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…
“Despite gross violations of individual rights, many physicians went on to have successful careers, and in many cases were honored.” (Lawrence W. White M.D. The Nazi Doctors and the Medical Community, Journal of Medical Humanities, 1996) Hans-Joachim Sewering, MD was a former member of the SS and the Nazi party. He was…
The World Medical Association — which ostensibly had been founded in 1947 in an effort to distance the profession from Nazi medical crimes — elected a Nazi medical criminal, Dr. Hans Joachim Sewering, as its president. The vote was 53 to 9, with 9 abstentions. Sewering was a former SS…
Academic institutions and professional medical bodies have steadfastly refused to face up to the enormous moral culpability that academic medical researchers and institutions bear for the human carnage and suffering they caused during the Nazi era. They have avoided confronting the scientific and personal legacy of their activities and active…
The deliberate use of rape as a weapon of terror has always been and continues to be part of wartime violence against women. The German military and the SS raped and sexually assaulted women wherever they conquered. Rape was (and is) often accompanied by torture and mutilation and frequently ends…
A Holocaust Crossroads: Jewish Women and Children in Ravensbrück, edited by Irith Dublon Knebel, 2010 Harmut Hanauske-Abel. Not a Slippery Slope or Sudden Subversion: German Medicine and National Socialism in 1933, BMJ, 1996 Yehuda G. Adam. Justice in Nuremberg: The Doctors’ Trial – 60 Years Later A Reminder, Israeli Medical…
"Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates." Associated Press, Feb 27, 2011
Using drugs to cope with battlefield traumas is not discussed much outside the Army, but inside the service it has been the subject of debate for years.
