The question of polygal was from the beginning one of the weakest counts of the indictment against Dr. Blome. It is a remedy to make the blood clot and to prevent people from bleeding to death as a result of wounds inflicted in battle or by operation, or from injury due to excessive loss of blood. This equally innocuous and beneficial remedy was apparently made the object of a charge only because Dr. Rascher once maintained that he had killed four concentration camp inmates with pistol shots in order to try out polygal on them. (NO-1424, Pros. Ex. 462; NO-065, Pros. Ex. 221.) But I believe that every intelligent person must have approached this contention of Rascher’s with the strongest distrust, because one cannot try out a styptic on a dead person, and Dr. Blome, like other physicians, has repeatedly assured me that they did not understand what Dr. Rascher had in mind with such actions, which of course had nothing to do with “experiments”. But even on the assumption that these stories of Dr. Rascher were true—that he had actually killed some concentration camp prisoners in order to “experiment” on them with “polygal”—by what right can Dr. Blome be held responsible for this, a man who knew nothing at all about these crimes of Dr. Rascher? Dr. Blome has been waiting in vain for evidence to be submitted by the prosecution to prove that he (Dr. Blome) had had anything to do with those actions of Dr. Rascher, that he had at least approved or at any rate had some knowledge of them. The document presented by the prosecution proves that Dr. Blome can certainly not be held responsible for the alleged shooting of four concentration camp inmates by Dr. Rascher. (NO-1424 Pros. Ex. 462.) This murder committed by Dr. Rascher, if it was committed at all, happened before August 1943, according to Document NO-1424. It was during this month that the witness Friedrich Karl Rascher found in the writing table of his nephew, Dr. Rascher, the report on the shooting of the four concentration camp inmates. Dr. Blome, however, heard about polygal for the first time only during his second visit to Himmler in August or September 1943; before that time the matter was unknown to him. This statement by Dr. Blome concerning the date is in agreement with the testimony of Sievers of 10 April 1947, according to which the joint visit of Dr. Blome, Sievers, and Rascher to Himmler took place in the autumn of 1943. From this it is evident that the murder of the four concentration camp inmates by Dr. Rascher, if it has really any connection with polygal, happened without doubt at a time when Dr. Blome still had no knowledge of this styptic. Dr. Blome has rightly pointed out that it would have been a completely incomprehensible insanity to kill people only for the purpose of testing a styptic at a time when every day offered an abundance of material for the observation and study of the effect of polygal in the thousands of wounded soldiers and of patients operated on at the front as well as among the civilian population.
In this connection it is, incidentally, quite interesting to learn from the interrogation of the witness Neff that he never saw or observed any such “experiments” by Dr. Rascher. Neither did Dr. Rascher tell Neff anything about them, although Neff held a particularly confidential position with Rascher and otherwise learned much about Rascher and his “experiments”. Even in the camp nothing was said at the time about these alleged “experiments” of Dr. Rascher with polygal, although it could certainly not have been and also did not have to be kept secret in the camp if Rascher had actually shot four concentration camp inmates in order to carry out “experiments” on them with polygal.
These facts justify serious doubts as to whether those “experiments” ever took place at all and especially whether they have anything to do with the hemostatic polygal.
In reality, polygal is an absolutely harmless drug, whether it is injected or taken in tablet form, and the use of such a drug in this form can in no case be considered a criminal experiment against humanity as specified by the indictment before this Tribunal. Even when administered by injection with the subsequent drawing of a few drops of blood from the experimental subject, it is completely harmless. It does not cause any more “pain” than any other injection, and the whole test of this drug consists solely of taking one cc. of blood from the vein of the so-called experimental subject. Thus we are not dealing with any experiment of the kind that could be considered criminal because it causes severe pains or because it is dangerous or for any other reasons.
Besides, the concept of “criminal experiments on human beings” has already been explained at the trial of Field Marshal Milch[[77]] by the verdict of 16 April 1947; this verdict expressly limits the range of such experiments to experiments “which could cause torture or death to the experimental subjects.” Thus one cannot, in the present proceedings, object to those experiments which cannot ordinarily be assumed to cause death to the experimental subject or be accompanied by severe pain. Neither took place when polygal was administered. For either it serves as a hemostatic which can only be of advantage to the patient or, in the reverse case, it simply has no effect. Polygal can never have any harmful consequences, least of all cause any damage to health; nor could this be claimed by the prosecution, for polygal is generally used in surgery nowadays.
And finally, all the persons who submitted to polygal tests were volunteers. Dr. Blome, however, could not prove this here by interrogating the inventor of the drug, Feix, because the prosecution prevented defense counsel from examining Feix by transferring the latter to Dachau, whence he later escaped. The transcript of the interrogation of Feix by the prosecution was not submitted here, even though Feix had told me personally that he could not understand how any blame in connection with polygal could be put on Dr. Blome. But another witness, namely Walter Neff, testified here on the witness stand that the experimental subjects on whom the experiments had been carried out had volunteered, just as he himself had done. Since Neff was produced as witness by the prosecution,[[78]] the latter will hardly want to declare the testimony, sworn to by Neff, to be untrue.
The verdict of 16 April 1947 against Field Marshal Milch quoted above, states explicitly that medical experiments are punishable only when carried out without the consent of the subjects. Furthermore, punishability presumes that the experiments were a “torture” for the experimental subject or jeopardized his life. Both conditions obviously do not apply to polygal. Thus one comes to the conclusion that it would have been better not to mention within the limits of this trial subjects where even the closest observer has to look very carefully to see whether he could not possibly find anything to object to.
This applies especially to the report of the Institute for Military Scientific Research (Department Rascher), on coagulation of blood. (NO-438, Pros. Ex. 240.) In this report, the author, Dr. Rascher, emphasizes the importance of “Polygal 10” for combat troops and in operations and describes five operations where polygal was used with good results. There can be no doubt that those were five bona fide operations which were performed on patients in an entirely legitimate way and which tested polygal’s effectiveness in stopping bleedings in an absolutely proper manner, as it is usually done, with similar drugs. It is inconceivable how a conclusion of illegal “experiments” could have been drawn from that report.
One of these five legitimate operations, by the way, is described in a report by the camp physician Dr. Kahr, dated 12 October 1943 [10 December 1943] (NO-656, Pros. Ex. 247); it does not offer any basis for assuming an “experiment”. In this connection it is worthwhile to note that Dr. Blome himself, in his affidavit of 25 October 1946 (NO-471, Pros. Ex. 238), under section 8 describes the use of polygal in cases of “battle wounds and operations”, but deals with “experiments on human beings” only in the next section, 9. Therefore, Dr. Blome knew from the beginning that polygal had nothing to do with “experiments on human beings”.