Dr. Walter Sonntag, the senior doctor at Ravensbrück, had trained to be a dentist, but switched to medicine when he realized the career opportunities for doctors who were given a prominent role in Hitler’s racial cleansing program. Sonntag joined the Nazi Party and the SS along with the other medical…
Ravensbrück was conveniently situated and its Revier (hospital) was staffed with doctors and nurses. Experimental medical atrocities were conducted under the watchful eye of chief of SS chief Heinrich Himmler who was fascinated by medical experimentation, and his approval was necessary for every deadly experiment conducted at SS concentration camps. Five miles from…
Physicians were not pawns of the Nazi regime; they legitimized mass murder. In contradiction to the myth perpetuated by both the German and American medical establishments; the vast majority of physicians and biological scientists lent their support to Racial Hygiene laws. They provided the “scientific” ideological justification for exterminating carriers…
At the end of the war, Allied and Soviet military intelligence officials were on a competitive mission to locate the weapons arsenals, radar, rockets and jet engines, and to obtain Germany’s military, scientific and technical information, in the hope of obtaining advanced beneficial results from their research. During the war…
Even as their profession’s crimes were coming to light, they elected Dr. Karl Haedenkamp, a Nazi as their first president. His specialty had been the removal of Jewish physicians from the professional associations. His successor was Dr. Erich Fromm, a Nazi who was an active SS (Storm Troopers); the third…
It was the first of twelve U.S. military tribunals at Nuremberg. Sixteen Nazi doctors were tried at Nuremburg along with four non-Party physicians and three SS administrators — in all, twenty-three. The focus of the trial was the medical atrocities; heinous experiments conducted on concentration camp inmates; bringing to public…
Buchenwald Trial at Dachau, April 11 –August 14, 1947 Between July 1937 and April 1945, some 250,000 persons of 30 nationalities were imprisoned at various times at Buchenwald; by Feb. 1945, there were 112,000 prisoners at Buchenwald. It is estimated that about 56,000 were killed or died from starvation and…
Judgment at Nuremberg All sixteen Nazi doctors were found guilty; seven were sentenced to death and executed, nine were convicted and sentenced to prison, and seven were acquitted. Karl Gebhardt was found guilty of “crimes against humanity” and war crimes for his experimental atrocities at Ravensbrück and was hanged. His…
The revelations at Nuremberg were extremely discomforting to the American medical establishment: the sheer unprecedented scale of immorality of the Nazi doctors was staggering — and the potential of guilt by association. The fact that the American medical profession had also enthusiastically embraced eugenics; Americans provided financial support for Nazi…
In 1946, the World Medical Association (WMA) was formed by representatives of 32 national medical associations. In 1947, one month after the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trial, the WMA held its first meeting, when it adopted a new physician’s oath, omitting injunctions against abortion and euthanasia. Almost from its inception,…
“Children’s Euthanasia & the German Society of Pediatrics – Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kinderheilkund (DGK) The Nazi “children’s euthanasia” program was a unique phenomenon in the history of humankind; psychiatrists and pediatricians targeted and systematically murdered disabled children as the means for realizing a social Darwinist utopia. Before a child was…
In 1962, the World Medical Association (WMA) Committee distributes a Draft Code of Ethics on Human Experimentation specifying populations that could not be used as research subjects. These include: children in institutions; all prisoners and persons retained in prisons, penitentiaries, or reformatories, mental hospitals and hospitals for mental defectives. (Draft…
