Statements Concerning the Question of Responsibility of the Defendant Rose for the Malaria Experiments Carried Out by Professor Claus Schilling at the Concentration Camp Dachau and Concerning the Question of Rose’s Participation in These Experiments.
In the indictment, Professor Rose is not charged with special responsibility for the malaria experiments carried out by Professor Schilling at the Dachau concentration camp or with participation. The defendant Rose is also not mentioned in Document Book No. 4 of the prosecution which deals with these malaria experiments. In the course of the verbal proceedings in the court, the prosecution has, however, preferred charges against Professor Rose to this effect and introduced several new documents in the trial during the cross-examination of defendant Rose (NO-1752, Pros. Ex. 487; NO-1753, Pros. Ex. 488; NO-1755, Pros. Ex. 489; NO-1756, Pros. Ex. 486) and also heard the witness Vieweg concerning this question. (German Tr., 13 Dec. 46, pp. 464-516.)
This evidence shows that among others also the Department for Tropical Diseases of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, under the direction of the defendant Rose, sent anopheles eggs and malaria cultures on a few occasions to Professor Schilling at Dachau during the years 1942 to 1943. At this juncture it should be mentioned that it is completely immaterial for the judgment of the case what the name of the culture of malaria tertiana was and whether or not its name was first changed by Schilling to “Culture Rose”. The above-mentioned evidence also shows that Professor Schilling told Professor Rose in two of his letters about his breeding of mosquitoes; finally it also shows that Professor Schilling asked the defendant Rose from Italy to procure for him spleens of persons whose death had been caused by malaria. This was in 1941, at a time when Schilling was not yet working in Dachau. According to the testimony given by the defendant Rose during cross-examination (Tr. pp. 6412-3), he evidently complied with Schilling’s request.
The Tribunal will have to decide whether these above-mentioned activities of the Department for Tropical Diseases of the Robert Koch Institute under the management of the defendant Rose or his own activities, constitute, within the meaning of the Penal Code, participation on the part of the defendant Rose in the deeds of Professor Schilling. In my opinion this decision can only be a negative one, for the followings reasons:
The delivery of material necessary for malaria research such as anopheles eggs and malaria cultures was one of the official duties of the Department for Tropical Diseases of the Robert Koch Institute. (Rose 11, Rose Ex. 27.) This department had a section which dealt exclusively with these matters. This can be seen from both the yearly reports of the Robert Koch Institute and from the report covering the Third Conference East of Consulting Specialists discussing work-projects. (Rose 38, Rose Ex. 10; Rose 10, Rose Ex. 26; Rose 12, Rose Ex. 28.) Deliveries of this kind are internationally common practice and were never denied by the defendant Rose. It is also common practice to use the organs of human corpses for the carrying out of scientific research. (Tr. p. 6474; Rose 51, Rose Ex. 50.)
The prerequisites for such deliveries are that they are requested either by well-known institutes or by renowned research scientists. It cannot be denied that Schilling, a coworker of Robert Koch and a member of the malaria commission of the League of Nations, was famous as a malaria research scientist. In a case of this kind, the non-delivery of such material would have been an express violation of traditional practice and of official duty. It is also not international usage for the orderer to be questioned about the intended use of the material before its delivery. (Compare Mrugowsky 4a, Mrugowsky Ex. 96; Rose 49, Rose Ex. 48; German Tr., 19 June 47, p. 9680.) Even if Professor Rose declared, in the witness box during examination on his own behalf, that he assumes full responsibility for it, it should be mentioned here that such deliveries are carried out in such a routine way that the chief of the institute often knows nothing about it since these matters are dispatched independently by the personnel employed by him in the laboratory. This also was the procedure in the case in question as the evidence shows unequivocally. (Rose 35, Rose Ex. 32; German Tr., 16 Dec. 46, p. 507; Tr. pp. 6020, 6352.) Thus, it is by no means surprising that the defendant Rose could no longer remember the correspondence with Professor Schilling put before him by the prosecution during cross-examination especially since undoubtedly it often happens that, as in the case in question, although the letters are sent by the orderer to the head of such an institute personally, the dispatching of the order is nevertheless carried out independently by the personnel of the institute.
Besides, the delivery of these materials by the Department for Tropical Diseases of the Robert Koch Institute to Professor Schilling was by no means a prerequisite for the carrying out of his experiments in Dachau, since it has already been established that Schilling obtained no less than 12 other malaria cultures from other institutes. (NO-1752, Pros. Ex. 487; German Tr., 16 Dec. 46, p. 509.) Professor Schilling also obtained mosquitoes from other institutes. (German Tr., 16 Dec. 46, p. 507.) Naturally these institutes could also not have had any scruples about sending material to Professor Schilling. In addition to this, Professor Schilling personally maintained a group of people to catch mosquitoes. (German Tr., 16 Dec. 46, p. 508.) If Professor Schilling turned at all to the Robert Koch Institute in this matter, the main reason for doing so was that for decades he himself had been the head of the Department for Tropical Diseases of the Institute and that personnel were still working there who had formerly already been employed under his management.
The defendant Rose did, as a matter of fact, oppose Schilling’s scientific approach to the problem as may clearly be seen from his opinion on Schilling for the Reich Ministry of the Interior (Tr. p. 6021) and from his lecture in Basel. (Rose 25, Rose Ex. 31.) However, to judge by Professor Schilling’s personality and past he could, nevertheless, not conceive the idea that Professor Schilling’s work at Dachau could be anything but completely above reproach. Experiments on human beings in malaria research are first of all, a matter of course and common practice. Even if the defendant Rose always limited his own work to the traditional evaluation of therapeutic malaria infections, experiments on prisoners in this field must unquestionably be permissible from an ethical point of view, as can be proved by the malaria experiments on many hundreds of prisoners in American prisons. (Karl Brandt 1, Karl Brandt Ex. 1; Karl Brandt 117, Karl Brandt Ex. 103; Mrugowsky 80, Mrugowsky Ex. 76; Rose 50, Rose Ex. 49.) Apart from the fact that the delivery of material to Schilling by no means obliged him to inform himself about the latter’s research work and its ways and means, Rose really had no knowledge whatsoever of the object of the research carried out by Schilling, and did not know the collaborators of the latter. (Rose 29, Rose Ex. 34; Rose 30, Rose Ex. 33.) Much less was he informed about the conditions under which Schilling was working in Dachau.
The defendant Rose himself is a well-known malaria research scientist. Malaria research was the main study of his department at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin and also later in Pfaffenrode. Professor Schilling only worked with malaria tertiana (benign tertian) in Dachau. (NO-1752, Pros. Ex. 487.) Professor Rose, as an experienced malaria research scientist, knew of course that this form of malaria is not a dangerous one and that no complications are to be expected from it. (Rose 50, Rose Ex. 49.) The witness Vieweg (Tr. pp. 457-458) also expressly stated that none of the prisoners died of malaria, but that the cause of death could be traced back to technical errors [Kunstfehler] or to complications, as, for example, faulty puncture of the liver resulting in hemorrhage due to omission of an operation and an overdose of pyramidon in therapy, outbreak of typhus among the experimental subjects and finally, wrong doses in the treatment with salvarsan. Just in passing it should also be mentioned here that the defendant Rose also opposed this last-mentioned method of treatment. This method was prohibited in the German Luftwaffe at his suggestion. (NO-922, Pros. Ex. 435.)
No further explanation is necessary to show that solely the person carrying out the experiments is responsible for technical errors and negligence in the process. It seems to me that not even his superiors who ordered the work, namely Himmler and Grawitz, were responsible for them. However, a person assigned to supervise these experiments would have been obliged to take action whenever he was informed of such technical errors or negligence. The defendant Rose, however, was neither assigned to supervise nor was he informed of these matters. It is also unfair to assume that he knew about these matters, because he happened to take part in the conference on freezing experiments which took place in Nuernberg in October 1942. Firstly, the freezing experiments carried out by Professor Holzloehner, although also taking place on Dachau, were in no way connected with the malaria experiments carried out by Professor Schilling. Furthermore, the participants of the conference were misinformed about the method employed in these experiments and about the status of the experimental subjects. (Handloser 37, Handloser Ex. 18; German Tr., 12 Dec. 46, p. 315.)