“The general need for experiments on human beings… has been recognized by all nations as a military necessity.” Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician (135)

In Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans, Vivien Spitz writes about her experience as the youngest court reporter at the Nuremburg trials. Immediately following the International Military Tribunal trial of the major Nazi leaders charged with crimes against humanity and calculated genocide, Vivien helped transcribe the twelve Subsequent Proceedings, of which the medical case was first.

In The United States of America versus Karl Brandt, et al., twenty doctors and three medical assistants were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The bulk of Vivien’s book consists of selections from the trial transcripts. As one can imagine, recording the atrocities and horrors of the inhumane medical experiments conducted by the doctors took its toll on Vivien.

Vivien writes the book in order that the Holocaust will not be forgotten by future generations. Twice she quotes Justice Robert H. Jackson’s warning, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated” (293). In this regard, Vivien clearly challenges her readers to take history to heart: “I want you, the reader, to realize the infinite capacity for demonic evil and depravity in ordinary good people with free will who make choices that turn them into unethical, immoral perpetrators with victims at their mercy” (6).

Crimes Against Humanity

“The professional group that had the largest percentage of Nazi Party members was medicine” (xv). The case against the doctors was not difficult to make. These distinguished scientists, doctors, and surgeons kept meticulous records of their experiments.

The human experiments described in this book are shocking, gruesome, and horrific. They include:

• High-altitude experiments “designed to test the limits of human endurance and existence at extremely high altitudes with and without oxygen” (65).
• Freezing experiments: Victims were kept in ice-cold freezing tanks for hours until they became unconscious or died.
• Malaria experiments: Inmates “were deliberately infected with malaria by infected mosquitoes, or were injected with malaria-infected blood” (104).
• Bone, muscle, nerve regeneration and bone transplantation experiments: “Some of the most savage, sadistic, and inhumane experiments were those involving regeneration of bones, muscles, and nerves, and transplantation of bones. Sections of bone were removed, legs were removed at the hips, arms were removed, including the shoulder blades, and muscles and nerves were removed from healthy concentration camp inmates, and then the attempt was made to transplant these body parts to other victims” (115).
• Mustard gas experiments: “Wounds were deliberately inflicted on camp inmates and mustard gas applied to the wounds” (135).
• Sea water experiments: In order to “develop a method of making sea water drinkable through desalinization” prisoners were forced to drink sea water on empty stomachs for days on end (157).
• Typhus experiments: Victims were infected with the typhus virus in order to test various vaccines.
• Poison experiments: These experiments “had no scientific objective to heal or cure, but were used to time how fast death occurred and to observe the pain and agony the poisons inflicted up to the point of death” (209).
• Incendiary bomb experiments: Prisoners were deliberately burned with ignited phosphorus in order to test various skin ointments for combating burns.
• Phlegmon and Polygal experiments: Victims were injected with pus and blood coagulants.
• Jewish Skeleton collection: Although not an experiment, this charge involved “the murder of 112 Jews to complete a skeleton collection for the Reich University at Strasbourg, France” (231).

Through the testimony of Waffen SS member Kurt Gerstein, we are given an unbelievably horrific account of routine mass euthanasia. His account takes place in 1942. He speaks of the arrival of “forty-five [train] cars containing 6,700 persons [including children], 1,450 of whom were already dead on arrival” (241). As the Jews and other “undesirables” left the trains to the gas chambers, SS men would tell them, “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!” (242)

The gas facility consisted of four chambers. In each chamber seven to eight hundred people would be “crushed together on twenty-five square meters, in forty-five cubic meters!” (242)

Gerstein recounts how the Diesel engine that dispensed the deadly gas would not immediately start. It took two hours and forty-five minutes until it finally kicked on. After 30 more minutes all the people in each chamber were dead. “The dead were still standing like stone statues, there having been no room for them to fall or bend over” (235).

The next day Gerstein attended a banquet given in honor of the employees of his institution. Professor Pfannenstiel, Hygiene Professor at the University of Marburg/Lahn, was the speaker at this event. The professor spoke of “the beauty of the task” and the “humane cause” in which they were involved. “Looking at the bodies of these Jews, one understands the greatness of your good work!” (246)

Final Statements

After 139 trial days, 85 witnesses (including the 23 defendants), and 1,471 pieces of documentary evidence, the personal statements of the defendants were heard on July 19, 1947, the last day of the trial. After all the damning evidence, Vivien recalls, “There was not one scintilla of remorse shown by any of these defendants. I was stunned at the evil, expressionless, hard faces of these doctors and assistants during the trial. They often expressed resentment when testifying, spewing defensive justifications and denying responsibility” (266).

Following is a selection of some of the final words from the accused. Notice the lack of any sense of guilt, wrong-doing, or shame. Instead, the opposite is quite evident. Also, notice the rationalizations the doctors used to defend their conduct.

• Siegfried Handloser stated that the “general charges of the prosecution against the Medical Corps of the German Armed Forces have been proved to be without any foundation.” (258)
• Paul Rostock claimed to perform his experiments, not for any political party, “but simply and solely for my patients and for medical science.” (258)
• Karl Genzken spoke of the “decent and brave doctors and medical attendants.” He requested that the court recognize “the honest idealism” of the doctors. (259)
• Kurt Blome: “I feel myself free of the guilt of every having committed or furthered crimes against humanity.” (260)
• Siegfried Ruff: “After detailed inquiry into my conscience, I still today hold the belief that I never sinned against my duty as a man and as a doctor.” (261)
• Joachim Mrugowsky: “My life, my actions, and my aims were clean. That is why now that at the end of this trial I can declare myself free of personal guilt.” (260)
• Helmut Poppendick: “[A]fter sincere examination of my conscience, I cannot find any feelings of guilt and expect with a clear and peaceful conscience the verdict of the Tribunal.” (261)
• Wolfram Sievers: “I have lived for a good cause and acted on it, on behalf of something which – then as today – filled me with true belief.” (261)
• Konrad Schaefer: “May it please the Tribunal, since I consider myself entirely innocent, I have nothing more to add. I ask to be acquitted, if possible, even before the verdict.” (262)
• Fritz Fischer: “In my life I have never followed egotistical aims, and I was never motivated by base instincts. For that reason, I feel free of any guilt inside me.” (264)

The evil of the human experiments rose out of eugenics theory and its implementation. The Germans did not simply wish to defeat the Jews and other “undesirables”; they wanted to exterminate them. The Jews were simply “material” to be experimented upon, lab rats, “useless eaters” whose suffering was irrelevant. The irony is that the Nazis had passed laws in 1933 forbidding inhumane treatment of animals (62). To the Nazis, the Jews were not animals; they were lower than animals.

Each doctor would have taken the Hippocratic Oath to do his best to protect and preserve human life. Somewhere along the way, each doctor would have had to compromise his moral and ethical commitment to the Oath. “All principles of medicine became subordinate to the Nazi National Socialist population policy and racial concepts” (59).

Vivien concludes: “The medical case of the Nazi doctors is the story of the mass violation of basic human rights and the dignity of life, of indifference to evil, of people, of people who knew and kept silent, and of heads of state who looked the other way” (266).

Vivien does not want us to forget the horrific possibility of human evil done in the name of state, race, or science. Each one of these – the Nazi cause, the supremacy of the German race, and the cause of science – was used by various doctors from hell to rationalize their evil and inhumane treatment of others.

Robert H. Jackson’s warning is worth repeating: “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated” (293).

May we never forget. May we always remember. May we never repeat. May we learn.

© Richard J. Vincent, 2005