Experiments which time and again have been described in international literature without meeting any opposition do not constitute a crime from the medical point of view. For nowhere did a plaintiff arise from the side of the responsible professional organization, or from that of the administration of justice, to denounce as criminal the experiments described in literature. On the contrary, the authors of those reports on their human experiments gained general recognition and fame; they were awarded the highest honors; they gained historical importance. And in spite of all this, are they supposed to have been criminals? No! In view of the complete lack of _written_ legal norms, the physician, who generally knows only little about the law, has to rely on and refer to the admissibility of what is generally recognized to be admissible all over the world. The defense is convinced that the Tribunal, when deciding this problem without prejudice, will first study the many experiments performed all over the world on healthy and sick persons, on prisoners and free people, on criminals and on the poor, even on children and mentally ill persons, in order to see how the medical profession in its international totality answers the question of the admissibility of human experiments, not only in theory but also in practice. It is psychologically understandable that German research workers today will, if possible, have nothing to do with human experiments and will try to avoid them, or would like to describe them as inadmissible even if before 1933 they were perhaps of the opposite opinion. However, experiments performed in 1905-1912 by a highly respected American in Asia for the fight against the plague, which made him famous all over the world, cannot and ought not to be labelled as criminal because a Blome is supposed to have performed the same experiments during the Hitler period (which, in fact, however, were not performed at all); and experiments for which, before 1933, a foreign research worker, the Englishman Ross, was awarded the Nobel prize for his malaria experiments, do not deserve to be condemned only because a German physician performed similar experiments during the Hitler regime. One should not say that experiments, where different diseases or different drugs from those referred to in this trial were dealt with, have no connection with the charges of this indictment because of this difference and that, therefore, they are of no importance as evidence. In the foreground there stands the basic question as to the conditions under which such experiments are permissible; whether they refer to plague or typhus, to tuberculosis or jaundice, is a secondary question which concerns the medical expert more than the jurist.