The so-called, “Doctors’ Trial” (officially known as “United States of America v. Karl Brand et al.”) was the first of a total of 12 trials conducted by the United States authorities in their occupation zone in Nuremberg, Germany, after the end of World War II for war crimes by high-ranking German officials and industrialists. These trials, officially called the “Nuremberg War Criminal Trials”, but were collectively known as “the subsequent Nuremberg trials”, despite the fact that they were conducted before US military courts and not before the International Military Tribunal , took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice.
In the “Doctors’ Trial” there were a total of twenty-three defendants, twenty of whom were doctors – Victor Braque, Rudolf Brandt and Wolfram Sievers were Nazi officials – and they were accused of participating in Nazi experiments and mass murder under the guise of euthanasia. Some committed suicide – Philip Bühler, Ernst-Robert Gravitz, Leonardo Conti and Eno Lolling – while Josef Mengele, one of the leading Nazi doctors, had evaded capture.
The indictment was filed on October 25, 1946. According to it the defendants faced the following charges: 1. Conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. 2. War crimes: conducting medical experiments, without the consent of the subjects, on prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, during which the accused committed murders, atrocities, cruelty, torture, atrocities and other inhuman acts. Also, planning and execution of mass murders of prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, stigmatized as old, insane, terminally ill, deformed, etc., by gassing, lethal injection and various other means in nursing homes, hospitals and asylums during Program of Euthanasia and participation in the mass murder of concentration camp inmates. 3. Crimes against humanity: committing crimes, as described above, also against German nationals. 4. Participation in the SS criminal organization.
The presiding judge was Walter Beals of Washington, and other members came from Florida and Oklahoma. Also participating was Victor Swearingen, former Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the United States, as Associate Judge. The Public Prosecutor was Brigadier General Telford Taylor. As emphasized by the Public Prosecutor during the trial, the victims of these crimes numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Most of them were slaughtered or died during the torture they were subjected to, as for the accused they were not individuals. For the most part, these are dead who remained anonymous, as it was not possible in most cases to identify them. While the victims who managed to survive, which were numerically negligible, continued to be in a very bad situation.
The trial, which had begun on December 9 of the same year, would end on August 20, 1947. Of the 23 defendants, seven were acquitted and seven were sentenced to death by hanging, which took place on June 2, 1948 in the Landsberg am Lech prison in Bavaria. . The rest received prison terms ranging from 10 years to life in prison.
Column editor: Myrto Katsigera, Vassilis Minakakis, Antigoni-Despina Poimenidou, Athanasios Syroplakis
