By Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin
PIKESVILLE, Maryland — The Nuremberg Nazi Doctors’ Trials, called United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al., occurred from December 9, 1946 to August 20, 1947. There were 23 defendants. Twenty were medical doctors. They were accused of performing Nazi human experimentation and mass murder under the guise of euthanasia. The trials resulted in seven acquittals and seven death sentences. The remaining nine received prison sentences of 10 years to life imprisonment.
Dr. Lauren Small, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, offers a very informative, splendid fictional account of the trial in her 2023 novel The Eye Begins to See. The book’s title is based on a statement by the American poet Theodore Roethke: “In Dark Time, the eye begins to see.”
Although Dr. Small’s novel is fiction, with some invented characters and events, the actual chief counsel to the prosecution, Dr. Leo Alexander, the lead defendant Hitler’s chief physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, who headed the American prosecution team, appear in the novel.
Although Dr. Small fictionalizes some of their activities, she perfectly captures the spirit of the trial and the contribution that Dr. Alexander gave to world medicine. This contribution is a universal ethical code known as “The Nuremberg Code,” which affects every person a physician treats today. He was the principal author of the Code.
Dr. Small reveals many things about Germany, the Nazis, and the trial. Still, her foremost gift to readers is her narrative skill in showing why the Nazi doctors felt that euthanasia, that is, the killing of sick children, which led to the butchery of six million Jews and others, was proper medical treatment. What made healers become killers?
Before and during World War II, many Germans accepted and acted according to Hitler’s desires for different reasons. Hitler almost hypnotized some. Others felt they must obey because of their love of Germany, or they were affected by the German loss of World War I and the vast inflation that followed, or by a feeling that German culture was far superior to others whose people were less than human, or anti-Semitism, the belief that Jews are worthless.
Readers who read Eli Wiesel’s “The Testament” or my review of it may have been struck as I was with the ease with which religious Jews turned from the wisdom and goal of Judaism to communism. What happened with the religious Jews in Russia happened with many doctors in Germany.
The Jewish youths in Stalin’s Russia, even those who had little Jewish knowledge, were filled with the desire to see a messianic age, which Judaism saw as a goal for humanity. They felt correctly that the age would not come miraculously. It required work. They thought they were working to create a messianic age for everyone, but they stumbled in the wrong direction when they listened and believed that communism would make what they desired: equality, luxury, and freedom.
So, too, the Nazi doctors, Brandt among them, felt strongly that their goal was to treat their patients. Still, they stumbled into the wrong behavior, a twisted and perverted behavior where they saw murder as a medical duty when they felt that one way to relieve their pain was to kill their patients. They thought that this was both for the good of the painful patient and the common good. Mentally ill people, individuals with disabilities, Jews, and Romani who are worthless, less than human, are disposable for their good and for the sake of a healthy society. This, they felt, was so self-evident that it was foolish to think doctors needed to ask their permission or that of their families to lend their bodies to be experimented upon and die for the common good.
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Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin is a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps and the author of more than 50 books.