The Evening Star (August 19, 1947)
Hitler’s physician convicted of camp medical atrocities
Brandt accused of killing hundreds of thousands as ‘guinea pigs’
NUERNBERG (AP) – An American war crimes tribunal today convicted Dr. Karl Brandt, Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, of “full responsibility” in the performance of Nazi medical experiments on concentration camp victims.
The four-man court, headed by Judge Walter Beals of the Washington State Supreme Court, found the 43-year-old SS (elite guard) general guilty of crimes against humanity as charged by the prosecution, which had accused him of killing hundreds of thousands of human guinea pigs in “worthless” experiments.
Brandt was one of the 23 co-defendants who made up the SS medical corps. His fate and that of his fellow defendants was contained in a 300-page judgment.
Brandt’s was the first conviction to be announced. At the rate at which the court was proceeding with the reading of the judgment it appeared likely that the detailed account of its findings would not be completed until tomorrow afternoon.
Sentences will be passed Thursday. Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor, American prosecutor, had asked death for the defendants.
The court found that Brandt was directly responsible for high altitude and freezing experiments, as well as malaria, mustard gas, seawater and sterilization tests from which many victims died.
Brandt stared coldly at his four judges as he heard himself and his fellow defendants denounced in scathing terms in the judgment. The room where the proceedings were held was the one where Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop and other top Nazis were condemned to death by the International Military Tribunal.
Also convicted with Brandt were Siegfried Handloser, medical inspector of the German Army, and Oskar Schroeder, chief of the Luftwaffe’s medical service, both of whom were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The judgment found they were linked with knowledge of the experiments and declared they could have prevented cruelties and deaths if they had acted in their official capacity.
Paul Rostock, tall, fat chief surgeon of the Berlin clinic and head of army research, was acquitted. The evidence, the court found, failed to show that he overstepped the bounds of medical ethics or knew conclusively what was being done in concentration camp clinics.