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
Particularly deplorable was the degradation of psychiatry. Psychiatric
university teaching declined to the level of a mere rehashing of the
Nuernberg 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 neuroses,
on the part of their own medical personnel, drove many of them to
surrender to the enemy; efforts to rehabilitate them and restore them to
duty were frustrated by the ruinous 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.
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 world was flooded with preposterous and wicked
notions about superior and inferior races and developed a perverted
moral outlook in which cruelty to subjugated races and peoples was
praiseworthy. Training in SA and SS formations 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
grew with horrible rapidity.
CRIMES OF MASS EXTERMINATION; MURDER OF
POLISH NATIONALS
From the preaching of Guett and others sprang the notions which underlie
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
“Sonderbehandlung.” In the next document, as will be shown, it occurs
frequently in Nazi correspondence and was used by them to mean
extermination. In May 1942, Greiser wrote to Himmler as follows
(_NO-246_):
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