The trial began on December 9 1946 and ended on August 20 1947, it was held before a US military court, the defendants were 23 Nazi medical doctors and officials accused of criminal human experimentations, and mass murder, under the guise of euthanasia, the official name of the trial was the United States of America v Karl Brandt.
The Doctors Trial was one of a series of trials held in Nuremberg Germany after WW2 for individuals being charged as war criminals, the best known of these was held for major Nazi criminals before an international military tribunal. Twenty physicians and three officials who engaged in Nazi human experimentation and mass murder, were the defendants of the so called Doctors Trial, it was the first of 12 tribunals known as the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials for war crimes of high-ranking German officials and industrialists that the United States authorities held in their occupied zone in Nuremberg. These trials were conducted by U.S. military courts [Nuremberg Military Tribunal] , not before an international military tribunal, however they took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg as the international trial, it included the testimony of 85 witnesses, and about 1,500 documents.
The trial verdict resulted in seven acquittals, seven death sentences, the remainder were imprisoned, ranging from 10 years to life. This trial led to the Nuremberg code, a set of ethical standards for research with human subjects.
During the period of Nazi control in Germany, many German physicians and associates promoted a race-based programme of public health and genocide, they conducted unethical medical experiments, these physicians and medical and biological researchers took a central role in the implementation of the holocaust.
Inhumane medical experiments were conducted on large numbers of prisoners including children in Nazi concentration camps, during the Holocaust prisoners were forced to participate in medical experiments, no consent was given for these procedures. At Auschwitz and other camps under the direction of Eduard Wirths, selected inmates were subjected to various experiments that were designed to help the German military personal in combat situations, develop new weapons, and for the recovery of injured soldiers, also to advance the Nazi racial ideology and eugenics, which included the experiments on twins carried out by the notorious Josef Mengele.
Ono of the issues before the tribunal was what was considered as an acceptable medical experimentation involving human beings, some Nazi doctors argued that their experiments differed little from those conducted by American and German researchers in the past, and that there was no international law that differentiated illegal from legal human experiments but this defence was countered, by a number of examples, one in particular was the Reich Circular on Human experimentation of February 28 1931, which included regulations regarding codes of ethics.
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