Nuremberg trials

A glance at the London Agreement, which established the legal framework for the Nuremberg Trials, reveals two remarkable articles, which are clearly incompatible with the procedures of a state under the... 

Reprinted in its entirety in T. Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, Little, Boston 1992, pp. 645ff. probably the best analysis of the trial itself was written by Alexander von Knieriem, Nurnberg. Rechtliche und menschliche Probleme, Klett, Stuttgart 1953. 

Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, Little, Boston 1992... 

Out of the Nuremberg trials in 1947 came the Nuremberg Code, the first code to deal specifically with human experimentation. It created ethical guidelines for the conduct of medical research throughout the world. Although many researchers had customarily obtained consent from volunteers in the past, it was the Nuremberg Code that first established the practice formally. The code deals with self-experimentation in Article 5, which states No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects. ... 

The so-called Ereignismeldungen (Event Reports) which were allegedly drawn up by German authorities and collected in Berlin, where they were found by the Allies at the end of the war and were subsequently presented as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. These Event Reports give very detailed accounts of the Babi Yar incident. 

In 1966 R. M. W. Kempner, then the deputy chief prosecutor at the IMT, claimed that with respect to legal procedure the Nuremberg Trial did not differ from the trials held before a German jury court or another kind of court.342 In many respects we agree with him. 

Hottl s recent after-the-fact apologia for his testimony of that time5 contradicts what he had stated earlier, and is thus not very credible.6 For details of the ways and means with which the statements of such coerced witnesses were obtained during the Nuremberg Trials, see the chapter by Manfred Kohler in this volume. 

Two documents from the time of the Third Reich are generally cited in support of the gas van theory one of them is a letter dated May 16, 1942, that was submitted as Document PS-501 at the Nuremberg Trial (International Military Tribunal, IMT), and the other is a file from the Federal Archives at Koblenz, numbered R 58/871 - a Note from the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich Security Main Office) dated June 5, 1942. 

Gas Vans in the Nuremberg Trials 2.2.1. Soviet-Russian Accusations... 

Regarding the problem of the evidence submitted in the Nuremberg Trial, we wish to remind the reader in the course of this trial, the accused, the defense counsels and the witnesses found themselves faced with thousands of documents, on which they had to comment immediately. There were only a few cases where the persons in question refused to be intimidated by the Court. The trial judge constantly urged them to answer immediately, yes or no . The result was that many defendants and witnesses gave up and simply answered in whichever way was easiest, and that, as a rule, was to confirm the correctness of the document shown to them. They generally did not even get to see the evidence.28... 

In the Nuremberg Trials, the Soviets repeated their accusations, in which they were supported by the American prosecutors, who presented written documents affidavits, and Document PS-501 -one of two documents on which the gas vans theory rests to this day. We have shown that neither the affidavits nor PS-501 are probative documents. In the 1970s another document, R 58/871, suddenly surfaced from the Koblenz Federal Archives, to also allegedly substantiate the existence of gas vans . We have clearly shown this item to be a fabrication. 

There were numerous eyewitness testimonies relating to these gas chambers as well. At the Nuremberg Trial, a former camp doctor at Dachau, a Czech named Dr. Franz Blaha, testified as follows 94... 

According to the Brockhaus Enzyklopadie09 the order for the final solution of the Jewish ques-tion was issued on July 31, 1941 (Nuremberg Trial Document NG 2586e), and was announced on tbe occasion of tbe Wannsee Conference (January20, 1942).110... 

Because of their involvement at Auschwitz the top management of IG Farbenindustrie was tried and convicted at the Nuremberg trials after World War II and the cartel broken into three large branches—Bayer, Hoechst, and BASF (Badische Anilin and Sodafabrik)—each of which does more business than DuPont, the largest American chemical company. 

The crime of the Nazi physicians was an offense only from the point of view of a nontotalitarian medical ethic. It was to reaffirm the primacy of the patient-physician relationship over the state-physician relationship that the Geneva version of the Hippocratic Oath was formulated shortly after the Nuremberg trials. This oath, adopted by the World Medical Organization, explicitly commands the physician to honor the following principles ... 

In a parallel effort, prison doctors in Chicago infected about four hundred (probably unsuspecting) inmates with malaria in order to test potential cures. The imdertaking was so nefarious that, during the Nuremberg trials, Nazi doctors actually referred to it to justify their own experiments on prisoners. 

As director of the Filmfabrik Wolfen Gajewski was responsible for 11,000 employees. As head of Sparte III he was the leader of another 28,000 employees manufacturing photographic products, synthetic fibers, and plastics. He was vice-chairman of the I.G. Farben technical committee (TEA) and a member of the executive board as well as the central committee. He was also a member of several business organizations and technical commissions. Due to this concentration of posts in his person, Gajewski spent only about 100 days each year in his Wolfen office, according to his testimony at the Nuremberg trial. ... 

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