Defendant Rose: The Buchenwald experiments (with typhus vaccine) had four main results. First of all, they showed that belief in the protective effect of Weigl vaccine was a mistake, although this belief seemed to be based on long observation. Secondly, they showed that the useful vaccines did not protect against infection, but almost certainly prevented death, under the conditions of the Buchenwald experiments. Thirdly, they showed that the objections of the biological experts to the vitelline membrane vaccines and to the lice vaccines were unjustified, and that vitelline membrane, rabbit lungs, and lice intestines were of equal value. We learned this only through the Buchenwald experiments. This left the way open to mass production of typhus vaccines.
The Buchenwald experiments showed in time that several vaccines were useless. First, the process according to Otto and Wohlrab, the process according to Cox, the process of Rickettsia Prowazeki and Rickettsia murina, that is, vaccine from egg cultures; secondly, the vaccines of the Behring works which were produced according to the Otto process, but with other concentrations; finally the Ipsen vaccines from mouse liver. The vaccines of the Behring works were in actual use at that time in thousands of doses. They always represented a danger to health. Without these experiments the vaccines, which were recognized as useless, would have been produced in large quantities because they all had one thing in common: their technical production was much simpler and cheaper than that of the useful vaccines. In any case, one thing is certain, that the victims of this Buchenwald typhus test did not suffer in vain and did not die in vain. There was only one choice, the sacrifice of human lives, of persons determined for that purpose, or to let things run their course, to endanger the lives of innumerable human beings who would be selected not by the Reich Criminal Police Office but by blind fate.
How many people were sacrificed we cannot figure out today; how many people were saved by these experiments we, of course, cannot prove. The individual who owes his life to these experiments does not know it, and he perhaps is one of the accusers of the doctors who assumed this difficult task.
I. Medical Ethics
1. GENERAL PRINCIPLES
a. Introduction
In a case involving the charge that human beings were subjected to medical experiments of many kinds under varying circumstances, it was inevitable that questions of medical ethics became a part of the proof and the argumentation.
The prosecution’s rejoinder to the statement of the defendant Rose appears on page 71. As illustrations of the defense position on medical ethics, extracts have been taken from the final pleas for the defendants Gebhardt and Beiglboeck. These appear on pages 71 to 77. Considerable testimony was given on this question by defendants and by expert witnesses, and appears on pages 77 to 86. Selections from this testimony have been taken from the direct examination of the defendant Rose, the cross-examination of the prosecution witness Professor Werner Leibbrandt, and from the direct examination of the prosecution witness Dr. Andrew C. Ivy.
The judgment of the Tribunal deals at some length with the medical ethics applicable to experimentation on human beings (p. 181 ff.).