1947-03-10, #2: Doctors' Trial (late afternoon)
THE MARSHALL: The Tribunal is again in session.
FRITZ FISCHER - DIRECT EXAMINATION (Resumed)
BY DR. SEIDL:
Q: Witness, the war against Soviet Russia you took part in as a Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler; please tell us of your experience during this service in respect to the evidonce being presented in this proceedings?
A: I took part in the war against Soviet Russia first as a physician for the First Battalion and second as second surgeon, [illegible] — Platz is the medical unit in which the surgical treatment takes place at the closest distance from the front.
At that time I experienced the war for the first time really and there I saw things that you cannot find in books. It was a very difficult time because it placed the individual under an entirely different law from the law under which he was placed during peace and because not everyone has had this experience personally and many of these who did experience it did not survive it, so that those who had experience in this respect are individuals among a great number and are likely not to be understood. I should have been happy if my generation had been spared this experience, but that was our task and this is the tragedy of the situation that my generation did participate in this and it would not be right for me to complain about this of course I would have to complain to a German.
This division was a German elite division. From the very first day of the Russian campaign until the day when I had to leave it because of a slight wound and a serious illness on the front lines in actual combat.
At that time the German divisions were still advancing to the east and the attacks were carried out with no regard for our own losses. The division was 12,000 men strong at the beginning, 12,000 young men no older than twenty four. As troop physician I came to know these men to a large extent so that the difficult thing for me subsequently was that the number of wounded were not impersonal cases of wounded persons, rather they came to me as wounded friends as wounded human beings, whom I knew very well and the sort of persons they were.
I said that the division started with 12,000 men and when I left and I remember the statement, its strength at the end was in toto about 3,000 when I left a large number of these 9,000 fatalities and casualties went through my hands. They dropped out because of death in the field through wounds, through sickness and during winter because of the terrible cold.
My experience as a troop physician basically and in many respects differs from a front line combat officer. The combat officer, of course, also experiences war in all its hardships, but experiences it actively and when his men fall beside him, he tells himself that that simply is the fate of war, when they are wounded he tells himself the same and his position prevents him from inquiring into the individual fate of these individuals. But, these wounded persons who would come to us troop physicians are the same people with whom perhaps on the day before we had spoken and had made a particular impression on us. Those people expressing the same hopes for life and wishes as one had within peace in mind in one's own heart.
In all these occurrences which did not happen sporadically as in the case of the combat officer, but happened continuously to us, these events lasted throughout months and months, and this is the way I answered the question at the end of the war. I believed that this war had been so dreadful that it could only be concluded after the last man had fallen. That was the impression that we had at that time because one asked oneself again and again: where do these young healthy people come from? At that time the man who was not completely inarticulate about things or hardened to them and who did not simply have the wish to regard himself as an individual and to save himself, such a person found himself in a critical spiritual condition because everything that happened and was experienced took place according to laws which one did not know of from peacetime.
We had been raised in the belief in order, order in which man occupied the central point, and we saw man as a creature who stood in a personal and direct relationship with God. Now we experience day after day that human beings whom one knew and of which one knew that they did not hate the enemy, that those non obeyed orders and in obeying these orders committed deeds or were wounded or died although we knew that they had not been particularly obliged to do this rather than someone else, but that they did this only because they did not disobey the laws of the State. Thus, the person who analyzed these conditions from a spiritual point of view went through a very essential change if he saw that there was such a thing as a law of war, a moral-ethical law of war, and that this law of war was not only different from the law of peace but that it was actually the diametric opposite of the law of peace.
In peacetime the individual stood in the center and the State was simply the organization for the individual security, and unless one wanted to be an anarchist, one could allow in warfare only that law which put the State in the center and adopted a supra-individual attitude, however, without being able to avoid the conclusion that the individual occupied a secondary position.
There were also philosophic bases for this point of view.
One referred to Hegel who saw history as the manifestation of Divine Will and the State on the one hand as the highest ethical norm, and on the other hand saw in the State the instrument for the execution of this historical process. Thus, two laws confronted one another which really had no contact with each other but stood in a contradiction to one another. Both were based on ethical principles. The justification of each of them could not be denied. They were based both on concern for the suffering cares and deaths of the soldiers in relation to reality. At that time I felt the wish in myself to defend myself against these terrible occurrences, but I could not have granted myself the right of accepting any fate but that which the others next to me were to experience, but after the war I wanted to appear before the youth of our country and speak against war as an institution because I believed that it was the root of all evil, and I thought that this would be more convincing if I did not do it from a comfortable armchair but did it after I myself had experienced the hardships of war as a brave soldier.
At that time it was clear to me that it was a particularly tragic situation that would result if a man had to act in a moment in which the laws of war and those of peace were working in him simultaneously and if he experienced within himself the difference and the contradiction between these two laws, both of which were based on ethical bases and demands.
Q: How did the leadership of the SS Division differ from that of others?
A: Counsel can certainly advise me on this since I was only under the Waffen SS. I only saw the other divisions next to me but was not actually in them. One thing I do know that they were essentially characterized by the personalities of their commanders. These commanders were men and personalities who, as history will report, were determined and courageous and they gave an example of such qualities to their soldiers. I had experiences with two divisional commanders. They both wore the decoration for close fighting, from which it could be seen that they had not directed tank attacks from their headquarters, but they were actually on hand in the first tanks themselves, and actively participated in the fighting. This resulted in a very particular command relationship within the division, because a man who acted in this way and of whom it was known he was a courageous man and had experienced everything the common soldier had experienced. It was impossible to refuse to obey such a man and it was impossible not to give such a commander implicit obedience. These personalities and personal courage of these men was really the essential characteristic of these men, although they may have been in tactical respects very skillful.
Q: What were your impressions at that time on the Eastern front regarding the medical and the medical military problems?
A: The first thing that I experienced was that the situation here was quite different from that in peace. For example in 1941 and 1942 there was mention of a winter catastrophe on the Russian front and I heard at that time with interest that this catastrophe was traced back to some extent to difficulties in organization. We troop physicians saw a different picture of this and we thought the main reason for this was a different one. The situation was characterized by the fact that the medical power, even that in the ambulances was not sufficient to fill the duties that were placed on us, particularly when a main dressing station had four doctors and cannot under any circumstances take care of more than twenty or twenty-five seriously wounded persons, and perhaps as many as fifty slightly wounded persons in one day. The problem of which I spoke came up when not sixty wounded persons turned up, but 150 and 200 and I have experienced 400 wounded persons which had to be taken care of at the dressing station. Secondly, the situation was characterized by the fact that the war was a war of movement, which made the connections between the various units much more difficult, where as the main emphasis in the medical care with the individual unit in the case of wounds from high velocity weapons, the troop physician was not to take care of the wounded.
This could not have been forseen, and later that a symptom arose which was known as the their stage of molecular disturbance. The first care for these wounded persons was insufficient and the troop physicians could only sterilize the wounds. Their main task and their main concern was to transport the wounded from the from lines to the rear area, the main dressing stations in the rear area, so that the real surgical treatment took place only at the main dressing stations in the rear area and they were successful. From this it can be seen that unfortunate conditions arose which it was impossible to solve because of one division which consisted of 15,000 men there were two main dressing stations and one front line dressing station. In those two main dressing stations there were four surgeons and they were the ones who had to do the main surgical treatment. I think that even this is problematic, and that if one is clear regarding the fact that in this war a misproportion existed between the destructive power on the one hand and the static potentialities of the physician, then the answer is given to the question which has frequently been asked here and which people tried to solve along organizational lines. When our division stood over against a Russian division and there was a Stalin-Orgel (organ) in this Russian division with rocket guns, and one of those Stalin organs, these rocket shooters, had a direct hit in a group of soldiers, thirty or forty soldiers fell, and that corresponded to the number which it would take a physician in the main dressing station a whole day to attend to. Unfortunately they did not shoot just one Stalin organ but hundreds at a time, of which not all hit home, but even if ten hit then the number of wounded reached as high as four or five hundred. This was a number of casualties against which the physician working with his hands could do simply nothing. At that time because of this attitude and because of the necessity and of this problem the report regarding the effectiveness of sulfanilamide was particularly striking, and made a great impression, because if I simply wanted to relax into desperation and watch how our soldiers and the enemy's soldiers simply fell to their fate without any help and saw the technical development of the destructive weapons, then, of course, I wanted to do something.
Psychologically, it was very difficult for a surgeon at a main dressing station to stay there without feeling that the task which he was presented with was simply beyond his powers no matter what he might do. He who was not ready to resign himself to the current situation that this also was peace work over against the growth of these modern weapons. Then the hope and possibility arose that many embraced in deceiving themselves and in being very critical, namely, the hope that with therapeutic methods it would be possible to equal the technical growth of destructive weapons equivalent to the growth in methods of therapy. These speculations were not without their consequences because if in this way a large number of wounded persons could be cared for they were cared for and no one concerned himself subsequently with these treated persons because there were still enough who were in need of acute surgical care. These persons who had been treated took the long and arduous journey back to the interior. But the relations in the East were much different from those in the west. I also went through the war in the west. There in the first place we were protected by the Red Cross because our opponent was a fair one. We could rely on the Red Cross sign and the wounded transports could move without interference. In the East on the other hand, the situation was different. Red Cross cars were shot at as much as any other, but that was not the most difficult matter. The most difficult matter was the roads. I recall a specific experience. I was once commissioned to send my wounded from the main dressing station to a field hospital and we had to put our men in school houses and we had to have more room. At that time I hoped that the transport would have help from the trucks from the munitions depot and that the transport could, be carried out in one day, but it turned out quite differently. These 18 kilometers could be covered only in three days because the trucks had to move arduously through these soft muddy roads, and during, these three days the patients were without any care and the necessity alone of meeting their human bodily needs caused difficulties. In other words, this was an enormously important matter, whether we could succeed with the help of sulfonamide of finding a reliable chemical treatment for that enormous number of wounded persons who otherwise would not have been treated or at least insufficiently treated.
Because of this mis-proportion of the destructive power of the weapons and the manual potentialities of the surgeons this was what characterized the medical situation in the war in the East.
Q: Where did you then go to from this main dressing station?
A: I fell sick in December 1941 of jaundice and went back through medical channels to the rear area, to Hohenlychen.
Q: What impression did Hohenlychen make on you in December 1941?
A: I arrived at the beginning of 1942 and found Hohenlychen quite different from what it was a year ago. This change was not in external matters or facts, but was rather a more internal matter. In 1940 Hohenlychen was a hospital, in which sportsmen or others were to be found, and the basic tone there was cheerful and almost happy. In 1942 Hohenlychen was an Army hospital. The sportsmen had become less and they were mostly wounded soldiers who were being cured there and who had the opportunity there of being cured. This basic change affected also the clinic. I would like to say that everything was more serious in time.
Q: What position did you have there in the Army Hospital in Hohenlychen?
A: I was Obersturmfuehrer, that corresponds to Lieutenant in the American Army. And, at the beginning was in charge of the Septic Station, and then was assistant in private station No. I and in the Officer's Station P-2. Also it was my task to take care of the ambulatory civilian patients who came at the rate of about thirty a day to Hohenlychen to consult with Gebhardt and be introduced to him. It was my task to introduce them to Gebhardt.
Q: In July 1942 your Chief, General in the SS, Gebhardt gave you the order to carry out human experiments. Professor Gebhardt has described these experiments in detail. Would you like to make some statements regarding them? But, first I should like to ask you, did you previously concern yourself with this basic problem, namely, whether medical experiments on human beings were justified or not?
A: Counsel, before I answer that question I should like to point out that the sentence "you received the order" was translated "you received the permission".
Q: You did not receive permission, rather you received a specific order from your superior officer and chief of the clinic who was then Obersturmfuehrer and General in the SS Gebhardt.
A: Yes. I had concerned myself almost not at all with the question of human experiments heretofore. I had known that there were experiments on human beings in the course of medical history but I never looked into this matter and had the conviction and wish never to concern myself with that problem. I knew that there were human beings and doctors, who even in normal times acted as free individuals and held human experiments to be necessary. And I knew that these were doctors who were not so much clinical doctors or followed a clinical direction which can be traced back to the old art of Priest craft and assisted in observing the symptoms of sickness, but were doctors who in normal times followed their own initiative. They represented natural scientific attitude and felt themselves ethically justified in what they did, because in natural science the final proof lies in observation. And, in the natural science applying to biology proves itself in the last analysis observation of human beings. But, this was of no practical importance to me. These questions had been only academic considerations for me and had never had any real basic influence on me. At that time I did not even remember that I had ever concerned myself with this problem heretofore.
Q: To this question Professor Leibbrandt and Rostock expressed opinions. They testified that they would not have carried out such experiments on human beings. What is your basic attitude toward that problem?
A: When Professor Rostock gave this answer I envied him and I consider him happy — that at the height of his surgical career he could say such a thing. I had always believed that I, could say such a thing, because it would never have occurred to me to consider such an experiment necessary. I should never have carried them out, I, as a person who could make his own decision. So, I should like to say in summary that I have exactly the same attitude as those two gentlemen.
And in this particular trial, I see the question differently only so far as it was not a question of my initiative and basic attitude, but that these matters arose from the situation which was characteristic of War and the condition at that time, and was conditioned only by the War.
Q: Professor Leibbrandt's testimony and Rostock's testimony referred to 1947. How did the situation seem to you at that time?
A: The situation in 1942 was so different from the situation in 1947 during peace that in describing these things it is difficult for me to recall what the situation was at that time, namely 1942. Both the external and internal conditions I cannot describe sufficiently, unless I take up the development that led to these conditions. I was born shortly before the first World War and was educated in the period just subsequent to it. During this period of schooling we heard from our teachers of the situation that Germany was in after the first World War, namely poverty, because the old hereditary disease of Germany of particularism had its sacrifice again. Whatever the political orientation of the teachers was, they all agreed that through work fate could be improved on but that, secondly, unity and, as a demand on the individual citizen, subordination to the State were an integrated and necessary prerequisite and a better fate in the future. All the parties, who got in touch with unity at that time, emphasized this point of view, and differences between parties themselves were periphery as far as we were concerned. Despite this wish for order and unity, despite this wish for a State, in which obedience and submission were paramount, disunity became greater and greater until 1933 when, to the surprise of most of us Hitler came on the scene. Ther personal orientation toward this occurrence could be as different among individuals as possible. Nevertheless the strength of the State was again organized, the economic problem of unemployment was solved, and all this was a convincing argument and brought many people into a benignant attitude toward National Socialist party.
None of us believed at this time that there would be a War, but we knew, that if a War came about, the economic limitations under which Germany lived and had to live made defeat very likely. And, the only antidote against this fate seemed to us to be the moral strength of unity itself There was a very essential change at the moment when the War began, of which I should like again to emphasize the fact that all of us, whether or not we were politically active, all of us did not greet it. I considered myself politically inactive at that time. The situation changed to this extent, that at that time we now considered ourselves no longer able to free ourselves from this total fate.
The National Socialistic state made propaganda to us, stating that the situation was that we were like the crew on a ship descending into a maelstrom, and the individual no longer had the right to follow his own wishes, because his fate was the fate of all, and it could only be a question either of the ship's floundering or that, through common efforts, it would be able to reach the shore. I believe that this was the most convincing argument, that persuaded many who were in opposition, or simply endured National Socialism, then actually took part in it actively, abandoned their passivity and regarded the Fuehrer not as the leader of the Party or as the exponent of a political system, but as the chief of state of the German Reich and as the Commander-in-Chief in the war whom they obeyed implicitly in that capacity. The whole situation during that period, which we all knew in the year 1942, was Germany's fight — life and death struggle — and I knew that this has not yet been expressed by witnesses at this trial — that was a characteristic that I, as a man of the people, experienced and did not so experience as a person in high position. This we saw as members of the German people. For us the State was characterized by the clear chain of command from the top to the bottom, to which was attached the responsibility and the duty to accept responsibility, and the duty from below upwards to be obedient. I should like to mention something else as characteristic for that situation. When I mentioned my front line experiences I spoke about how this law of war was obligatory ethically when one saw friends and also persons, one did not know, losing their lives during the war. In my effort to recognize the spirit and philosophic situation, I saw that it was not possible for the individual to recognize it, because it took place in an order that was above the individual and embraced a whole state, and so the situation in 1942 was characterized by the individual's recognition that he must obey the orders of the state, no matter where they might reach him, without always demanding that he should understand the individual measures, and without it being demanded that he should consider them just.
There are many parallels to these occurrences not only from the purely military sphere, but this law of war, which previously had been sharply discriminated between combat and rear area soldiers. Now this law applied not only to front line soldiers but also to the hinterlands, and with this extension of the effectiveness of weapons, automatically the law of war, of which I have been speaking, also became extended; and so it happened that in other fields of life — for example, in labor allocation, all the individual peaceful laws were relinquished and were supplemented by new laws and regulations, which one could not understand from the purely peaceful point of view or orientation. The duty to work was obligatory for everyone, including women, and so in various spheres, life became loosened up, so to speak, so the individual was no longer able to discriminate at what point the law of peace applied and where it was ever-lapped by the law of war. We also know at this time that other persons, who were engaged in the pursuit of science — for instance, in the preparation of chemical war or in increasing the effectiveness of explosives — that these men certainly were not acting as individuals with a positive aim, but, on the contrary, with a destructive intention; and vis-a-vis these tasks, the individual who received orders to do such work was not in a position to refuse or even to ask himself whether it was permissible.
Q: What was the contents of the order which, in connection with the sulfonamide experiments, Professor Gebhardt issued in July, 1942?
A: Professor Gebhardt came, in the middle of July, 1942, from the Fuehrer's Headquarters, called me to him, and told me briefly and definitely that he had received an order from the Fuehrer via Himmler to test the effectiveness of a few new sulfonamide preparations, of which he justifiably hoped that they would succeed in controlling wound infections, and which, for that reason, should be used as preventive means in the German Wehrmacht as widely as possible.
He told me that for this reason, in order to be able to answer this decisive question entirely clearly, this order had come from the Fuehrer via Himmler and that the testing was to be carried out on human beings. Gebhardt told me that he was the person who had received part of this order; namely, the medical part and that he was going to carry it out and wanted to make use of my services as his assistant and he told me that I was as much obligated by this order as he was, since it was a Fuehrer Order, and that it was not my responsibility — what I did in obeying it.
Q: You testified that it was a Fuehrer Order; namely, an order which you felt particularly obliged to obey. Did you otherwise, in your military career, receive a Fuehrer Order?
A: In my military career I three times received Fuehrer Orders. Through the explanation I tried to give, regarding Germany's inner structure at that time, I wanted to point out the particularly obliging nature of such a Fuehrer Order. In November, 1941, when the German Front, for the first time, was brought to a standstill, my division was before the Russian city of Rostow on the Don River. The German forces were exhausted, and in order to mobilize them again, the Fuehrer went to the front to Mariepol and gave our divisional commander the order that the city of Rostow was to be taken. My division consisted at that time of roughly 1000 men in four battalions. Two battalions, totaling 500 men, were put together and I was given the order to conduct the main dressing station for them. For a military tactician this would have been an enormous task to command such a group. The fact that it was a Fuehrer Order excluded any possibility of discussion and, on the morning of the 30th of November, the two divisions went into attack as ordered, broke through the Russian defense, and, on the same day, took the city of Rostow on the Don.
Out of the 500 men, 300 were lost, and four days later they were thrown out of the city again. In the winter of 1943-1944, the German front in the Ukraine collapsed. The First German Army was inclosed, surrounded, dispersed and fled into the rear regions. At this time, my division received a second Fuehrer Order. We were unloaded at Lemberg and entered a territory in which there were no more German soldiers; went 120 kilometers through the bitter Russian cold to the East. The tanks begged down so that at the end we, consisting of infantry alone, had to try to gain our goal. This order was only carried out, because it was an order from the highest commander-in-chief; and, in this case also, we succeeded in doing what we were ordered to do. We freed the 230,000 people who had been surrounded, but this order also was carried out at the expense of great losses.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will now recess until 9:30 o'clock tomorrow morning.
(A recess was taken until 0930 hours 11 March 1947)