Guest
Almost seven decades after the end of World War II, the German Medical Association has made a long overdue apology for its participation in human rights violations and atrocities under the Nazi regime. In a stunning admission the Declaration states that German doctors from all strata of the profession enthusiastically supported Nazi ideology and were not coerced to support Hitler. The Declaration of May 12, 2012, which was unanimously adopted by the delegates of the Physician’s Congress declared: “In contrast to still widely accepted view, the initiative for the most serious human rights violations did not originate from the political authorities at the time, but rather from the physicians themselves… German doctors “were guilty of scores of human rights violations”… “The crimes were simply not the acts of individual doctors, but rather took place with the substantial involvement of leading representatives of the medical association and medical specialist bodies as well as considerable representatives of university medicine and renowned biomedical research facilities.” 2012 also marked the 65th anniversary of the Nuremburg Doctors’ Trial. Most people are aware of the famous trial in Nuremberg, Germany at the end of World War II, where leading Nazis were tried as war criminals. There were a number of subsequent lesser known trials at Nuremberg. One of these lesser known trials was the Doctors’ trial. Twenty physicians were put on trial; sixteen were convicted, four of whom were executed by hanging. The crimes committed by German physicians in their human experimentation have been amply documented. The victims were mainly Jews, Poles, Russians, and other prisoners. They suffered horribly from the gruesome experiments; many died. A few examples of these experiments include subjecting prisoners to a low pressure chamber to determine the maximum altitude from which crews of damaged aircraft could parachute to safety, freezing experiments using prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia, Other experiments subjected prisoners to phosgene and mustard gas, infecting inmates with malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, infectious hepatitis and other diseases. The infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele performed twin experiments at Auschwitz to test his racial theories. And finally German doctors led the euthanasia program where over 200,000 German citizens whose “lives were deemed not worthy of living, those mentally ill and also disabled persons, were put to death, and over 360,000 classified with “heredity illness” were forcibly sterilized. The prime legacy of the Nuremberg Doctor’s Trial is the Nuremberg Code, which established rules for human experimentation. Of the ten points in the Nuremberg Code Point, the first one which states “the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential” is the most important. It should be pointed out that at the time of the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial the Allies including the United States also performed experiments on human subjects without their consent. The defense used this argument during the trial. However, the American experiments were not considered brutal and this legal strategy failed to convince the judges. Today, the Nuremberg Code forms the basis of all human research guidelines throughout the world. It is historically fitting that the apology from the German Medical Association for crimes committed by physicians under the Nazis took place at a meeting held in Nuremberg.
