Inquisition, witch trials, and revolutionary tribunals have existed in the name of the state and eternal justice, and the executive participants did not consider themselves criminals but servants of their community. They would have been killed if they had stood up against what was believed to be newly discovered eternal justice. What is the subject to do if the orders of the state exceed the customary limits which the individual himself took for inviolable according to tradition. What did the airman think who dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima? Did he consider himself a criminal? What did the statesmen think who ordered this atomic bomb to be used. We know from the history of this event that the motive was patriotism, based on the harsh necessity of sacrificing hundreds of thousands to save their own soldiers’ lives. This motive was stronger than the prohibition of the Hague Convention, under which belligerents have no unlimited right in the choice of methods for inflicting damage on the enemy. “My cause is just and my quarrel honorable,” says the king. And Shakespeare’s soldier answers him: “That’s more than we know.” Another soldier adds: “Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know enough if we know we are the king’s subjects; if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime out of us.” It is the hard necessity of the state on which the defense for Karl Brandt is based against the charge of having performed criminal experiments on human beings. Here also—in addition to the care for the population—the lives of soldiers were at stake, soldiers who had to be protected from death and epidemics. In Professor Bickenbach’s experiment, the issue was the lives of women and children who without 45 million gas masks would have been as unprotected against the expected gas attack as the Japanese were against the atomic bomb. Biological warfare was imminent, even praised abroad as cheaper and more effective than the atomic bomb. Is it really against the law and all political morals if the state in such a situation provides for the expected emergency and orders the necessary medical experiments to be performed on its own citizens? As applied to foreigners such procedure is limited in principle. In my closing brief I have discussed the exceptions. What is to be done is decided not by the physician but by the political leader. Even the expert Dr. Ivy had to grant him the fundamental authority. The question is why, with the legal position so clear, a man like Keitel refused to have such experiments carried out in the Wehrmacht, and why some of the defendants themselves try to disprove any connection with the experiments. The answer is that a measure may be as unavoidable as war and yet be abhorred in the same way.