I wish to thank the high Tribunal for having granted me an opportunity, in the witness box, to describe my personal position in 1942 in such detail.
The historical situation at that time placed me in a totalitarian state which, in turn, placed itself between the individual and the universe. Virtues in the service of the state were paramount virtues. Beyond that I do not know anywhere where the intellect was not debased as a tool for war. Everywhere, in some way values and solutions were put into the service of the war. And here again, in the intellectual field, the first step is the decisive one. I may be permitted to recall that in the war of nerves, it was propaganda with and for “medical preparations” which caused the first step, the order to examine the question of sulfanilamides.
In my final statement today may I be permitted to describe my entire attitude. In doing so, I may perhaps utilize the most important of the four American freedoms, that is to say the freedom of speech, until the very end in such a way that I will refrain from any denunciation or from incriminating others.
Without exaggerating the importance of my own person, a physician can only be measured according to his conception of medical science. Basically, I was neither a cold technical specialist nor a pure scientist. I believe that I have always tried, for example when carrying out surgical experiments, to see every disease as a human condition of suffering. I did not look on my task as something to serve my own advantage, or as a cheap gesture of theoretical pity, but as a personal active support to the trembling existence of the suffering patient. My goal as a physician was not so much purely technical therapy for the individual patient, as therapeutical care for the particularly underprivileged group of the poor, the children, the cripples, the neurotics.
I am anxious that it should be believed that it was not due to moral baseness nor to the selfish arrogance of the scientist that I came into contact with experiments on human beings. On the contrary, during the entire period in question I had experiments in my field of research carried out on animals. It was only because I was the competent responsible surgical expert that I was informed about the imminent experiments on human beings in my field of surgery, which had been ordered by the state authorities. After the order had been given, it was no longer a question of stopping these experiments, but the problem was the method of their execution.
My problems as an expert consisted of the following: For one, the experiments that had been ordered had to be of practical scientific value, for the purpose of testing immunization to protect thousands of injured and sick. On the other hand, I considered humane safety measures for the experimental subjects most important. The main point for me was never the purpose and the object of the experiments, but the manner in which they were carried out. To realize that in a humane way I did not remain aloof and restrict myself to theoretical instruction in the field of surgery, but I myself took part, with my clinic and with all its safety measures.
I hope that this will show that in carrying out experiments I tried with the best of intentions to act primarily in the interest of the experimental subjects. We did not take advantage of the unlimited opportunities given us by Himmler, that is to say, the surgical experiments were not followed by others. I believe that as far as was possible at that chaotic period I fulfilled my duty as an expert, because these experiments did not increase in the field of surgery in spite of the crescendo of the catastrophic policy. My desire was to help and not to give a bad example.
In seeing my responsibility in this way I, of course, made a decision for myself. I hope that hitherto I have always faced criticism, even from foreign countries, without any secrecy, but also without any feeling of guilt for my activities as an expert.
Through these activities, however, as a military physician, not through my own initiative, I was brought into contact with concentration camps. I can understand how heavily that deadly shadow must lie upon anyone who was ever active there. In the ghostly phenomenon of that sphere, which at that time was unknown to me as well, we can now in retrospect begin to realize the frightfulness of the negative ideology of extermination becoming combined secretly with the negative selection of the guards. Only from the documents of the international trial have we been able to see definitely that of the 35,000 guard troops, only 6,000 were SS men who were unfit for combat. The rest were scum, conscripts, foreigners, etc., who with the greatest injustice and to our bitter shame were given the same Waffen SS uniform as we wore at the front. As head of a well-known clinic, known for its measures of safety, in the interest of the experimental subjects, within the framework of my duty as an expert as I saw it, I got in touch with concentration camp doctors. As far as it was at all possible I tried to exclude that atmosphere from my sphere of work. That my counter-actions went beyond purely clinical safety measures for the experimental subjects may, I think, be seen from the following fact: Of the several thousand foreign inmates of this concentration camp—among whom, as we were told here, there were at least seven hundred Polish women—only 200 were turned over to the Red Cross at the end of the war. Of these two-hundred, however, sixty were my experimental subjects, as was proved.
Just as I have tried to clarify my actions as a doctor and to explain my good intentions and possibilities for influence, so my final thought should be devoted to self-criticism, above all as regards on my moral obligation.