Various

“ As I have already said, I share with most scientists the point of view that the prerequisite for any experiment is the self-experiment. This was not merely a theory in my case. Everyone who knows my work or saw my work knows that I performed a number of self-experiments and contracted a number of infections. I need not go into that now, but of course I tested all vaccines on myself. If we dispensed with the element of voluntariness in this present case, I must state that according to our rules and laws in Germany, vaccinations are ordered wherever there is danger of an epidemic. ”

“ LES CRIMES CONTRE L’HUMANITE: c’est à dire l’assassinat, l’extermination, la réduction en esclavage, la déportation, et tout autre acte inhumain commis contre toutes populations civiles, avant on pendant la guerre, ou bien les persécutions pour des motifs politiques, raciaux, ou réligieux, lorsque ces actes ou persécutions, qu’ils aient constitué ou non une violation du droit interne du pays où ils ont été perpétrés ont été commis à la suite de tout crime rentrant dans la compétence du Tribunal, ou en liaison avec ce crime. ”

“ It is to be supposed that each defendant thought there was some necessity to what he was doing. This is no defense. Rascher thought the same thing. It was deemed necessary to incarcerate hundreds of thousands of persons in concentration camps. It was deemed necessary to murder millions of Jews. The slave labor policy was bottomed on necessity. If that is a defense, then these trials lose all meaning. But, on the other hand if it is proved that these experiments were not necessary, not of scientific value, then it makes the guilty even more guilty. ”

“ Guilt for the oppressions and crimes of the Third Reich is widespread, but it is the guilt of the leaders that is deepest and most culpable. Who could German medicine look to to keep the profession true to its traditions and protect it from the ravaging inroads of Nazi pseudo-science? This was the supreme responsibility of the leaders of German medicine—men like Rostock and Rose and Schroeder and Handloser. ”

“ In view of the clear and overwhelming proof, it can only be concluded that the practice of experimentation on concentration camp inmates without their consent was an organized and systematic program. It is, therefore, appropriate to consider whether we have in this dock the leaders of the German medical services without whom these crimes would not have been possible. It would be an unforgivable miscarriage of justice to punish the doctors who worked on the victims in the concentration camps while their superiors, the leaders, organizers, and instigators go free. ”

“ Were the Ruff-Romberg high-altitude experiments in Dachau dangerous to life? If it is demanded that experiments on humans are carried out as humanely as possible, pain avoided wherever possible, and damage to health eliminated, it is obvious that deaths must be prevented in every way possible. The conscientious research worker will always start from the standpoint that experiments can only then be carried out when, according to human estimation and the experience of science, death can in no way be expected. ”

“ One surely is not mistaken in supposing that none of the defendants, even if he has ever such great experience as a medical man, at that time thought without exception of all the possibilities which we have to consider now, when for many months we have had to search for the legal basis of the whole problem of human experiments, and have had to think of all eventualities. According to his sentiment, at that time each physician and research man said to himself: If the experimental subject agrees to the experiment, everything is all right. ”

“ The service of prisoners as subjects in medical experiments should be rewarded in addition to the ordinary time allowed for good conduct, industry, fidelity, and courage, but the excess time rewarded should not be so great as to exert undue influence in obtaining the consent of the prisoners. To give an excessive reward would be contrary to the ethics of medicine and would debase and jeopardize a method for doing good. Thus the amount of reduction of sentence in prison should be determined by the forbearance required by the experiment and the character of the prisoner. ”

“ For the moment we will christen this macabre science “thanatology,” the science of producing death. The thanatological knowledge, derived in part from these experiments, supplied the techniques for genocide, a policy of the Third Reich, exemplified in the “euthanasia” program and in the wide-spread slaughter of Jews, gypsies, Poles, and Russians. This policy of mass extermination could not have been so effectively carried out without the active participation of German medical scientists. ”

“ These legal realities must be contrasted with the extravagant opinion, which believes that the protection of humanity can only be safeguarded by a kind of international sovereignty limited by the sovereignty of the individual states. This would be an aim which we would most sincerely desire to attain, but practice shows that there are plenty of crimes against humanity even today, but no institution which has the power to punish them. There will never be such an institution, except insofar as it concerns the totally vanquished after a total war, to which in the future every war must lead. ”

“ Grawitz: You see, this is the point! When the Reich Leader SS does not understand a medical matter clearly he hands the matter over to me, anyway.
Rascher: Of course, I am grateful for every kind of help, but I believe that I am primarily under the orders of the Ahnenerbe.
Grawitz: Certainly not when you are a member of the Waffen SS. I am able to be of much use to you through my knowledge and I shall inform Brandt to that effect. It isn’t that I bear a grudge against you or your work, but all things have to follow their course. Don’t be afraid, scientific thefts don’t occur with us. ”

“ This is a problem which concerns the entire future of our people, indeed, one may say without being over-emotional about it, the entire future of humanity. One should approach this problem neither from the point of view of our present scientific opinion nor from the point of view of the still more ephemeral economic crises. If by sterilization we can prevent the occurrence of mental disease then we should certainly do it, not in order to save money for the government but because every case of mental disease means infinite suffering to the patient and to his relatives. ”

“ Besides if I had not been present, that would today be considered as an incomprehensible lack of interest in the death—if I had not accepted Rascher’s invitation. If such a death happened during a centrifugal experiment in our institute, if such an accident had happened which was not in my field of work, I certainly would have gone to watch the autopsy. One must learn from the findings; that is one’s duty as a doctor. One has to look at such things so that one can draw one’s own conclusions and be able to avoid subsequent accidents. ”

“ It is not the point in this connection whether a dictatorial regime is desirable or should be rejected, nor whether a war as such appears to be criminal (for example because it will be judged as an aggressive war later on) ; the attitude that, under such exceptional conditions as exist in a dictatorship or total war, even life-endangering experiments on human beings may perhaps be more justified than under normal conditions is obviously based on the thought that the state governed by dictatorship can and will ask for greater sacrifices, from criminals too, especially during total war. ”

“ Hippke, Chief of the Medical Service of the Luftwaffe, when writing his thanks to Himmler on 8 October 1942 said the following:
“It is true that no conclusions as to the practice of parachuting can be drawn for the time being, as a very important factor, namely, cold has so far not yet been taken into consideration; it places an extraordinary excess burden on the entire body and its vital movements, so that the results in actual practice will very likely prove to be far more unfavorable than in the present experiments.” ”

“ It was a big responsibility to introduce a new vaccine like this, even if one had already gained experience in a small experiment on oneself and volunteers. But in this trial the word, “experiment,” has been grossly misused. In this sense our vaccinations were not “experiments”, they were tests and not experiments with any uncertain goal or purpose. One can hardly speak of criminal experiments here. And in every medical journal in the world, on almost every page, we find experiments at the sick bed, and I don’t think anyone has any objection to this word. ”

“ These simple facts were known during the war to people all over the world. How much greater then was the duty of these defendants to determine very carefully the voluntary character of these experimental subjects who were so conveniently available. True it is that these defendants are not charged with responsibility for the manifold complex of crimes which made up the concentration camp system. But it cannot be held that they could enter the gates of the Inferno and say in effect: “Bring forward the subjects. I see no evil; I hear no evil; I speak no evil.” ”

“ The walls and towers and churches of Nuernberg were, indeed, reduced to rubble by Allied bombs, but in a deeper sense Nuernberg had been destroyed a decade earlier, when it became the seat of the annual Nazi Party rallies, a focal point for the moral disintegration in Germany, and the private domain of Julius Streicher. The insane and malignant doctrines that Nuernberg spewed forth account alike for the crimes of these defendants and for the terrible fate of Germany under the Third Reich.
A nation which deliberately infects itself with poison will inevitably sicken and die. ”

“ Well, is it or is it not a fact that a human being will voluntarily undergo hunger, thirst, pain, discomfort, and stand it better when he knows that he is doing it under his own volition with a scientific objective, than a person of equal physical condition will stand such an experiment when, insofar as he is concerned, he has no personal interest whatsoever?
A. No doubt that is correct, and I am perfectly convinced that Professor Eppinger tried everything he could in order to obtain such volunteers. He was most uncomfortable about the fact that these experiments were carried out in Dachau. ”

“ I was very much surprised by the fact that the prisoners to be used for experiments should be paid for. If we use only 10 prisoners for one experiment, which might under certain circumstances last 10 months, the cost for the prisoners alone would total approximately 4,000 RM. When I think of our military research work conducted at the concentration camp Dachau, I must praise and call special attention to the generous and understanding way in which our work was furthered there and to the cooperation we were given. ”

“ With Police Captain Wirth, I stood right in front of the death chambers. Completely naked, they marched by, men, women, girls, children, babies, even one-legged persons, all of them naked. In one corner, a strong SS man told the poor devils in a strong deep voice: “Nothing whatever will happen to you. All you have to do is to breathe deeply; it strengthens the lungs. This inhalation is a necessary measure against contagious diseases; it is a very good disinfectant!” Asked what was to become of them, he answered: “Well, of course the men will have to work, building streets and houses. ”

“ It is the supreme duty of a national state to grant life and livelihood only to the healthy and hereditarily sound portion of the people in order to secure the maintenance of a hereditarily sound and racially pure folk for all eternity. ”

“ One of the infirmities of dictatorship is that, when it suffers irretrievable and final military disaster, it usually crumbles into nothing and leaves the victims of its tyranny leaderless amidst political chaos. The Third Reich had ruthlessly hunted down every man and woman in Germany who sought to express political ideas or develop political leadership outside of the bestial ideology of nazism. When the Third Reich collapsed, Germany tumbled into a political vacuum. ”

“ All God-fearing men consider this destruction of helpless beings a crass injustice. And if anybody says that Germany cannot win the war, if there is yet a just God, these expressions are not the result of a lack of love for the Fatherland but of a deep concern for our people. The population cannot grasp the fact that systematic actions are carried out which in accordance with paragraph 211 of the German Penal Code are punishable with death. High authority as a moral concept has suffered a severe shock as a result of these happenings. ”

“ In fact it seems inconceivable that an occupying power should not be allowed to take measures for the effective combating of a resistance movement, whose sole and openly admitted purpose it was to undermine and destroy the authority of the occupying power and the safety of the occupation troops. The right to do this can be contested even less in our case, since with the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, the territory of the former General Government became the largest military transit area which has ever existed in the history of war. ”

“ An experiment is legal if the experimental subject agrees to it, provided that the physician observes the necessary care when performing the experiment. As proved here by this trial, there exists in no country a written law regulating the legal conditions of experiments on humans. On the other side, however, the human experiment is such a far-reaching and often such an indispensable matter that one might speak of an unwritten law, which generally and tacitly is accepted and acknowledged by the whole world. ”

“ Summary The general decline of German medical conduct and the poisoning of German medical ethics which the Nazis brought about laid the basis for the atrocious experiments of which the defendants are accused.
Many of these were experiments in name only; we will show them to have been senseless and clumsy and of no real value to medicine as a healing art. The Nazi medical world was flooded with preposterous and wicked notions about superior and inferior races and developed a perverted moral outlook in which cruelty to subjugated races and peoples was praiseworthy. ”

“ If one takes the case of the defense at its face value, the Tribunal is in effect asked to rule that it is legal for military doctors of a nation at war to experiment on political prisoners of an occupied country who are condemned to death, to experiment on them in such a way that they may suffer death, excruciating pain, mutilation, and permanent disability—all this without their consent and in direct aid of the military potential of their enemy. ”

“ Such a checking of the “morals” of the enemy seems inadmissible; the checking of the conditions in one’s own country is a matter for the people itself; the latter may, on account of its laws, or in a revolution, prosecute its compatriots itself, on the grounds of their behavior. The IMT kept just to this fundamental idea of the statute and one cannot push this law aside arbitrarily by declaring on political grounds that in order to secure peace and democracy all actions committed formerly in the country must be punished as crimes against humanity. ”