On this date, December 9, 1946, The Doctor’s Trials began for 23 Medical Doctors during Nazi Germany. I will post the information from Wikipedia.
 |
Death by hanging is pronounced by a U.S. War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg upon Adolf Hitler's personal physcian, 43-year old Karl Brandt. Brandt, who was also Reich Commissar for Health and Sanitation, was indicted by the U.S. prosecution with 22 other Nazi doctors and SS officers on war crimes charges in the first case of alleged criminals tried after the judgment in the International Military Tribunal. The Tribunal found him guilty on all four counts charging him with conspiracy in aggressive wars, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in the criminal SS organization. Among those criminal acts was his participating in and consenting to using concentration camp inmates as guinea pigs in horrible medical experiments, supposedly for the benefit of the armed forces. Brandt, who was executioner of thousands of political, racial, and religious persecutees, was hanged on June 2, 1948 at Landsberg prison after the U.S. Military Commander Gen. Lucius D. Clay and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the sentence of the Nuremberg Tribunal. In a long-winded speech that was finally muffled when the black hood was thrown over his head, Brandt shouted arrogantly, "It is no shame to stand on this scaffold; I have served my country as have others before me." Hitler was also once imprisoned here in 1923, following his unsuccessful Munich putsch. He wrote "Mein Kampf" during his confinement. [Original Descriptive Caption]. Date: 20 August 1947 Provenance: From Public Relations Photo Section, Office Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, Nuremberg, Germany, APO 696-A, US Army. Photo No. OMT-I-D-144. Citation: Telford Taylor Papers, Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, Columbia University Law School, New York, N.Y. : TTP-CLS: 15-1-1-76. |
The Doctors' Trial (officially United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al.) was the first of 12 trials for war crimes of German doctors that the United States authorities held in their occupation zone in Nuremberg, Germany after the end of World War II. These trials were held before US military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal, but took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice. The trials are collectively known as the "Subsequent Nuremberg Trials", formally the "Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals" (NMT).
Twenty of the 23 defendants were medical doctors (Viktor Brack, Rudolf Brandt, and Wolfram Sievers were Nazi officials) and were accused of having been involved in Nazi human experimentation and mass murder under the guise of euthanasia. Josef Mengele, one of the leading Nazi doctors, had evaded capture.
The judges in this case, heard before Military Tribunal I, were Walter B. Beals (presiding judge) from Washington, Harold L. Sebring from Florida, and Johnson T. Crawford from Oklahoma, with Victor C. Swearingen, a former special assistant to the Attorney General of the United States, as an alternate judge. The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was Telford Taylor and the chief prosecutor was James M. McHaney. The indictment was filed on October 25, 1946; the trial lasted from December 9 that year until August 20, 1947. Of the 23 defendants, seven were acquitted and seven received death sentences; the remainder received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment.
Indictment
The accused faced four charges, including:
1. Conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity as described in counts 2 and 3;
2. War crimes: performing medical experiments, without the subjects' consent, on prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, in the course of which experiments the defendants committed murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhuman acts. Also planning and performing the mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, stigmatized as aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed, and so on, by gas, lethal injections, and diverse other means in nursing homes, hospitals, and asylums during the Euthanasia Program and participating in the mass murder of concentration camp inmates.
3. Crimes against humanity: committing crimes described under count 2 also on German nationals.
4. Membership in a criminal organization, the SS.
The tribunal largely dropped count 1, stating that the charge was beyond its jurisdiction.
I— Indicted G— Indicted and found guilty
Defendants, functions, verdicts, and fates
Those sentenced to death were hanged on June 2, 1948 in Landsberg prison, Bavaria.
For some, the difference between receiving a prison term and the death sentence was membership in the SS, "an organization declared criminal by the judgement of the International Military Tribunal". However, some SS medical personnel received prison sentences. The degree of personal involvement and/or presiding over groups involved was a factor in others.