Following World War II the American Military Tribunal indicted twenty-three Nazi doctors and
administrators for performing agonizing and often fatal experiments on helpless concentration
camp inmates. Using primarily court records this book attempts to answer the following salient
questions: What sort of medical experiments did the Nazi doctors perform? Who were their
victims and what was their fate? What if any were the medical results? What legal charges
were brought against the doctors and what was their defense? Who were the witnesses? Did the
defendants try to reconcile their brutal acts with the Hippocratic Code never to do harm or
were they devoid of any medical ethics? Did they constitute dishonorable exceptions to a
principled German medical profession or were they symptomatic of a more widespread disregard
for traditional medical ethics? In trying to answer these questions Horst H. Freyhofer gives
the reader the opportunity to follow the exchanges between prosecutors and defendants as well
as the final reasoning of the court.
