If one compares the actual risk with the advantage granted, one cannot admit the consent of these “voluntary prisoners” as legal, in spite of all the protective forms they have to sign, for these can only have been obtained by taking advantage of inexperience, imprudence, or distress.
Looking through medical literature, one cannot escape the growing conviction that the word “volunteer”, where it appears at all, is used only as a word of protection and camouflage; it is hardly ever missing since the struggle over this problem became acute.
I will touch only briefly on what I have explained in detail in my closing brief. No one will contend that human beings really allowed themselves to be infected voluntarily with venereal disease; this has nowhere been stated explicitly in literature. Cholera and plague are also not minor inconveniences one is likely to undergo voluntarily for a trifle in the interest of science. Above all, it is not customary to hand over children for experimental purposes, and I cannot believe that in the 13 experiments carried out on a total of 223 children, as stated in Document Karl Brandt 117, Karl Brandt Exhibit 103, the mothers gave their consent. Would not the mothers have deserved the praise of the scientist for the sacrifice they trustfully made in the interest of science, praise which is otherwise liberally granted to real volunteers in reports on experiments?
Is it not likely to have been similar to the experiments carried out by Professor McCance? (Karl Brandt 93, Karl Brandt Ex. 29.) The German authorities who condemn the defendants in a particularly violent form have no objection to raise here against the order to hand over weakling children to a research commission for experimental purposes. The questionnaires which the Tribunal approved for me in order to get further information about this matter have not been answered as the higher authorities did not give permission for such statements to be made. This silence says enough; it is proof of what is supposed to be legal today in the line of “voluntariness”.
It is repeatedly shown that the experiments for which no consent was given were permitted with the full knowledge of the government authorities. It is further shown that these experiments were published in professional literature without meeting any objection, and that they were even accepted by the public without concern as a normal phenomenon when reports about them appeared in popular magazines.
This happens at a time when the same press is stigmatizing as crimes against humanity the German experiments which were necessary in the interests of the state. Voluntariness is a fiction; the emergency of the state hard reality.
In all countries experiments on human beings have been performed by doctors, certainly not because they took pleasure in killing or tormenting, but only at the instigation and under the protection of their state, and in accordance with their own conviction of the necessity for these experiments in the struggle for the existence of the people.
The German doctor who acted in conformity with the German regulations can no more be punished than the American doctor who complied with the requests of his state in the way which is customary there.
Justice is indivisible.
To what extent is the defendant Karl Brandt implicated in the medical experiments?