The number of human guinea pigs used in the experiments alleged by the prosecution is about 2,000. The number of human guinea pigs known to the defense from published data amounts to more than 11,000 persons. If among those, minor experiments are also to be found, it may be supposed that the experiments published contain only the material fit to be known to the public. Publications show the results but not the sacrifices and undesirable incidents. That which the defense can present is not the result of an exhausting criminal investigation.
Looking at only these experiments which were considered fit for publication, one cannot possibly come to the conclusion that they were made only with volunteers. I refer in this connection to the compilation of experiments in Document Karl Brandt 117, Karl Brandt Exhibit 103, namely 32 experiments on at least 1,580 persons: they are experiments on persons sentenced to death, prisoners and soldiers, women and girls; the experiments are often carried out in such a way that it cannot be presumed the subjects volunteered.
Voluntary service of the human guinea pigs has not been claimed either; only in two cases has it specifically been pointed out. The volunteers in one of these experiments were medical students. Outstanding in this document are 13 experiments with at least 223 children. One cannot assume that the parents had given their consent. In this connection reference is made to Document Karl Brandt 93, Karl Brandt Exhibit 29, regarding the experiments of Professor McCance.
EXTRACT FROM THE CLOSING BRIEF FOR
DEFENDANT RUFF
Experiments which time and again have been described in international literature without meeting any opposition do not constitute a crime from the medical point of view. For nowhere did a plaintiff arise from the side of the responsible professional organization, or from that of the administration of justice, to denounce as criminal the experiments described in literature. On the contrary, the authors of those reports on their human experiments gained general recognition and fame; they were awarded the highest honors; they gained historical importance. And in spite of all this, are they supposed to have been criminals? No! In view of the complete lack of written legal norms, the physician, who generally knows only little about the law, has to rely on and refer to the admissibility of what is generally recognized to be admissible all over the world.
The defense is convinced that the Tribunal, when deciding this problem without prejudice, will first study the many experiments performed all over the world on healthy and sick persons, on prisoners and free people, on criminals and on the poor, even on children and mentally ill persons, in order to see how the medical profession in its international totality answers the question of the admissibility of human experiments, not only in theory but also in practice.
It is psychologically understandable that German research workers today will, if possible, have nothing to do with human experiments and will try to avoid them, or would like to describe them as inadmissible even if before 1933 they were perhaps of the opposite opinion. However, experiments performed in 1905-1912 by a highly respected American in Asia for the fight against the plague, which made him famous all over the world, cannot and ought not to be labelled as criminal because a Blome is supposed to have performed the same experiments during the Hitler period (which, in fact, however, were not performed at all); and experiments for which, before 1933, a foreign research worker, the Englishman Ross, was awarded the Nobel prize for his malaria experiments, do not deserve to be condemned only because a German physician performed similar experiments during the Hitler regime. One should not say that experiments, where different diseases or different drugs from those referred to in this trial were dealt with, have no connection with the charges of this indictment because of this difference and that, therefore, they are of no importance as evidence. In the foreground there stands the basic question as to the conditions under which such experiments are permissible; whether they refer to plague or typhus, to tuberculosis or jaundice, is a secondary question which concerns the medical expert more than the jurist.
Decisive for this trial is the question whether the conditions under which experiments were performed by the defendants were those internationally recognized as for the experiments which were performed by foreign research workers with the approval of all civilized humanity.
If one wants to arrive at a just and satisfactory decision, one must disregard the fact that here German research workers are accused. On the contrary, one has to strive toward obtaining an international basis to represent the present international opinion on human experiments, one which for decades, if not for centuries, will form the criterion for the permissibility of human experiments. We, as jurists, can only render a service to the development of medical science and therewith to humanity if we endeavor to establish an incontrovertibly clear view of today’s international opinion on human experiments, whether these experiments were performed by Germans or by foreigners.