Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent (review)

In this prodigiously researched volume Paul Julian Weindling completes his "informal trilogy" ( p. 6) on the relationship between medicine, eugenics, and genocide in modern German history (the other two volumes being Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 [1993] and Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890-1945 [2000]). In effect taking up where his earlier studies left off, Weindling here examines the aftermath of Nazi medical crimes and the difficult choices that the western Allied occupation authorities faced in deciding how to respond to them.

Weindling recounts the investigation leading up to the Nuremberg medical trial and the trial itself, concluding with an analysis of what he calls the trial's "fragile legacy" ( p. 319). At the heart of Weindling's analysis lies the conundrum that faced the western Allies at the end of the war: whether to exploit Nazi medical research for their own purposes in the face of a mounting Cold War, or to prosecute German researchers for conducting criminal experiments. According to Weindling, the central development of the early postwar years was the western Allies' gradual, reluctant, and ultimately only partial shift from exploitation to prosecution.

Immediately after the war, the Allies dispatched investigators to assess German medical research. Of these officials, the Canadian John Thompson, the American Andrew Ivy, and the émigré Austro-German Leo Alexander loom largest in Weindling's story. According to the author, these Allied investigators dealt with a number of fundamental questions regarding both the German physicians' relationship with the Nazi regime and the contribution of medical research to Nazi genocide ( p. 6). Though they expected initially to uncover a "highly innovative scientific war effort," Allied investigators were soon brought up short by the "criminality and the sheer craziness of the Nazis" ( p. 27). Survivors of Nazi medical abuses played an important role in changing the Allies' thinking (pp. 60-62). Yet, in the end, it was the Allies' own medical investigators who provided the "crucial impetus to the new wave of investigation, arrest and trial" ( p. 88). Thompson, who coined the term "medical war crimes," was particularly helpful in formulating what would become the Allies' "dual policy" ( p. 43) of continuing to exploit useful scientific data while selectively prosecuting medical war criminals and denazifying the German medical profession.

After the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg ended, the tide turned even more decisively in favor of prosecution, as the Americans took over from the British the lead in formulating policy on medical war crimes. The French pushed for a second International Tribunal—one that would include the prosecution of medical crimes. The British and Americans saw communist participation in the French government at the time as unacceptable; in order to forestall the politically undesirable outcome of a communist-influenced second international tribunal, the British turned over their well-developed investigative materials on German medical crimes to the Americans. This transfer of authority made it possible for Telford Taylor to get the American successor trials at Nuremberg up and running quickly ( p. 120). In the end, though, according to Weindling, these political maneuvers among allies mattered less than the drive and passion of a handful of committed individuals. "The disinterest among Allied politicians and Foreign Office officials in war crimes contrasted to field investigators' sustained concerns with medical war crimes," he writes; "The initiative to investigate medical war crimes was pressed by a handful of energetic medical investigators. . . . The demand for a Medical Trial came from below, while the high-level IMT created a responsive climate for some sort of follow-up trial in late 1946" ( p. 125).

Though the pressure to hold a criminal trial of German medical researchers may have come from below, the trial itself was heavily shaped by the prosecutors' understanding of the particular case. In the first instance, they wanted "clear-cut, winnable cases" ( p. 138). They saw Nazi medical experiments largely...