I quote from the letter of Defendant Blome:
"It was calculated that in 1939 there were among the Poles about 35,000 persons suffering from open tuberculosis and, besides this number, about 120,000 other consumptives in need of treatment.
*** "Wit the settlement of Germans in all parts of the Gau an enormous danger has arisen for them.
A number of cases of infection of settled children and adults occurs daily.
"Therefore, something basic must be done soon. One must decide the most efficient way in which this can be done. There are three ways to be taken into consideration:
1. Special treatment ( Sonderbehandlung ) of the seriously ill persons, 2. Most regorous isolation of the seriously ill persons, 3. Creation of a reservation for all TB-patients.
"For the planning, attention must be paid to different points of view of a practical, political and psychological nature. Considering it most soberly, the simplest way would be the following: Aided by the X-ray battalion ( Roentgen Sturmbann ) we could reach the entire population, German and Polish, of the Gau during the first half of 1943. As to the Germans, the treatment and isolation is to be prepared and carried, out according to the regulations for Tuberculosis Relief ( Tuberkulosehilfe ).
"The approximately 35,000 Poles who are incurable and infectious will be 'specially teated' (sonderbehandelt). All other Polish consumptives will be subjected to an appropriate cure in order to save them for work and to avoid their causing contagion.
"According to your request I made arrangements with the offices in question, in order to start and carry out this radical procedure within half a year. You told me, that the competent office agreed with you as to this special treatment and promised support. Before we definitely start the program, I think it would be correct if you would make sure once more that the Fuehrer will really agree to such a solution.
**** "There can be no doubt of the intended program's being the most simple and most radical solution.
If absolute secrecy could be guaranteed all scruples - regardless of what nature -- could be overcome. But I consider simply maintaining secrey impossible. Experience has taught us that this assumption is true. Should those sick persons, having been brought, as planned, to the old Reich supposedly to be treated or healed, and they actually never return, the relatives of those sick persons in spite of the greates secrecy would some day notice 'that somethin was not quite right'.
"Therefore, I think it necessary to explain all those points of view to the Fuehrer before undertaking the program, as, in my opinion he is the only one able to view the entire complex and to come to a decision."
The Prosecution will intruduce evidence to show that the program was in fact carried out at the end of 1942 and the beginning of 1943, and that as a result of the suggestions made by Blome and Greiser, many Poles were ruthlessly exterminated and that others were taken to insolated camps, utterly lacking in medical facilities, where thousands of them died.
"The special treatment", and the German word is Sonderbehandlung," of about 100,000 Jews in the territory of my district approved by you in Agreement with the Chief of the Reich-Main-Security-Office, SS-Obergruppenfuehrer HEYDRICH, can be completed within the next two to three months. I ask you for permission to rescue the district immediately after the measures are taken against tho Jews, from a menace, which is increasing week by week? and to use the exiting and efficient special commandos for that purpose.
"There are about 230,000 people of Polish nationality in my district, who were diagnosed to suffer from tuberculosis. The number of persons infectet with open Tuberculosis is estimated at about 35,000. This fact has led in an increasing frightening measure to the infection of Germans, who came to the Warthegau perfectly healthy. In particular; reports are received with ever increasing effect of German children in danger of infection. A considerable number of well known leading men, especially of the police, have been infected lately and are not available for the wareffort because of the necessary medical treatment. The ever increasing risks were also recognized and appreciated by the deputy of the Reich Leader for Public Health (Reichsgesundheitsfuehrer) Comrade Professor Dr. BLOME as well as by the Leader of your X-ray battalion SS Standartenfuehrer Professor Dr. HOHLFELDER.
"Though in Germany proper it is not possible to take appropriate draconic steps against this public plague, I think I could take responsibility for my suggestion to have cases of open TB exterminated among the Polish race here in the Warthegau. Of course only a Pole should be handed over to such an action, who is not only suffering from open tuberculosis, but whose incurability is proved and certified by a public health officer.
"Considering the urgency of this project I ask for your approval in priciple as soon as possible. This would enable us to make the preparations with all necessary precautions now to get the action against the Poles suffering from open tuberculosis under way, while the action against the Jews is in its closing stages."
Greiser's Proposal was supported in a letter from one, Koppe, the SS and police leader in that region, to the defendant Rudolf Brandt, to which Brandt replied stating that the matter was under consideration and that the final decision would rest with Hitler. Late in June, Himmler sent a "favorable reply to Greiser cautioning him, however, that the exterminations should be carried out inconspicuously. Thereafter, consultations as to how to carry out the measure occurred between Greiser, Dr. Hohlfelder, and the defendant Blome. The views of Blome are obodied in a letter from him to Greiser written in November 1942. This letter contains an indescribably brutal analysis of the situation, in which Blome expresses agreement with the view that extermination of the tubercular Poles is the simplest and most logical sulution, and expresses doubt as to its desirability only in that it would be difficult to keep such widespread slaughter secret, and that Hitler might think the program plitically inexpedient if the facts should ever come out.
Euthanasia (Indicktment, paragraphs 9 and 14) On September 1, 1939, the very day of the German attack on Poland, and after a great deal of discussion between Dr. Karl Brandt, Dr. Leonardo Conti, Phillip Bouhler, the Chief of the private Chancery of the Fuehrer, and others, Hitler issued the following authority to the defendant Karl Brandt:
"Reichsleiter BOUHLER and Dr. BRANDT, M.D. are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such a manner that persons, who, according to human judgment, are incurable, can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death.
signed ADOLF HITLER" After the receipt of this order, an organization was set up to execute this program.
Karl Brandt headed the medical section and Phillip Bouhler the administrative section. The defendant Hoven, as Chief Surgeon of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, took part in the program and personally ordered the transfer of at least 300 to 400 Jewish inmates of different nationalities, mostly non-German, to their death in the euthanasia station at Bernberg. The defendants Brack and Blome participated in their capacities as assistants to Bouhler and Conti.
Questionnaires were forwarded to the Ministry of the Interior from the various institutes and were then submitted to Karl Brandt and his staff for an expert opinion in order to determine the status of each patient. Then each of those experts indicated his opinion as to the eventual disposition of the patient; that is, whether or not the patient should be transferred to a killing station. The questionnaires were supposedly returned to the Ministry of the Interior, which, in turn, sent lists of the doomed patients to the different insane asylums, ordering the directors of the asylums to hand over the patients to a thing called the General Patient Transport Corporation for transfer to the particular stations where the killings took place. This Transport Corporation was not a real organization, but one of the come names used to disguise the true nature of the activities. The patients were then transferred to the station where they were immediately killed. This entire procedure took place without the consent of the relatives, but the relatives did receive a death certificate on which the cause of death was falsified.
The euthanasia program was an open secret in top Nazi circles. However, every possible effort had been made to keep it from the public in order to avoid intervention by the churches. In spite of all these precautions, it became commonly known in Germany as early as the summer of 1940 that these killings were going on and church authorities, as well as various legal officials, tried in vain to stop the killings.
Typical of the letters reaching the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Interior is the following:
Addressed to "The Reich Minister of Justice:
"I have a schizophrenic son in a Wurttembergian mental institution. I am shocked about the following absolutely reliable information.
"Since some weeks insane persons are being taken from the institutions allegedly on the grounds of military evacuation. The directors of the institutions are enjoined to absolute secrecy. Shortly afterwards the relatives are informed that the sick person has died of encephalitis. The ashes are available if so desired. This is plain murder just as in the concentration camps. This measure uniformly emanates from the SS in Berlin. The institutions dare not inform the authorities. Inquire at once at Rottenmuenster, Schassenried, Winzertal, all in Wurttemberg. Have the lists of two months ago examined and submitted to you, check upon the inmates who are there now and ask where the missing persons went to. For seven years now this gang of murderers defiled the German name. If my son is murdered, woe! I shall take care that these crimes will be published in all foreign newspapers. The SS may deny it as they always do. I shall demand prosecution by the public prosecutor.
"I cannot give my name nor the institution where my son is, otherwise I, too, won't live much longer.
Heil Hitler Oberregierungsrat N."If this program had stayed within the bounds set forth in Hitler's letter to Karl Brandt, it would have been bad enough.
We may pass over as quite irrelevant any such question as whether mercy killing may not in some circumstances be desirable, and whether a statute authorizing mercy killings under proper safeguards would be valid.
Such questions may be debatable, but they do not confront us here. No German law authorizing mercy killings was ever adopted. Hitler's memorandum to Brandt and Bouhler was not a law, not even a Nazi law. It was not intended to be a law or regarded as such even by the top Nazi officials. That is why the program was carried out with the utmost secrecy. The program was known to be utterly illegal by those who were in charge of it; they know it was nothing but murder.
This is brought out very clearly in a Getter from Himmler to the defendant Brack in December 1940:
"Dear Brack:
"I hear there is great excitement on the Alb because of the institution Grafeneck.
"The population recognizes the gray automobile of the SS and think they know what is going on at the constantly smoking crematory. What happens there is a secret and yet is no longer one. Thus the worst feeling has arisen there all in my opinion there remains only one thing, to discontinue the use of the institution in this place and in any event disseminate information in a clever and sensible manner by showing motion pictures on the subject of inherited and mental diseases in just that locality.
"May I ask for a report as to how the difficult problem was solved." But there are more fundamental matters here. The program did not stay even within the bounds of the secret Hitler authority.
Euthanasia became merely a polite word for the systematic slaughter of Jews and many other categories of persons useless or unfriendly to the Nazi regime. The evidence before the International Military Tribunal proved this clearly, and the judgment states and I quote from the transcript, pp. 16916-17, 17007:
"Reference should also be made to the policy which as in existence in Germany by the summer of 1940, under which all aged, insane and incurable people, 'useless eater', were transferred to special institutions where they were killed, and their relatives informed that they had died from natural causes. The victims were not confined to German citizens, but included foreign laborers, who were no longer able to work, and were therefore useless to the German war machine. It has been estimated that at least some 275,000 people were killed in this manner in nursing homes, hospitals and asylums, which were under the jurisdiction of the defendant Frick, in his capacity as Minister of the Interior. How many foreign workers were included in this total it has been quite impossible to determine."
I quote no more paragraph from the decision, pp. 17007:
"During the war nursing homes, hospitals, and asylums in which euthanasia was practiced as described elsewhere in this Judgment, came under Frick's jurisdiction. He had knowledge that insane, sick and aged people, 'useless eaters' were being systematically put to death. Complaints of these murders reached him, but he did nothing to stop them. A report of the Czech slovak War Crimes Commission estimated that 275,00 mentally deficient and aged people, for whose welfare he was responsible, fell victim to it."
As stated in the Indictment, the defendants involved in the euthanasia program sent their subordinate to the eastern occupied territories to assist in the mass extermination of Jews. This will be shown by abandon evidence, including the following excerpt from a letter from the defendant Brack to Himmler in 1942 from which I quote a paragraph:
"On the instructions of Rech-Leader BOHHLER I placed some of my men at the disposal of Brigadefuehrer GLOBOCNIK to execute his special mission. On is renewed request I have now transferred additional personnel. On this occasion Brigadefuehrer GLOBOCNIK ....../.... stated his opinion that the whole Jew-Action should be completed as quickly as possible so that one would not get caught in the middle of it one day if some difficulties should make a stoppage of the action necessary.
You yourself, Reichsfuehrer, have already expressed your view, that work should progress quickly for reasons of camouflage alone."
Protesting the lawless slaughter which even Himmler sought to "camouflage", the Bishop of Limburg in 1941 foresaw that such insane carnage spelled the downfall of the Third Reich. He wrote:
"And if anybody says that Germany cannot win the war, if there is yet a just God, these expressions are not the result of lack of love for the Fatherland but of a deep concern for our people. High authority as a moral concept has suffered a severe shock as a result of these happenings."
I have outlined the particular charges against the defendants under Counts Two, Three, and Four of the Indictment, and I have sketched the general nature of the evidence which we will present. But we must not overlook that the medical experiments were not an assortment of unrelated crimes. On the contrary, they constituted a well-integrated criminal program in which the defendants planned and collaborated among themselves and with others.
We have here, in other words, a conspiracy and a common design, as is charged in Count One of the Indictment, to commit the criminal experiments set forth in paragraphs 6 and 11 thereof. There was a common design to discover, or improve, various medical techniques. There was a common design to utilize for this purpose the unusual resources which the defendants had at their disposal, consisting of numberless unfortunate victims of Nazi conquest and Nazi ideology. The defendants conspired and agreed together to utilize these human resources for nefarious and murderous purposes, and proceeded to put their criminal design into execution. Numbered among the countless victims of the conspiracy and the crimes are Germans, and nationals of countries overrun by Germany, and Gypsies, and prisoners-of-war and Jews of many nationalities. All the elements of a conspiracy to commit the crimes charged in paragraphs 6 and 11 are present and all will be clearly established by the proof.
There were many co-conspirators who are not in the dock. Among the planners and leaders of this plot were Conti and Grawitz, and Hippke whose whereabouts is unknown. Among the actual executioners, Dr. Ding is dead and Rascher is thought to be dead. There were many others.
Final judgment as to the relative degrees of guilt among those in the dock must await the presentation of the proof in detail. Nevertheless, before the introduction of evidence, it will be helpful too look again at the defendants and their **art in the conspiracy. What manner of men are they, and what was their major role?
The twenty physicians in the dock range from leaders of German scientific Medicine, with excellent international reputations, down to the dregs of the German medical profession. All of them have in common a callous lack of consideration and human regard for, and an unprincipled willingness to abuse their power over, the poor, unfortunate, defenseless creatures who had been deprived of their rights by a ruthless and criminal government. All of them violated the Hippocratic commandments which they had solemnly sworn to uphold and abide by, including the fundamental principle **************************************** Outstanding men of science, distinguished for their scientific ability in Germany and abroad, are the defendants Rostock and Rose.
Both exemplify, in their training and practice alike, the highest traditions of German medicine. Rostock headed the Department of Surgery at the University of Berlin and served as dean of its medical school.
Rose studied under the famous surgeon, Enderlen, at Heidelberg and then became a distinguished specialist in the fields of public health and tropical diseases.
Hanloser and Schroeder are outstanding medical administrators. Both of them made their careers in military medicine and reached the peak of their profession. Five more defendants are much younger men who are nevertheless already known as the possessors of considerable scientific ability, or capacity in medical administration. These include the defendants Karl Brandt, Ruff, Beiglbock, Schaefer and Becker-Freyseng.
A number of the others such as Romberg and Fischer, are well-trained, and several of them attained high, professional position. But among the remainder few were known as outstanding scientific men. Among them at the fact of the list is Blome who has published his autobiography entitled "Embattled Doctor" in which he sets forth that he eventually decided to become a doctor because a medical career would enable him to became "master over life and death."
The part that each of these twenty physicians and their three lay accomplices played in the conspiracy and its execution corresponds closely to his professional interest and his place in the hierarchy of the Third Reich as shown in the chart. The motivating source for this conspiracy came from two principal sources. Himmler, as head of the SS, a most terrible engine of oppression with vast resources, could provide numberless victims for the experiments. By doing so, he enhanced the prestige of his organization and was able to give free rein to the Nazi racial theories of which he was a leading protagonist and to develop new techniques for the mass exterminations which were dear to his heart. The German military leaders, as the other main driving force, caught up the opportunity which Himmler presented them with and ruthlessly capitalized on Himmler's hideous overtures in an endeavor to strengthen their military machine.
And so the infernal drama was played just as it had been conceived in the minds of the authors. Special problems which confronted the German military or civilian authorities, were, on the orders of the medical leaders, submitted for solution in the concentration camps.
Thus we find Karl Brandt stimulating to epidemic jaundice experiments, Schroeder demanding "40 healthy test subjects for the seawater experiments, Handloser providing the impetus for Ding's fearful typhus researches, and Milch and Hippke at the root of the freezing tests. Under Himmler's authority, the medical leaders of the SS-Grawitz, Genzken, Gebhardt and others -- set the wheels in motion. They arranged for the procurement of victims through other branches of the SS, and gave directions to their underlings in the SS medical service such as Hoven and Fischer. Himmler's administrative assistants, Sievers and Rudolf Brandt, passed on the Himmler orders, gave a push here and a shove there, and kept the machiner oiled. Blome and Brack assisted from the side of the civilian and party authorities.
The Wehrmacht provided supervision and technical assistance for those experiments in which it was most interested. A low pressure chamber was furnished for the high altitude tests, the services of Weltz, Ruff, Romberg and Rascher for the high altitude and freezing experiments and those of Becker-Freyseng, Schaefer, and Beiglbock for seawater. In the important but sinister typhus researches, the eminent Dr. Rose appeared for the Luftwaffe to give expert guidance to Ding.
The proper stops were taken to insure that the results were made available to those who needed to know. Annual meetings of the consulting physician of the Wehrmacht held under Handloser's direction were favored with lectures on some of the experiments. The report on the high altitude test was sent to Field Marshal Milch, and a moving picture about them was shown at the air Ministry in Berlin. Weltz spoke on the effects of freezing at a medical conference in Nurnberg, the same symposium at which Rascher and others passed on their devilish knowledge.
There could, we submit, be no clearer proof of conspiracy. This was the medical service of the Third Reich at work. Among the defendants in the box sit the surviving leaders of that service. We will ask the Tribunal to determine that neither scientific eminence nor superficial respectability shall shield them against the fearful consequences of the orders they gave.
I intend to pass very briefly over matters of medical ethics, such as the conditions under which a physician may lawfully perform a medical experiment upon a person who has voluntarily subjected himself to it, or whether experiments may lawfully be performed upon criminals who have been condemned to death. This case does not present such problems. We refined questions confront us here.
None of the victims of the atrocities perpetrated by these defendants were volunteers, and this is true regardless of what these unfortunate people nay have said or signed before their turtures began. Most of the victims had not been condemned to death, and those who had been were not criminals, unless it be a crime to be a Jew, or a pole, or a Gypsy, or a Russian prisoner of-war.
Whatever book or treatise on medical ethics we may examine, and whatever expert on forensic medicine we may question, will say that it is a fundamental and inescapable obligation of every physician under any known system of law not to perform a dangerous experiment without the subject's consent. In the tyranny that was Nazi Germany, no one could give such a consent to the medical agents of the Stake; everyone lived in fear and acted under dur** I fervently hope that none of us here in the court room will have to suffer in silence while it is said on the part of these defenants that the wretched and helpless people whom they froze and drowned and burned and poisoned were volunteers. If such a shame less lie is spoken here, we need only remember the four girls who were taken from the Revensbruck concentration camp and made to li** naked with the frozen and all but dead Jews who survived Dr. Rascher's tank of ice water. One of these women, whose hair and eyes and figure were pleasing to Dr. Rascher, when asked by him why she had volunteered for such a task, replied:"rather half a year in a brothel than half a year in a concentration camp."
Were it necessary, one could make a long list of the respects in which the experiments which those defendants performed depart from every known standard of medical ethics. But the gulf between these atrocities and serious research in the healing art is so patent that such a tabulation would be cynical.
We need look no further than the law which the Nazis themselves passed on the 24th of November 1933 for the protection of animals. This law states explicitly that it is designed to proven cruelty and indifference of man towards animals and to awaken and develop sympathy and understanding for animals as one of the highest moral values of a people.
The soul of the German people should abhor the principle of more utility without consideration of the moral aspects. The law states further that all operations or treatments which are associated with pain or injury, especially experiments involving the use of cold, heat, or infection, are prohibited, and can be permitted only under special exceptional circumstances. Special written authorization by the head of the department is necessary in every case, and experimenters are prohibited from performing experiments according to their own free judgment. Experiments for the purpose of teaching must be reduced to a minimum. Medico-legal tests, vaccinations, withdrawal of blood for diagnostic purposes and trial of vaccines prepared according to well-established scientific principles are permitted but the animals have to be killed immediately and painlessly after such experiments. Individual physicians are not permitted to use dogs to increase their surgical skill by such practices. National Socialism regards it as a sacred duty of German science to keep down the number of painful animal experiments to a minimum.
If the principles announced in this law had been followed for human beings as well, this indictment would never have been filed. It is perhaps the deepest shame of the defendants that it probably never even occurred to them that human beings should be treated with at least equal humanity.
This case is one of the simplest and clearest of those that will be tried in this building. It is also one of the most important. It is true that the defendants in the box were not among the highest leaders of the Third Reich. They are not tho war lords who assembled and drove the German military machine, nor the industrial barons who made tho parts, nor tho Nazi politicians who debased and brutalized the mines of the German people. But this case, perhaps more than any other we will try, epitomizes Nazi thought and the Nazi way of life, because those defendants pursued the savage premises of Nazi thought so far.
The things that these defendants did, like so many other things that happened under the Third Reich, were the result of the noxious merger of German militarism and Nazi racial objectives. No will see the results of this merger in many other fields of German life; we see it here in the field of medicine.
Germany surrendered herself to this foul conjunction of evil forces. The nation fell victim to the Nazi scourge because its leaders lacked the wisdom to foresee the consequences and the courage to stand firm in the face of throats. Their failure was the inevitable outcome of that sinister undercurrent of German philosophy which preaches the supreme importance of the state and the complete subordination of the individual, A nation in which the individual means nothing will find few leaders courageous and able enough to serve its best interests.
Individual Germans did indeed give warning of what was in store, and German doctors and scientists were numbered among the courageous gew. At a meeting of Bavarian psychiatrists hold in Munich in 1931, when the poisonous doctrines of the Nazis were already sweeping Germany, there was a discussion of mercy killings and sterilization, and the Nazi views on these matters, with which we are now familiar, were advanced. A German professor named Oswald Bunke rose and made a reply more eloquent and prophetic than anyone could have possibly realized at the time. He said:
"I should like to make two additional remarks. One of them is, please for God's sake leave our present financial needs out of all these considerations. 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 crisis. 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. But to introduce economic points of view is not only inappropriate but outright dangerous because the logical consequences of the thought that for financial reasons all these human being who could be dispensed with for the moment should be exterminated, is a quite monstrous logical conclusion: we would then have to put to death not only the mentally sick and the psychopathic personalities but all the crippled including the disabled veterans, all old maids who do not work, all widows whose children have completed their education, and all those who live on their income or draw pensions.
That would certainly save a lot of money but the probability is that we will not do it.
"The second point of advice is to use utmost restraint, at least until the political atmosphere here in this country shall have improved, and scientific theories concerning heredity and race can no longer be abused for political purposes. Because, if the discussion about sterilization today is carried into the arena of political contest, then pretty soon we will no longer hear about the mentally sick but, instead, about Aryans and nonAryans, about the blonde Germanic race and about inferior people with round skulls. That anything useful could come from that is certainly improbable; but science in general and genealogy and eugenics in particular would suffer an injury which could not easily be repaired again."
I said at the outset of this statement that the Third Reich died of its own poison. This case is a striking demonstration not ???? of the tremendous degradation of German medical ethics which Nazi doctrine brought about, but of the undermining of the medical art and thwarting of the techniques which the defendants sought to employ. The Nazis have, to a certain extent, succeeded in convincing the peoples of the world that the Nazi system, although ruthless, was absolutely efficient; that although savage, it was completely scientific; that although entirely devoid of humanity, it was highly systematic -- that "it got things done." The evidence which this Tribunal will hear will explode this myth. The Nazi methods of investigation were inefficient and unscientific, and their techniques of research were unsystematic.
These experiments revealed nothing which civilized medicine can use. It was, indeed, ascertained that phenol or gasoline injected intravenously will kill a man inexpensively and within sixty seconds. This and a few other "advances" are all in the field of "thanatology." There is no doubt that a number of these new methods may be useful to criminals everywhere and there is no doubt that they may be useful to a criminal state. Certain advances in destructive methodology we cannot deny, and indeed from Himmler's standpoint this may well have been the principal objective.
Apart from these deadly fruits, the experiments were not only criminal but a scientific failure. It is indeed as if a just deity had shrouded the solutions which they attempted to reach with murderous means. The moral shortcomings of the defendants and the precipitous ease with which they decided to commit murder in quest of "scientific results", dulled also that scientific hesitancy, that thorough thinking-through, that responsible weighing of every single stop which alone can insure scientifically valid results.
Even if they had merely been forced to pay as little as two dollars for human experimental subjects, such as American investigators nay have to pay for a cat, they night have thought twice before wasting unnecessary numbers, and thought of simpler and better ways to solve their problems. The fact that these investigators had free and unrestricted access to human beings to be experimented upon misled then to the dangerous and fallacious conclusion that the results would thus be better and more quickly obtainable than if they had gone through the labor of preparation, thinking, and meticulous pre-investigation.
A particularly striking example is the seawater experiment. I believe that three of the accused -- Schaefer, Becker-Freyseng, and Beiglbueck -- will today admit that this problem could have been solved simply and definitively within the space of one afternoon. On May 20, 1944 when these accused convened to discuss the problem, a thinking chemist could have solved it right in the presence of the assembly within the space of a few hours by the use of nothing more gruesome than a piece of jolly, a semipermeable membrane and a salt solution, and the German Armed Forces would have had the answer on May 21, 1944. But what happened instead? The vast armies of the disenfranchised slaves were at the beck and call of this sinister assembly; and instead of thinking, they simply relied on their power over human beings rendered rightless by a criminal state and ment. What time, effort, and staff did it take to get that machinery in motion! Letters had to be written, physicians, of whome dire shortage existed in the German Armed Forces whose soldiers went poorly attended, had to be taken out of hospital positions and dispatched hundreds of miles away to obtain the answer which should have been known in a few hours, but which thus did not become available to the German Armed Forces until after the completion of the gruesome show, and until 42 people had been subjected to the tortures of the damned, the very tortures which Greek mythology had reserved for Tantalus.
In short, this conspiracy was a ghastly failure as well as a hideous crime. The creeping paralysis of Nazi supersition spread through the German medical profession and, just as it destroyed character and morals, it dulled the mind.
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.
That is why their guilt is greater than that of any of the other defendants in the dock. They are the men who utterly failed their country and their profession, who showed neither courage nor wisdom nor the vestiges of moral character. It is their failure, together with the failure of the leaders of Germany in other walks of life, that debauched Germany and led to her defeat. It is because of them and other like them that we all live in a stricken world.
JUDGE BEALS: The prosecution has now consumed all of the time allocated it for its opening statement. Is the Prosecution prepared to proceed with the introduction of any evidence this afternoon?
GENERAL TAYLOR: Your Honor, the document book for Mr. McHaney's first part of the evidence was not ready until yesterday, which was a Sunday, and if agreeable to the Tribunal, it would be more convenient for us, and I think for the defendants, to resume tomorrow morning when we have had more time to look at it.
JUDGE BEALS: The Tribunal will recess until 9:30 o'clock tomorrow morning.
"The Tribunal adjourned until 10 December 1946, at 9:30 hours.)
Official Transcript of the American Military Tribunal in the matter of the United States of America, against Karl Brandt, et al, defendants, sitting at Nurnberg, Germany, on 10 December 1946, 0930-1430, Justice Beals, presiding.
THE MARSHAL: The honorable judges of Military Tribunal. Military Tribunal 1 is now in session. God save the United States of America and this Honorable Tribunal. There will be order in the court-room.
THE PRESIDENT: Will the Marshal ascertain if the defendants are all present.
THE MARSHAL: May it please your Honor, all defendants are present in the courtroom.
THE PRESIDENT: Secretary-General, will you note for the record the presence of the defendants in the courtroom.
The prosecution may proceed.
MR. McHANEY: May it pleas the Tribunal:
Before any evidence is presented, it is my purpose to show the process whereby documents have been procured and processed in order to be presented in evidence by the United States. I shall also describe and illustrate the plan of presenting documents to be followed by the prosecution in this case.
When the United States Army entered German territory it had specialized military personnel who duties were to capture and preserve enemy documents, records, and archives.
Such documents were assembled in temporary documents centers. Later each Army established fixed document centers in the U.S. Zone of Occupation where there documents were assembled and the slow process of indexing and cataloguing was begun. Certain of these document centers in the U.S. Zone of Occupation have since been closed and the documents assembled there sent to other document centers.
When the International Military Tribunal was set up, field teams under the direction of Major William M. Coogan were organized and sent out to the various document centers. Great masses of German documents and records were screened and examined. Those selected were sent to Nurnberg to be processed.