The regimen I adopt shall be for the benefit of my patient, according to my ability and judgement and not for their hurt or for any wrong. (The Hippocratic Oath)
This solemn promise formulated twenty four centuries ago by the Father of Medicine has since been and still is the basic ethical norm observed by all the members of the medical profession. During the Second World War this oath has been broken by German physicians who dared use human guinea-pigs in highly injurious tests and experimental operations performed under compulsion and with unmitigated cruelty.
The victims they so abused were concentration camp prisoners, people who found themselves behind barbed-wire fences because of their national or racial adherence, or because they loved their own country and tried to fight for its freedom, utterly helpless people in the clutches of a “might before right” system in which to protest against the violation of human rights was worse than useless. The number of deaths directly resulting from these criminal tests has been established in the investigation to the German Medical Trial held in Nuremberg in 1946/7. The American Prosecutor has said on this occasion: “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devasting that citvilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated”. These words have lost nothing of their actuality. In September, 1960 delegates of the World Medical Association, gathered in Berlin have discussed measures to be taken so that no human being is ever exposed to the danger of being used as forced guineapig in medical experimentation.(Experimental Operations On Prisoners of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, Studies and Monographies, December 1960, Edited by Wanda Machlejd.)
- Introduction
- Indictment
- Testimony – victim Władysława Karolewska
- Testimony – victim Jadwiga Dzido
- Exibit 214 A,C – victim Jadwiga Dzido
- Exibit 219 E,F – victim Maria Kuśmierczuk
- Sentences
