Here also—in addition to the care for the population—the lives of soldiers were at stake, soldiers who had to be protected from death and epidemics. In Professor Bickenbach’s experiment, the issue was the lives of women and children who without 45 million gas masks would have been as unprotected against the expected gas attack as the Japanese were against the atomic bomb. Biological warfare was imminent, even praised abroad as cheaper and more effective than the atomic bomb.
Is it really against the law and all political morals if the state in such a situation provides for the expected emergency and orders the necessary medical experiments to be performed on its own citizens? As applied to foreigners such procedure is limited in principle. In my closing brief I have discussed the exceptions.
What is to be done is decided not by the physician but by the political leader. Even the expert Dr. Ivy had to grant him the fundamental authority.
The question is why, with the legal position so clear, a man like Keitel refused to have such experiments carried out in the Wehrmacht, and why some of the defendants themselves try to disprove any connection with the experiments. The answer is that a measure may be as unavoidable as war and yet be abhorred in the same way.
Unlike Professor Ivy, these men certainly considered these experiments an evil, and their desire was not to become involved in them personally, if possible, and not to allow troops to participate in them who should not be burdened with such questions and who had no insight into the necessity of the measures to be taken. In spite of everything, Germany was not yet so “communized” that all private feelings in the individual had disappeared.
The prosecution opposes to this necessity the condition of absolute voluntariness.
It was a surprise to hear from the expert Professor Ivy that in the penitentiaries many hundreds of volunteers were pressing for admission to experiments, and that more volunteered than could be used. I do not want to dispose of this phenomenon with irony and sarcasm. There may be people who realize that the community has the right to ask them for a sacrifice. Their feeling of justice may tell them that insistence on humanity has its limits. If humanity means the appeal to the strong not to forget the weak in the abundance of might and wealth, the weak should also make their contribution when all are in need.
But what if in the emergency of war the convicts, and those declared to be unworthy to serve in the armed forces, refuse to accept such a sacrifice voluntarily, and only prove an asocial burden to state and community and bring about the downfall of the community? Is not compulsion by the state then admissible as an additional expiation?
The prosecution says “No”. According to this human rights demand the downfall of human beings.
But there is a mixture of voluntariness and compulsory expiation, “purchased voluntariness.” Here the experimental subject does not make a sacrifice out of conviction for the good of the community but for his own good. The subject gives his consent because he is to receive money, cigarettes, a mitigation of punishment, etc. There may be isolated cases of this nature where the person is really a volunteer, but as a rule it is not so.