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
DEFENDANT ROSE: The Buchenwald experiments (with typhus vaccine) had
four main results. First of all, they showed that belief in the
protective effect of Weigl vaccine was a mistake, although this belief
seemed to be based on long observation. Secondly, they showed that the
useful vaccines did not protect against infection, but almost certainly
prevented death, under the conditions of the Buchenwald experiments.
Thirdly, they showed that the objections of the biological experts to
the vitelline membrane vaccines and to the lice vaccines were
unjustified, and that vitelline membrane, rabbit lungs, and lice
intestines were of equal value. We learned this only through the
Buchenwald experiments. This left the way open to mass production of
typhus vaccines.
The Buchenwald experiments showed in time that several vaccines were
useless. First, the process according to Otto and Wohlrab, the process
according to Cox, the process of Rickettsia Prowazeki and Rickettsia
murina, that is, vaccine from egg cultures; secondly, the vaccines of
the Behring works which were produced according to the Otto process, but
with other concentrations; finally the Ipsen vaccines from mouse liver.
The vaccines of the Behring works were in actual use at that time in
thousands of doses. They always represented a danger to health. Without
these experiments the vaccines, which were recognized as useless, would
have been produced in large quantities because they all had one thing in
common: their technical production was much simpler and cheaper than
that of the useful vaccines. In any case, one thing is certain, that the
victims of this Buchenwald typhus test did not suffer in vain and did
not die in vain. There was only one choice, the sacrifice of human
lives, of persons determined for that purpose, or to let things run
their course, to endanger the lives of innumerable human beings who
would be selected not by the Reich Criminal Police Office but by blind
fate.
How many people were sacrificed we cannot figure out today; how many
people were saved by these experiments we, of course, cannot prove. The
individual who owes his life to these experiments does not know it, and
he perhaps is one of the accusers of the doctors who assumed this
difficult task.
I. Medical Ethics
1. GENERAL PRINCIPLES
a. Introduction
In a case involving the charge that human beings were subjected to
medical experiments of many kinds under varying circumstances, it was
inevitable that questions of medical ethics became a part of the proof
and the argumentation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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