Trials of war criminals before the Nuernberg military tribunals under control council law no. 10, volume IIVarious
Philosophy
Trials of war criminals before the Nuernberg military tribunals under control council law no. 10, volume II
Various
Nuremberg Trial of Major German War Criminals, Nuremberg, Germany, 1945-1946; War crime trials -- Germany -- Nuremberg
A. Yes, I know Geheimrat Otto. He is probably the best typhus expert not
only in Germany but in Europe, who has dealt with typhus all his life.
Q. From this excerpt you will see that Geheimrat Otto says, still in
1943:
“While the efficacy of lice vaccines has already been tested on
a large scale in Poland, Ethiopia, and China, and the vaccine
has proved its value, it is still necessary to gather
large-scale practical experiences with lung and vitelline
membrane vaccines. In animal experiments they have proved of
equal value with the former.”
Would you say something on that?
A. Professor Otto says here that even in the year 1943 the vitelline
membrane vaccine and the vaccines from lungs of animals were not
sufficiently known. That confirms what I have just testified and that is
in answer to Dr. Schreiber’s statement.
Q. The witness Bernhard Schmidt, who was interrogated here, stated that
human experiments were superfluous for the purpose of testing vaccines
and that the value of the individual typhus vaccines could have been
ascertained in an epidemiological way. What is your opinion in that
connection?
A. This is my opinion also. It is my opinion that these tests could have
been carried out in an epidemiological manner. I represented that point
of view before Grawitz and Himmler from the very beginning.
Q. You stated yesterday that to test this matter in an epidemiological
way, a large number of persons would have had to be vaccinated and
compared with a large number of persons who were not vaccinated. Would
such a long experiment have been possible considering the circumstances
prevailing during the war?
A. Such a test would have been possible. It was actually introduced by
me within the framework of the ministry. It is a matter of course,
however, that the results can only be collected at a very late date and
can only be exploited at a much later date. In the case of the entire
experiment we were concerned with bridging over this space of time.
Q. In carrying out this examination one could have found that one
vaccine has only a very small effectiveness, as was actually found out
in the case of the Behring vaccine. In that case would you say that the
mortality of persons vaccinated with the inferior vaccine would have
been much greater than the entire amount of fatalities as they occurred
in Buchenwald? You know that the statement regarding the fatality
figures fluctuated between 100 and 120.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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