Nazi Medicine And The Nuremberg Trials

This book offers a radically new and definitive reappraisal of Allied responses to Nazi human experiments and the origins of informed consent. It places the victims and Allied Medical Intelligence officers at centre stage, while providing a full reconstruction of policies on war crimes and trials related to Nazi medical atrocities and genocide.

Freyhofer gives the reader the opportunity to follow the exchange between prosecutors and defendants as well as the final reasoning of the court."--BOOK JACKET.

This book traces the history of the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial of 1946-47, through the eyes of the Austrian émigré psychiatrist Leo Alexander, whose investigations helped the US prosecution. Schmidt provides a detailed insight into the origins of human rights in medical science and into the changing role of international law, ethics and politics.

A chilling story of human depravity and ultimate justice, told for the first time by an eyewitness court reporter for the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Nazi doctors. This is the account of 22 men and 1 woman and the torturing and killing by experiment they authorized in the name of scientific research and patriotism. Doctors from Hell includes trial transcripts that have not been easily available to the general public and previously unpublished photographs used as evidence in the trial. The author describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for two years while working on the trial. Once a Nazi sympathizer tossed bombs into the dining room of the hotel where she lived moments before she arrived for dinner. She takes us into the courtroom to hear the dramatic testimony and see the reactions of the defendants to the proceedings. This landmark trial resulted in the establishment of the Nuremberg code, which set the guidelines for medical research involving human beings. A significant addition to the literature on World War II and the Holocaust, medical ethics, human rights, and the barbaric depths to which human beings can descend.

With 16 pages of photographs One of the most shocking aspects of the Nazi treatment of their prisoners was the wanton cruelty of the doctors assigned to the concentration camps that were dotted throughout occupied Europe. In an ironic perversion of their Hippocratic oath doctors, such as the infamous Mangele, carried out horrendous experiments on their captive victims in the name of science. As part of the Nuremberg trials the Nazi medical establishment was called to account for these crimes against humanity. Alexander Mitscherlich was the doctor assigned to carry out a full investigation into the crimes across all of Europe; in his report embodied in this book, reported on the awful scale and complicity of the Nazis. The terrible details have to be read to be believed in this shocking book.

This important new work surveys the source and ramifications of the famed Nuremburg Code -- recognized around the world as one of the cornerstones of modern bioethics.

Representing a new wave of research and analysis on Nazi human experiments and coerced research, the chapters in this volume deliberately break from a top-down history limited to concentration camp experiments under the control of Himmler and the SS. Instead the collection positions extreme experiments (where research subjects were taken to the point of death) within a far wider spectrum of abusive coerced research. The book considers the experiments not in isolation but as integrated within wider aspects of medical provision as it became caught up in the Nazi war economy, revealing that researchers were opportunistic and retained considerable autonomy. The sacrifice of so many prisoners, patients and otherwise healthy people rounded up as detainees raises important issues about the identities of the research subjects: who were they, how did they feel, how many research subjects were there and how many survived? This underworld of the victims of the elite science of German medical institutes and clinics has until now remained a marginal historical concern. Jews were a target group, but so were gypsies/Sinti and Roma, the mentally ill, prisoners of war and partisans. By exploring when and in what numbers scientists selected one group rather than another, the book provides an important record of the research subjects having agency, reconstructing responses and experiential narratives, and recording how these experiments – iconic of extreme racial torture – represent one of the worst excesses of Nazism.