Defendant Rose: Yes. That happened once again before a large number of people, but it was not about typhus experiments. It must have been about October 1944. The question at hand then was grippe. There was a meeting, a rather large meeting at which grippe vaccine was discussed. A number of people reported on the vaccines which they had developed in the laboratory. Among others, Professor Herzberg reported on a vaccine made from dead grippe virus, and Professor Haagen on a vaccine made from living avirulent grippe virus, which he had already tested on personnel at the Strasbourg clinic. Someone in the meeting, I don’t remember who, suggested that the Haagen tests had been insufficient, and that this vaccine should be tested on a larger number of persons. There was no mention of concentration camps then but of student companies. I had considerable misgivings about such experimental vaccination and expressed them. I said that I considered the experimental basis inadequate for these vaccines to be used on human beings. I was not convinced that the virus had been sufficiently attenuated. There was a danger that the vaccine would lead to infection, and one could not take that responsibility on one’s self. It was first of all intended to observe the effectiveness of the protection by determining whether people fell ill of grippe in natural ways after being vaccinated. Then someone else made the suggestion that this would take too long, and we did not know whether there would be an influenza epidemic during that time, and that therefore after the vaccines the subject should be infected with a virulent virus. Since I had already expressed objections to the vaccination, I opposed this proposal even more strongly, and the result of this discussion was that infections were not carried out, but it was decided to carry out the vaccination. Whether these vaccinations were carried out or not, I do not know. At any rate I read no order to the effect that anyone should perform the vaccinations nor did I ever read a report that the vaccinations were carried out. Only later on in imprisonment did I hear that similar experiments, such as were then discussed, and of which I disapproved, were carried out by the British Medical Service on German PW’s. Genzken probably participated personally in this, but I had heard about this before in the internment hospital Karlsruhe where there were people who had experienced these vaccinations.
EXTRACTS FROM THE TESTIMONY OF PROSECUTION WITNESS
PROFESSOR WERNER LEIBBRANDT[[24]]
CROSS-EXAMINATION
Dr. Servatius: Witness, you stated that the performance of experiments on human beings, as is the subject of the indictment here, can be ascribed to biological thought. What do you mean by biological thought?
Witness Leibbrandt: By biological thought I mean the attitude of a physician who does not take the subject into consideration at all, but for whom the patient has become a mere object, so that the human relationship no longer exists, and a man becomes a mere object like a mail package.
Q. You spoke of thinking as a biologist. Do I understand that you see therein an action belonging to biological thought?
A. An exaggeration of the purely mechanical or biological point of view, because the physician is not merely a biologist, he is also a biologist. Primarily, however, a physician is a man who assists the human being and not a scientific judge of biological events.
Q. Could there not be other causes for the experiments, such as a collective state thinking?