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
Then I spoke of the ethical side of the whole thing and this part of my
statement has been stricken from the record. I cannot, of course,
reproduce today the exact wording but only the sense of what I said. I
said more or less as follows: As important and as basic as the results
may have been, they were nevertheless achieved at the cost of a number
of human lives. We as hygienists should object against a life and death
experiment being performed as the prerequisite for the introduction of a
vaccine. So far, the customary procedure had been the testing with
animal experiments and subsequent determination of tolerance by human
beings and epidemiological exploitation. This procedure had proved its
value. We had to stick to it and we couldn’t let other political and
state authorities force us to conduct human experiments. I spoke much
longer at the time. I spoke for at least ten minutes. Ding replied that
he could pacify my conscience. The experimental subjects had been
criminals condemned to death. My answer was: I knew that myself. I was
not interested in the individuals concerned but in the principle of
human experiments in testing vaccines. At this comment Professor
Schreiber interrupted the discussion. He said he protested against my
criticism and if we wanted to discuss basic ethical questions we could
do that during the recess. He would have this part of the discussion
stricken from the record and that was done. After the meeting various
participants came to me and we discussed the whole matter. Some agreed
with me; others were convinced that in such an important question human
experiments were justified. Of course, those people who [_sic_] believed
Ding’s assurance that the subjects were criminals condemned to death. I
no longer remember the individual men with whom I talked during the
recess and I don’t know who was in favor and who was against it. The
only one I remember is Professor Mrugowsky because he spoke as an SS
member and the experiments had been conducted by an SS doctor, and
because I thought that Mrugowsky was Ding’s superior in every way. Of
course, I remember that Mrugowsky of all people came and said that, in
principle, he agreed with me, and that he had expressed similar
misgivings to Grawitz and that Grawitz had rejected his misgivings. Then
I also learned from Mrugowsky that Himmler was behind all these
experiments.
* * * * *
DR. FRITZ: Did you later discuss the matter of experiments on human
beings before a large group of people?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account