicine as a healing art. The Nazi medical worlds was flooded with preposterous and wicked notions about superior and inferior races and developed a perveryed moral outlook in which cruelty to subjugated races and peoples was praiseworthy. Training in SA and SS formation was hardly calculated to develop physicians who could comprehend even the bare elements of the doctor-patient relationship. In this noxious garden of lies, the seeds of the experiments were planted. In the climate of Nazi Germany, they grow with horrible rapidity.

CRIMES OF MASS EXTERMINATION: "EUTHANASIA" AND THE MURDER OF FOLISH NATIONALS

From the preaching of Gutt and others sprang the nations which underly the crimes to which we will now turn.

Here we leave behind all semblance, however, fictitious, of science and research.

Under these teachings, life and livelihood became the birthright of no one. The weak and the physically handicapped are in the way and must be pushed aside. Inferior peoples are born to be exterminated by the Herrenvolk.

The charges in paragraphs 8 and 13 of the Indictment concern the defendants Blome and Rudolf Brandt. The original impetus for this terrible mass murder came from a fiend named Greiser, who was the German Governor of the northwest portions of Poland, which had been absorbed into the Reich under the name "Wartheland." Early in 1942, Greiser was in the process of exterminating thousands of Jews in his territory, and he decided to turn his attention next to Poles infected with tuberculosis. I call the Tribunal's special attention to the German word "Sonderbehandlun". In the next Document, as will be shown, it occurs frequently in Nazi correspondence and was used by them to mean extermination. In May 1944, Greiser wrote to Himmler as follows:

I quote from the letter of Defendant Blome:

It was calculated that in 1939 there were among the Poles about 35,000 persons suffering from open tuberculosis and, besides this number, about 120,000 other consumptives in need of treatment.

*** Wit the settlement of Germans in all parts of the Gau an enormous danger has arisen for them.

A number of cases of infection of settled children and adults occurs daily.

Therefore, something basic must be done soon. One must decide the most efficient way in which this can be done. There are three ways to be taken into consideration:

1. Special treatment ( Sonderbehandlung ) of the seriously ill persons, 2. Most rigorous isolation of the seriously ill persons, 3. Creation of a reservation for all TB-patients.

For the planning, attention must be paid to different points of view of a practical, political and psychological nature. Considering it most soberly, the simplest way would be the following: Aided by the X-ray battalion ( Roentgen Sturmbann ) we could reach the entire population, German and Polish, of the Gau during the first half of 1943. As to the Germans, the treatment and isolation is to be prepared and carried, out according to the regulations for Tuberculosis Relief ( Tuberkulosehilfe ).

The approximately 35,000 Poles who are incurable and infectious will be 'specially teated' (sonderbehandelt). All other Polish consumptives will be subjected to an appropriate cure in order to save them for work and to avoid their causing contagion.

According to your request I made arrangements with the offices in question, in order to start and carry out this radical procedure within half a year. You told me, that the competent office agreed with you as to this special treatment and promised support. Before we definitely start the program, I think it would be correct if you would make sure once more that the Fuehrer will really agree to such a solution.

**** There can be no doubt of the intended program's being the most simple and most radical solution.

If absolute secrecy could be guaranteed all scruples - regardless of what nature -- could be overcome. But I consider simply maintaining secrey impossible. Experience has taught us that this assumption is true. Should those sick persons, having been brought, as planned, to the old Reich supposedly to be treated or healed, and they actually never return, the relatives of those sick persons in spite of the greates secrecy would some day notice 'that somethin was not quite right'.

Therefore, I think it necessary to explain all those points of view to the Fuehrer before undertaking the program, as, in my opinion he is the only one able to view the entire complex and to come to a decision.

The Prosecution will introduce evidence to show that the program was in fact carried out at the end of 1942 and the beginning of 1943, and that as a result of the suggestions made by Blome and Greiser, many Poles were ruthlessly exterminated and that others were taken to isolated camps, utterly lacking in medical facilities, where thousands of them died.

The special treatment [and the German word is Sonderbehandlung] of about 100,000 Jews in the territory of my district approved by you in Agreement with the Chief of the Reich-Main-Security-Office, SS-Obergruppenfuehrer HEYDRICH, can be completed within the next two to three months. I ask you for permission to rescue the district immediately after the measures are taken against tho Jews, from a menace, which is increasing week by week? and to use the exiting and efficient special commandos for that purpose.

There are about 230,000 people of Polish nationality in my district, who were diagnosed to suffer from tuberculosis. The number of persons infected with open Tuberculosis is estimated at about 35,000. This fact has led in an increasing frightening measure to the infection of Germans, who came to the Warthegau perfectly healthy. In particular; reports are received with ever increasing effect of German children in danger of infection. A considerable number of well known leading men, especially of the police, have been infected lately and are not available for the war effort because of the necessary medical treatment. The ever increasing risks were also recognized and appreciated by the deputy of the Reich Leader for Public Health (Reichsgesundheitsfuehrer) Comrade Professor Dr. BLOME as well as by the Leader of your X-ray battalion SS Standartenfuehrer Professor Dr. HOHLFELDER.

Though in Germany proper it is not possible to take appropriate draconic steps against this public plague, I think I could take responsibility for my suggestion to have cases of open TB exterminated among the Polish race here in the Warthegau. Of course only a Pole should be handed over to such an action, who is not only suffering from open tuberculosis, but whose incurability is proved and certified by a public health officer.

Considering the urgency of this project I ask for your approval in priciple as soon as possible. This would enable us to make the preparations with all necessary precautions now to get the action against the Poles suffering from open tuberculosis under way, while the action against the Jews is in its closing stages.

Greiser's Proposal was supported in a letter from one, Koppe, the SS and police leader in that region, to the defendant Rudolf Brandt, to which Brandt replied stating that the matter was under consideration and that the final decision would rest with Hitler. Late in June, Himmler sent a "favorable reply to Greiser cautioning him, however, that the exterminations should be carried out inconspicuously. Thereafter, consultations as to how to carry out the measure occurred between Greiser, Dr. Hohlfelder, and the defendant Blome. The views of Blome are obodied in a letter from him to Greiser written in November 1942. This letter contains an indescribably brutal analysis of the situation, in which Blome expresses agreement with the view that extermination of the tubercular Poles is the simplest and most logical solution, and expresses doubt as to its desirability only in that it would be difficult to keep such widespread slaughter secret, and that Hitler might think the program politically inexpedient if the facts should ever come out.

Euthanasia (Indictment, paragraphs 9 and 14) On September 1, 1939, the very day of the German attack on Poland, and after a great deal of discussion between Dr. Karl Brandt, Dr. Leonardo Conti, Phillip Bouhler, the Chief of the private Chancery of the Fuehrer, and others, Hitler issued the following authority to the defendant Karl Brandt:

Reichsleiter BOUHLER and Dr. BRANDT, M.D. are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such a manner that persons, who, according to human judgment, are incurable, can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death.

/s/ ADOLF HITLER

After the receipt of this order, an organization was set up to execute this program.

Karl Brandt headed the medical section and Phillip Bouhler the administrative section. The defendant Hoven, as Chief Surgeon of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, took part in the program and personally ordered the transfer of at least 300 to 400 Jewish inmates of different nationalities, mostly non-German, to their death in the euthanasia station at Bernberg. The defendants Brack and Blome participated in their capacities as assistants to Bouhler and Conti.

Questionnaires were forwarded to the Ministry of the Interior from the various institutes and were then submitted to Karl Brandt and his staff for an expert opinion in order to determine the status of each patient. Then each of those experts indicated his opinion as to the eventual disposition of the patient; that is, whether or not the patient should be transferred to a killing station. The questionnaires were supposedly returned to the Ministry of the Interior, which, in turn, sent lists of the doomed patients to the different insane asylums, ordering the directors of the asylums to hand over the patients to a thing called the General Patient Transport Corporation for transfer to the particular stations where the killings took place. This Transport Corporation was not a real organization, but one of the come names used to disguise the true nature of the activities. The patients were then transferred to the station where they were immediately killed. This entire procedure took place without the consent of the relatives, but the relatives did receive a death certificate on which the cause of death was falsified.

The euthanasia program was an open secret in top Nazi circles. However, every possible effort had been made to keep it from the public in order to avoid intervention by the churches. In spite of all these precautions, it became commonly known in Germany as early as the summer of 1940 that these killings were going on and church authorities, as well as various legal officials, tried in vain to stop the killings.

Typical of the letters reaching the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Interior is the following:

Addressed to The Reich Minister of Justice:

I have a schizophrenic son in a Wurttembergian mental institution. I am shocked about the following absolutely reliable information.

Since some weeks insane persons are being taken from the institutions allegedly on the grounds of military evacuation. The directors of the institutions are enjoined to absolute secrecy. Shortly afterwards the relatives are informed that the sick person has died of encephalitis. The ashes are available if so desired. This is plain murder just as in the concentration camps. This measure uniformly emanates from the SS in Berlin. The institutions dare not inform the authorities. Inquire at once at Rottenmuenster, Schassenried, Winzertal, all in Wurttemberg. Have the lists of two months ago examined and submitted to you, check upon the inmates who are there now and ask where the missing persons went to. For seven years now this gang of murderers defiled the German name. If my son is murdered, woe! I shall take care that these crimes will be published in all foreign newspapers. The SS may deny it as they always do. I shall demand prosecution by the public prosecutor.

I cannot give my name nor the institution where my son is, otherwise I, too, won't live much longer.

Heil Hitler Oberregierungsrat N.

If this program had stayed within the bounds set forth in Hitler's letter to Karl Brandt, it would have been bad enough.

We may pass over as quite irrelevant any such question as whether mercy killing may not in some circumstances be desirable, and whether a statute authorizing mercy killings under proper safeguards would be valid.

Such questions may be debatable, but they do not confront us here. No German law authorizing mercy killings was ever adopted. Hitler's memorandum to Brandt and Bouhler was not a law, not even a Nazi law. It was not intended to be a law or regarded as such even by the top Nazi officials. That is why the program was carried out with the utmost secrecy. The program was known to be utterly illegal by those who were in charge of it; they know it was nothing but murder.

This is brought out very clearly in a Getter from Himmler to the defendant Brack in December 1940:

Dear Brack:

I hear there is great excitement on the Alb because of the institution Grafeneck.

The population recognizes the gray automobile of the SS and think they know what is going on at the constantly smoking crematory. What happens there is a secret and yet is no longer one. Thus the worst feeling has arisen there all in my opinion there remains only one thing, to discontinue the use of the institution in this place and in any event disseminate information in a clever and sensible manner by showing motion pictures on the subject of inherited and mental diseases in just that locality.

May I ask for a report as to how the difficult problem was solved.

But there are more fundamental matters here. The program did not stay even within the bounds of the secret Hitler authority.

Euthanasia became merely a polite word for the systematic slaughter of Jews and many other categories of persons useless or unfriendly to the Nazi regime. The evidence before the International Military Tribunal proved this clearly, and the judgment states and I quote from the transcript, pp. 16916-17, 17007:

Reference should also be made to the policy which as in existence in Germany by the summer of 1940, under which all aged, insane and incurable people, 'useless eater', were transferred to special institutions where they were killed, and their relatives informed that they had died from natural causes. The victims were not confined to German citizens, but included foreign laborers, who were no longer able to work, and were therefore useless to the German war machine. It has been estimated that at least some 275,000 people were killed in this manner in nursing homes, hospitals and asylums, which were under the jurisdiction of the defendant Frick, in his capacity as Minister of the Interior. How many foreign workers were included in this total it has been quite impossible to determine.

I quote no more paragraph from the decision, pp. 17007:

During the war nursing homes, hospitals, and asylums in which euthanasia was practiced as described elsewhere in this Judgment, came under Frick's jurisdiction. He had knowledge that insane, sick and aged people, 'useless eaters' were being systematically put to death. Complaints of these murders reached him, but he did nothing to stop them. A report of the Czech slovak War Crimes Commission estimated that 275,00 mentally deficient and aged people, for whose welfare he was responsible, fell victim to it.

As stated in the Indictment, the defendants involved in the euthanasia program sent their subordinate to the eastern occupied territories to assist in the mass extermination of Jews. This will be shown by abandon evidence, including the following excerpt from a letter from the defendant Brack to Himmler in 1942 from which I quote a paragraph:

On the instructions of Rech-Leader BOHHLER I placed some of my men at the disposal of Brigadefuehrer GLOBOCNIK to execute his special mission. On is renewed request I have now transferred additional personnel. On this occasion Brigadefuehrer GLOBOCNIK ....../.... stated his opinion that the whole Jew-Action should be completed as quickly as possible so that one would not get caught in the middle of it one day if some difficulties should make a stoppage of the action necessary.

You yourself, Reichsfuehrer, have already expressed your view, that work should progress quickly for reasons of camouflage alone.

Protesting the lawless slaughter which even Himmler sought to "camouflage", the Bishop of Limburg in 1941 foresaw that such insane carnage spelled the downfall of the Third Reich. He wrote:

And if anybody says that Germany cannot win the war, if there is yet a just God, these expressions are not the result of lack of love for the Fatherland but of a deep concern for our people. High authority as a moral concept has suffered a severe shock as a result of these happenings.

I have outlined the particular charges against the defendants under Counts Two, Three, and Four of the Indictment, and I have sketched the general nature of the evidence which we will present. But we must not overlook that the medical experiments were not an assortment of unrelated crimes. On the contrary, they constituted a well-integrated criminal program in which the defendants planned and collaborated among themselves and with others.

We have here, in other words, a conspiracy and a common design, as is charged in Count One of the Indictment, to commit the criminal experiments set forth in paragraphs 6 and 11 thereof. There was a common design to discover, or improve, various medical techniques. There was a common design to utilize for this purpose the unusual resources which the defendants had at their disposal, consisting of numberless unfortunate victims of Nazi conquest and Nazi ideology. The defendants conspired and agreed together to utilize these human resources for nefarious and murderous purposes, and proceeded to put their criminal design into execution. Numbered among the countless victims of the conspiracy and the crimes are Germans, and nationals of countries overrun by Germany, and Gypsies, and prisoners-of-war and Jews of many nationalities. All the elements of a conspiracy to commit the crimes charged in paragraphs 6 and 11 are present and all will be clearly established by the proof.

There were many co-conspirators who are not in the dock. Among the planners and leaders of this plot were Conti and Grawitz, and Hippke whose whereabouts is unknown. Among the actual executioners, Dr. Ding is dead and Rascher is thought to be dead. There were many others.

Final judgment as to the relative degrees of guilt among those in the dock must await the presentation of the proof in detail. Nevertheless, before the introduction of evidence, it will be helpful to look again at the defendants and their **art in the conspiracy. What manner of men are they, and what was their major role?

The twenty physicians in the dock range from leaders of German scientific Medicine, with excellent international reputations, down to the dregs of the German medical profession. All of them have in common a callous lack of consideration and human regard for, and an unprincipled willingness to abuse their power over, the poor, unfortunate, defenseless creatures who had been deprived of their rights by a ruthless and criminal government. All of them violated the Hippocratic commandments which they had solemnly sworn to uphold and abide by, including the fundamental principle **************************************** Outstanding men of science, distinguished for their scientific ability in Germany and abroad, are the defendants Rostock and Rose.

Both exemplify, in their training and practice alike, the highest traditions of German medicine. Rostock headed the Department of Surgery at the University of Berlin and served as dean of its medical school.

Rose studied under the famous surgeon, Enderlen, at Heidelberg and then became a distinguished specialist in the fields of public health and tropical diseases.

Hanloser and Schroeder are outstanding medical administrators. Both of them made their careers in military medicine and reached the peak of their profession. Five more defendants are much younger men who are nevertheless already known as the possessors of considerable scientific ability, or capacity in medical administration. These include the defendants Karl Brandt, Ruff, Beiglbock, Schaefer and Becker-Freyseng.

A number of the others such as Romberg and Fischer, are well-trained, and several of them attained high, professional position. But among the remainder few were known as outstanding scientific men. Among them at the fact of the list is Blome who has published his autobiography entitled "Embattled Doctor" in which he sets forth that he eventually decided to become a doctor because a medical career would enable him to became "master over life and death."

The part that each of these twenty physicians and their three lay accomplices played in the conspiracy and its execution corresponds closely to his professional interest and his place in the hierarchy of the Third Reich as shown in the chart. The motivating source for this conspiracy came from two principal sources. Himmler, as head of the SS, a most terrible engine of oppression with vast resources, could provide numberless victims for the experiments. By doing so, he enhanced the prestige of his organization and was able to give free rein to the Nazi racial theories of which he was a leading protagonist and to develop new techniques for the mass exterminations which were dear to his heart. The German military leaders, as the other main driving force, caught up the opportunity which Himmler presented them with and ruthlessly capitalized on Himmler's hideous overtures in an endeavor to strengthen their military machine.

And so the infernal drama was played just as it had been conceived in the minds of the authors. Special problems which confronted the German military or civilian authorities, were, on the orders of the medical leaders, submitted for solution in the concentration camps.

Thus we find Karl Brandt stimulating to epidemic jaundice experiments, Schroeder demanding "40 healthy test subjects for the seawater experiments, Handloser providing the impetus for Ding's fearful typhus researches, and Milch and Hippke at the root of the freezing tests. Under Himmler's authority, the medical leaders of the SS-Grawitz, Genzken, Gebhardt and others -- set the wheels in motion. They arranged for the procurement of victims through other branches of the SS, and gave directions to their underlings in the SS medical service such as Hoven and Fischer. Himmler's administrative assistants, Sievers and Rudolf Brandt, passed on the Himmler orders, gave a push here and a shove there, and kept the machinery oiled. Blome and Brack assisted from the side of the civilian and party authorities.

The Wehrmacht provided supervision and technical assistance for those experiments in which it was most interested. A low pressure chamber was furnished for the high altitude tests, the services of Weltz, Ruff, Romberg and Rascher for the high altitude and freezing experiments and those of Becker-Freyseng, Schaefer, and Beiglbock for seawater. In the important but sinister typhus researches, the eminent Dr. Rose appeared for the Luftwaffe to give expert guidance to Ding.

The proper stops were taken to insure that the results were made available to those who needed to know. Annual meetings of the consulting physician of the Wehrmacht held under Handloser's direction were favored with lectures on some of the experiments. The report on the high altitude test was sent to Field Marshal Milch, and a moving picture about them was shown at the air Ministry in Berlin. Weltz spoke on the effects of freezing at a medical conference in Nurnberg, the same symposium at which Rascher and others passed on their devilish knowledge.

There could, we submit, be no clearer proof of conspiracy. This was the medical service of the Third Reich at work. Among the defendants in the box sit the surviving leaders of that service. We will ask the Tribunal to determine that neither scientific eminence nor superficial respectability shall shield them against the fearful consequences of the orders they gave.

I intend to pass very briefly over matters of medical ethics, such as the conditions under which a physician may lawfully perform a medical experiment upon a person who has voluntarily subjected himself to it, or whether experiments may lawfully be performed upon criminals who have been condemned to death. This case does not present such problems. We refined questions confront us here.

None of the victims of the atrocities perpetrated by these defendants were volunteers, and this is true regardless of what these unfortunate people nay have said or signed before their tortures began. Most of the victims had not been condemned to death, and those who had been were not criminals, unless it be a crime to be a Jew, or a pole, or a Gypsy, or a Russian prisoner of-war.

Whatever book or treatise on medical ethics we may examine, and whatever expert on forensic medicine we may question, will say that it is a fundamental and inescapable obligation of every physician under any known system of law not to perform a dangerous experiment without the subject's consent. In the tyranny that was Nazi Germany, no one could give such a consent to the medical agents of the Stake; everyone lived in fear and acted under dur** I fervently hope that none of us here in the court room will have to suffer in silence while it is said on the part of these defendants that the wretched and helpless people whom they froze and drowned and burned and poisoned were volunteers. If such a shame less lie is spoken here, we need only remember the four girls who were taken from the Revensbruck concentration camp and made to li** naked with the frozen and all but dead Jews who survived Dr. Rascher's tank of ice water. One of these women, whose hair and eyes and figure were pleasing to Dr. Rascher, when asked by him why she had volunteered for such a task, replied:"rather half a year in a brothel than half a year in a concentration camp."

Were it necessary, one could make a long list of the respects in which the experiments which those defendants performed depart from every known standard of medical ethics. But the gulf between these atrocities and serious research in the healing art is so patent that such a tabulation would be cynical.

We need look no further than the law which the Nazis themselves passed on the 24th of November 1933 for the protection of animals. This law states explicitly that it is designed to proven cruelty and indifference of man towards animals and to awaken and develop sympathy and understanding for animals as one of the highest moral values of a people.

The soul of the German people should abhor the principle of more utility without consideration of the moral aspects. The law states further that all operations or treatments which are associated with pain or injury, especially experiments involving the use of cold, heat, or infection, are prohibited, and can be permitted only under special exceptional circumstances. Special written authorization by the head of the department is necessary in every case, and experimenters are prohibited from performing experiments according to their own free judgment. Experiments for the purpose of teaching must be reduced to a minimum. Medico-legal tests, vaccinations, withdrawal of blood for diagnostic purposes and trial of vaccines prepared according to well-established scientific principles are permitted but the animals have to be killed immediately and painlessly after such experiments. Individual physicians are not permitted to use dogs to increase their surgical skill by such practices. National Socialism regards it as a sacred duty of German science to keep down the number of painful animal experiments to a minimum.

If the principles announced in this law had been followed for human beings as well, this indictment would never have been filed. It is perhaps the deepest shame of the defendants that it probably never even occurred to them that human beings should be treated with at least equal humanity.

This case is one of the simplest and clearest of those that will be tried in this building. It is also one of the most important. It is true that the defendants in the box were not among the highest leaders of the Third Reich. They are not tho war lords who assembled and drove the German military machine, nor the industrial barons who made tho parts, nor tho Nazi politicians who debased and brutalized the mines of the German people. But this case, perhaps more than any other we will try, epitomizes Nazi thought and the Nazi way of life, because those defendants pursued the savage premises of Nazi thought so far.

The things that these defendants did, like so many other things that happened under the Third Reich, were the result of the noxious merger of German militarism and Nazi racial objectives. No will see the results of this merger in many other fields of German life; we see it here in the field of medicine.

Germany surrendered herself to this foul conjunction of evil forces. The nation fell victim to the Nazi scourge because its leaders lacked the wisdom to foresee the consequences and the courage to stand firm in the face of throats. Their failure was the inevitable outcome of that sinister undercurrent of German philosophy which preaches the supreme importance of the state and the complete subordination of the individual, A nation in which the individual means nothing will find few leaders courageous and able enough to serve its best interests.

Individual Germans did indeed give warning of what was in store, and German doctors and scientists were numbered among the courageous few. At a meeting of Bavarian psychiatrists hold in Munich in 1931, when the poisonous doctrines of the Nazis were already sweeping Germany, there was a discussion of mercy killings and sterilization, and the Nazi views on these matters, with which we are now familiar, were advanced. A German professor named Oswald Bunke rose and made a reply more eloquent and prophetic than anyone could have possibly realized at the time. He said:

I should like to make two additional remarks. One of them is, please for God's sake leave our present financial needs out of all these considerations. This is a problem which concerns the entire future of our people, indeed, one may say without being over-emotional about it, the entire future of humanity. One should approach this problem neither from the point of view of our present scientific opinion nor from the point of view of the still more ephemeral economic crisis. If by sterilization we can prevent the occurrence of mental disease then we should certainly do it, not in order to save money for the government but because every case of mental disease means infinite suffering to the patient and to his relatives. But to introduce economic points of view is not only inappropriate but outright dangerous because the logical consequences of the thought that for financial reasons all these human being who could be dispensed with for the moment should be exterminated, is a quite monstrous logical conclusion: we would then have to put to death not only the mentally sick and the psychopathic personalities but all the crippled including the disabled veterans, all old maids who do not work, all widows whose children have completed their education, and all those who live on their income or draw pensions.

That would certainly save a lot of money but the probability is that we will not do it.

The second point of advice is to use utmost restraint, at least until the political atmosphere here in this country shall have improved, and scientific theories concerning heredity and race can no longer be abused for political purposes. Because, if the discussion about sterilization today is carried into the arena of political contest, then pretty soon we will no longer hear about the mentally sick but, instead, about Aryans and nonAryans, about the blonde Germanic race and about inferior people with round skulls. That anything useful could come from that is certainly improbable; but science in general and genealogy and eugenics in particular would suffer an injury which could not easily be repaired again.

I said at the outset of this statement that the Third Reich died of its own poison. This case is a striking demonstration not ???? of the tremendous degradation of German medical ethics which Nazi doctrine brought about, but of the undermining of the medical art and thwarting of the techniques which the defendants sought to employ. The Nazis have, to a certain extent, succeeded in convincing the peoples of the world that the Nazi system, although ruthless, was absolutely efficient; that although savage, it was completely scientific; that although entirely devoid of humanity, it was highly systematic -- that "it got things done." The evidence which this Tribunal will hear will explode this myth. The Nazi methods of investigation were inefficient and unscientific, and their techniques of research were unsystematic.

These experiments revealed nothing which civilized medicine can use. It was, indeed, ascertained that phenol or gasoline injected intravenously will kill a man inexpensively and within sixty seconds. This and a few other "advances" are all in the field of "thanatology." There is no doubt that a number of these new methods may be useful to criminals everywhere and there is no doubt that they may be useful to a criminal state. Certain advances in destructive methodology we cannot deny, and indeed from Himmler's standpoint this may well have been the principal objective.

Apart from these deadly fruits, the experiments were not only criminal but a scientific failure. It is indeed as if a just deity had shrouded the solutions which they attempted to reach with murderous means. The moral shortcomings of the defendants and the precipitous ease with which they decided to commit murder in quest of "scientific results", dulled also that scientific hesitancy, that thorough thinking-through, that responsible weighing of every single stop which alone can insure scientifically valid results.

Even if they had merely been forced to pay as little as two dollars for human experimental subjects, such as American investigators nay have to pay for a cat, they night have thought twice before wasting unnecessary numbers, and thought of simpler and better ways to solve their problems. The fact that these investigators had free and unrestricted access to human beings to be experimented upon misled then to the dangerous and fallacious conclusion that the results would thus be better and more quickly obtainable than if they had gone through the labor of preparation, thinking, and meticulous pre-investigation.

A particularly striking example is the seawater experiment. I believe that three of the accused -- Schaefer, Becker-Freyseng, and Beiglbueck -- will today admit that this problem could have been solved simply and definitively within the space of one afternoon. On May 20, 1944 when these accused convened to discuss the problem, a thinking chemist could have solved it right in the presence of the assembly within the space of a few hours by the use of nothing more gruesome than a piece of jolly, a semipermeable membrane and a salt solution, and the German Armed Forces would have had the answer on May 21, 1944. But what happened instead? The vast armies of the disenfranchised slaves were at the beck and call of this sinister assembly; and instead of thinking, they simply relied on their power over human beings rendered right-less by a criminal statement. What time, effort, and staff did it take to get that machinery in motion! Letters had to be written, physicians, of whom dire shortage existed in the German Armed Forces whose soldiers went poorly attended, had to be taken out of hospital positions and dispatched hundreds of miles away to obtain the answer which should have been known in a few hours, but which thus did not become available to the German Armed Forces until after the completion of the gruesome show, and until 42 people had been subjected to the tortures of the damned, the very tortures which Greek mythology had reserved for Tantalus.

In short, this conspiracy was a ghastly failure as well as a hideous crime. The creeping paralysis of Nazi superstition spread through the German medical profession and, just as it destroyed character and morals, it dulled the mind.

Guilt for the oppressions and crimes of the Third Reich is widespread, but it is the guilt of the leaders that is deepest and most culpable. Who could German medicine look to to keep the profession true to its traditions and protect it from the ravaging inroads of Nazi pseudo-science? This was the supreme responsibility of the leaders of German medicine -- men like Rostock and Rose and Schroeder and Handloser.

That is why their guilt is greater than that of any of the other defendants in the dock. They are the men who utterly failed their country and their profession, who showed neither courage nor wisdom nor the vestiges of moral character. It is their failure, together with the failure of the leaders of Germany in other walks of life, that debauched Germany and led to her defeat. It is because of them and other like them that we all live in a stricken world.

JUDGE BEALS: The prosecution has now consumed all of the time allocated it for its opening statement. Is the Prosecution prepared to proceed with the introduction of any evidence this afternoon?

GENERAL TAYLOR: Your Honor, the document book for Mr. McHaney's first part of the evidence was not ready until yesterday, which was a Sunday, and if agreeable to the Tribunal, it would be more convenient for us, and I think for the defendants, to resume tomorrow morning when we have had more time to look at it.

JUDGE BEALS: The Tribunal will recess until 9:30 o'clock tomorrow morning.

(The Tribunal adjourned until 10 December 1946, at 9:30 hours.)