Karl Brandt and 22 other Nazi doctors and officials went on trial in Nuremberg in October 1946 for conducting brutal medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. The proceedings marked the first of 12 secondary trials conducted by American military authorities following the primary war crimes tribunal.
Formally designated as United States of America v. Karl Brandt, the case centered on 20 physicians and three government officials accused of committing atrocities across German concentration camps. Brandt, an SS major general who served as personal physician to Adolf Hitler, stood as the principal defendant.
The victims of these experiments included children such as eight-year-old E., who was starved at the Mogilev concentration camp starting in August 1943. After camp guards distributed poisoned sweets to crying children, E. suffered severe convulsions, vomiting, fever, and temporary leg paralysis.
Following his partial recovery, a Nazi physician administered several unknown injections into the right corner of E.'s mouth. Although E. survived until liberation, he carried a permanent injection scar on his right cheek for the remainder of his life.
Ideological Foundations of Nazi Medicine
The corruption of German medicine began shortly after the Nazi regime took power in 1933, when Jewish doctors were expelled from practice and replaced by medical students. By 1939, a majority of German physicians held membership in the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
In 1935, Dr. Arthur Gütt, head of the public health department at the Reich Ministry of the Interior, published a book titled Structure of Public Health in the Third Reich. Gütt declared that traditional concepts of loving one's neighbor had to be abandoned regarding individuals deemed low-grade or asocial.
Gütt argued that the primary obligation of the state was to grant resources exclusively to the healthy population to maintain a racially pure gene pool. He maintained that individual lives possessed value only through their service to the family and the state.
Tribunal Composition and Key Defendants
The Military Tribunal was formally established on October 25, 1946, under Order No. 68 issued by the United States Military Administration in Germany. The judicial panel comprised legal experts Harold Sebring, Johnson Crawford, and Victor Swearingen, with Washington State Supreme Court Chief Justice Walter Beals presiding and James McHaney acting as chief prosecutor.
Cleo Streit, director of the expert commission at the War Crimes Branch, submitted extensive documentation demonstrating that doctors inflicted suffering exceeding that of the gas chambers. Experiments involved amputating limbs from the hip and removing fragments of bone, muscle, and nerve tissue for transplantation.
The 23 defendants ranged in age from 35 to 62. The indictment named four surgeons including Karl Brandt, Fritz Fischer, Karl Gebhardt, and Paul Rostock, three dermatologists including Kurt Blome, Adolf Pokorny, and Herta Oberheuser, and four bacteriologists including Siegfried Handloser, Joachim Mrugowsky, Gerhard Rose, and Oskar Schröder.
Additional defendants included internal medicine specialist Wilhelm Beiglböck, radiologist Georg August Weltz, general practitioners Waldemar Hoven and Karl Genzken, geneticist Helmut Poppendick, and researchers Hermann Becker-Freyseng, Hans-Wolfgang Romberg, Siegfried Ruff, and Konrad Schäfer. Three non-medical officials were also charged: Reich Interior Ministry official Rudolf Brandt, Ahnenerbe managing director Wolfram Sievers, and Fuehrer Chancellery officer Viktor Brack.
Brandt had served as Hitler's doctor since 1934 before his appointment as commissioner for health in July 1942 and head of Nazi medical services in August 1944. Other senior military medical leaders on trial included SS Lieutenant General Siegfried Handloser of the Wehrmacht, Oskar Schröder of the Luftwaffe, and Karl Genzken of the SS.
The open trial evaluated four specific indictment counts covering conspiracy, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in the criminal SS organization. Defendants Rudolf Brandt and Kurt Blome were directly implicated in special treatment programs that ordered the destruction or isolated confinement of thousands of victims.
Human Experiments in Concentration Camps
Human testing replaced animal research after a 1933 German decree outlawed cruelty to animals. Following instructions from SS leader Heinrich Himmler to continue testing, Nazi doctors targeted captive populations, including 112 French prisoners who were killed so their skeletons could be sent to an SS anatomical university.
In occupied Poland, an occupation official secured Himmler's permission to liquidate tens of thousands of tuberculosis patients. Concurrently, a state euthanasia program secretly executed elderly, mentally ill, and disabled individuals in hospitals using gas or lethal injections, falsely informing relatives that the victims died of heart failure.
At Buchenwald, chief physician Waldemar Hoven killed between 90 and 100 prisoners weekly with lethal injections. Hoven had previously lived in America as a Hollywood extra and in Paris before studying medicine in Freiburg. Records from the SS Hygiene Institute in Berlin show that on December 29, 1941, medical officials decided to test chicken embryo typhus vaccines on humans at Buchenwald and Natzweiler-Struthof.
At Ravensbrück, doctors intentionally broke the knees of female prisoners to perform muscle experiments. At Dachau, researchers infected victims with gangrene and tetanus while placing wood shavings and glass into open wounds to test sulfanilamide drugs. Other Dachau prisoners were forced into ice water pools by Dr. Sigmund Rascher to study hypothermia.
One former Auschwitz prisoner remembered being submerged in boiling water daily while Dr. Josef Mengele used a stick to force his head back under, followed by immediate immersion in freezing water. Between February 1942 and April 1945, Dachau doctors also infected over 1,000 prisoners with malaria using mosquito gland extracts.
Luftwaffe requirements prompted high-altitude endurance testing using pressure chambers, resulting in severe injuries and fatalities. In another experiment, German, Czech, and Polish prisoners were deprived of food and given only salty sea water for up to nine days, prompting survivor Karl Hollenreiner to physically attack defendant Wilhelm Beiglböck in court.
Experiments were also conducted on death-row resistance prisoners at Natzweiler-Struthof and Sachsenhausen to study epidemic jaundice under Brandt's direction. These tests caused severe suffering and death among the subjects.
Mass Sterilization and Poisoning Programs
Nazi doctors utilized Soviet prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates to develop high-speed mass sterilization techniques involving radiation, surgery, and chemicals. In 1941, Adolf Pokorny wrote to Himmler suggesting that sterilizing three million Soviet captives would provide a permanent labor force while preventing reproduction.
At Auschwitz, Dr. Karl Clauberg sterilized several thousand women using chemical injections. SS Oberführer Viktor Brack proposed installing secret X-ray machines behind partitions to covertly irradiate victim populations while they completed routine questionnaires, calculating that 20 machines could sterilize up to 4,000 people daily.
Researchers also shot Red Army prisoners with poisoned bullets and secretly added toxic compounds to food to monitor death rates. In separate tests, SS Obersturmführer Rosenbaum set German Shepherds with poisoned teeth on running prisoners, allowing doctors to cut flesh samples from wounds for analysis.
Doctors further applied bomb phosphorus to victims' skin to study incendiary burns. Prosecutors concluded that these procedures yielded no genuine scientific knowledge regarding hypothermia, poisons, or infection control, classifying the acts as systematic genocide.
Courtroom Testimony, Verdicts, and Medical Ethics
The prosecution opened its case on December 9, 1946, with US Army Brigadier General Telford Taylor stating that the defendants bore responsibility for hundreds of thousands of destroyed lives. The trial spanned 139 days, incorporating testimony from 32 prosecution witnesses, 53 defense witnesses, and 570 written exhibits.
During the formal reading of charges on November 21, 1946, court stenographer Vivien Spitz noted the defiant demeanor of the defendants. Spitz recorded that Karl Brandt glared at her with intense hatred, while describing Wolfram Sievers as having a black beard that resembled the character Bluebeard.
The evidentiary phase concluded on July 3, 1947, followed by closing arguments and final statements on July 19. Defendant Siegfried Handloser denied all charges against the military medical corps, while surgeon Paul Rostock claimed he had acted strictly in the service of his patients and medical science.
The military tribunal sentenced seven defendants to death by hanging: Karl Brandt, Karl Gebhardt, Rudolf Brandt, Joachim Mrugowsky, Viktor Brack, Waldemar Hoven, and Wolfram Sievers. Five defendants received life sentences, four were handed prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years, and seven were acquitted, including Rostock.
Historians note that at least 350 medical professionals committed war crimes across the Reich, with many tried during subsequent proceedings in Dachau. Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele avoided capture by fleeing to South America, where he died of a stroke in 1979; his skeleton is currently used as an educational display in São Paulo.
Following the trial, the 1947 Nuremberg Code was established, introducing the requirement for voluntary informed consent in medical treatment. Academician Alexander Chuchalin stated that the code ended traditional medical paternalism by establishing the fundamental right of patients to personal dignity and self-determination.
