My learned colleagues have compiled a long list of documents on human experiments especially from the Western democracies. It would be unjust, however, to conceal the enormous benefit of the human experiment. The fact that Paul Ehrlich dared to release his drug “Salvarsan” before it had been sufficiently tested saved thousands from the dangerous consequences of one of the worst epidemics. The fact that Strong took the responsibility upon himself to perform the probably very dangerous experiment with plague bacilli made it possible to vaccinate thousands of persons and to save them from almost certain death. The fact that Strong was in a position to prove that beri-beri was a disease caused by a deficiency, and that Goldberger proved the same for pellagra, made it possible to fight this deficiency and to liberate entire countries from one of their worst diseases.
With regard to the criminal law, however, and the judgment of crimes against humanity, it is the decisive result that in other countries, too, under their own generally prevailing medical and ethical convictions, doctors carried out similar or the same experiments for the benefit of scientific research or in consideration of a crisis in their country.
When I said that the surroundings had an influence on the doctor’s attitude, I did not mean the second determining factor of our individuality, the material influence on the organism which might modify or mitigate the influence of the actual conditions at the time upon the decisions of a physician.
Concentration camp, militarism, and peoples’ court—three important pillars of the Third Reich—they have collapsed. They are not to be forgotten, however, when examining the guilt of the individual. Every German had to fear them in one form or another. And then came the war. War was once called “the steel bath of the peoples”. Heraklit called it “the father of all things”. I can only repeat the judgment of the IMT that “war is the evil itself.” This is true to the highest degree for the last war. It was a total, a terrible war. Even medical science on both sides had to assist warfare. I have before me the index of the best known scientific English periodicals from the war period, “Lancet” and “Nature”. Now, after the war, General T. J. Betts of the United States War Department and Professor W. T. Sinsteat of the British Supply Office have declared that the captured German scientific accomplishments during the war were of the greatest use for the economic progress of British and American industry. Even the terrible freezing experiments of Dr. Rascher proved to be of the greatest use for America in the war against Japan. (Becker-Freyseng 31, Becker-Freyseng Ex. 18.) And what about us soldiers? We stood in the air-raid shelters, the Socialist beside the Party member. We did not complain. We saw villages go up in flames, innocent women and children become the victims of air raids. We saw our country, the Fatherland, in distress, and, even if we hated Hitler and his followers like the plague, we believed that we had to fulfill our duty to our country to the bitter end. One cannot explain these things, they have to be experienced. In such times a doctor is placed unwillingly between Scylla and Charybdis, between his concept of his profession and his duty as a soldier. It is easy today to say with pathos from an academic chair “numquam nocere!” A man does not say now, “I was a member of the resistance. Day in and day out I was trying to help persons who were racially and politically persecuted.” He says, “Then, like everyone else, I merely did my duty.”
Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest Americans, said in a speech before the American Congress in 1862, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. * * * In the face of new events we must think and act in a new way.”
With this I intend to conclude my statements about medical ethics and to repeat the words which Liek wrote at the end of his book, “The Doctor and His Mission”, “If we want to abolish undesirable conditions in medicine, we must follow our conscience—to help and to heal, that is, today as always, the mission of the doctor.”
d. Evidence
| Testimony | |
| Page | |
| Extracts from the testimony of defendant Rose | [77] |
| Extracts from the testimony of prosecution witness Professor Werner Leibbrand | [80] |
| Extracts from the testimony of prosecution expert witness Dr. Andrew C. Ivy | [82] |