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.
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 Doctors from Hell includes trial transcripts that have not been easily available to the general public and previously unpublished photographs used as evidence in the trial.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.
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.
More than 1.5 million concentration camp prisoners died of typhus, a preventable disease. Despite advances in public health measures to control and prevent typhus outbreaks, German doctors, fueled by their racist ideology and their medieval approach to the disease, used the disease as a form of biological warfare against Jews, Slavs, and gypsies. Jewish hospitals in ghettos were burned--along with patients and staff--if typhus was present. In concentration camps, even suspected typhus cases were killed in the gas chambers or through intracardiac injections. Typhus vaccines were tested on prisoners deliberately infected with typhus. Only a handful of doctors were ever prosecuted for their crimes. Against all odds, Jewish health providers struggled to avoid the worst through innovative steps to save lives. Despite the removal of their equipment, drugs, and other resources, they organized health care and sanitary hygienic measures. Doctors were forced to conceal cases, falsify diagnoses and cause of death in order to save lives. This important study explores the role of the International Red Cross in typhus epidemics during and after World War I and World War II. It details the widespread complicity of foreign companies in the Nazi typhus research. Finally, the author stresses the importance of monitoring and holding accountable the medical profession, researchers, and drug companies that continue to invest in research on biological agents as weapons of war.
A Newsweek Best Book of the Year: “Captivating . . . rooted in first-rate research” (The New York Times Book Review). In this New York Times bestseller, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story of the thousands of Nazis—from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich—who came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. Many gained entry on their own as self-styled war “refugees.” But some had help from the US government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories. Only years after their arrival did private sleuths and government prosecutors begin trying to identify the hidden Nazis. Now, relying on a trove of newly disclosed documents and scores of interviews, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau reveals this little-known and “disturbing” chapter of postwar history (Salon).
Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available."
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 is the first full-scale biography of Karl Brandt, one of the most powerful figures of the Third Reich. It tells the story of his rise to power and influence at the heart of Hitler's coterie of trusted advisors and confidants. It also tells of his exe
