Trials of war criminals before the Nuernberg military tribunals under control council law no. 10, volume IVarious
Philosophy
Trials of war criminals before the Nuernberg military tribunals under control council law no. 10, volume I
Various
Nuremberg Trial of Major German War Criminals, Nuremberg, Germany, 1945-1946; War crime trials -- Germany -- Nuremberg
From December 1941, until near the end of the war, a large program of
medical experimentation was carried out upon concentration camp inmates
at Buchenwald and Natzweiler to investigate the value of various
vaccines. This research involved a variety of diseases—typhus, yellow
fever, smallpox, paratyphoid A and B, cholera, and diphtheria. A dozen
or more of the defendants were involved in these experiments which were
characterized by the most cynical disregard of human life. Hundreds of
persons died. The experiments concerning typhus—known in Germany as
Fleckfieber or “spot fever”, but is not to be confused with American
spotted fever—were particularly appalling.
The typhus experiments at Natzweiler were conducted by Dr. Eugen Haagen,
an officer in the Air Force Medical Service and a professor at the
University of Strasbourg. In the fall of 1943, through the defendant
Sievers, Haagen obtained 100 concentration camp prisoners for
experiments with typhus vaccines. Two hundred more prisoners were
furnished in the summer of 1944. These experiments caused many
fatalities among the prisoners.
The general pattern of these typhus experiments was as follows. A group
of concentration camp inmates, selected from the healthier ones who had
some resistance to disease, were injected with an anti-typhus vaccine,
the efficacy of which was to be tested. Thereafter, all the persons in
the group would be infected with typhus. At the same time, other inmates
who had not been vaccinated were also infected for purposes of
comparison—these unvaccinated victims were called the “control” group.
But perhaps the most wicked and murderous circumstance in this whole
case is that still other inmates were deliberately infected with typhus
with the sole purpose of keeping the typhus virus alive and generally
available in the bloodstream of the inmates.
The typhus murders at Buchenwald were carried out in 1942 and 1943 under
the direction of the defendants Genzken and Mrugowsky. Requests for the
human guinea pigs were turned over to, and filled by, the defendant
Hoven. The bulk of the actual work was done by an infamous physician
known as Dr. Ding, who committed suicide after the war. But Dr. Ding’s
professional diary has survived.
The first entry in Ding’s diary, for 29 December 1941, reveals that here
again the impetus for these murderous researches came from the
Wehrmacht. This entry describes a conference sponsored by the defendant
Handloser and Dr. Conti, respective heads of the military and civilian
medical services of the Reich, which was also attended by the defendant
Mrugowsky. Typhus had been making serious inroads on the German troops
fighting in Russia. The account of this conference relates that, and I
quote (_NO-265_):
“Since tests on animals are not of sufficient value, tests on
human beings must be carried out.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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