E. Voluntary Participation of Experimental Subjects

a. Introduction

There was considerable contention in the ease as to whether an inmate of a German concentration camp could give his voluntary consent to participate in medical experiments. The prosecution argumentation on this point appears in the opening statement on pages 27-74 and in the closing statement. The applicable extract from the closing statement of the prosecution appears below on pages 980 to 988. Selections from the defense argumentation on this point have been taken from the closing brief for the defendant Karl Brandt and from the final plea for the defendant Ruff. These appear below on pages 983 to 992. The following selections from the testimony have been taken from the evidence on this point: Extracts from the direct examination of the prosecution witness Dr. Eugen Kogon, and extracts from the cross-examination and redirect examination of the prosecution's expert witness Dr. Andrew C. Ivy. These extracts appear below on pages 998 to 1004.

b. Selection from the Argumentation of the Prosecution

EXTRACT FROM THE CLOSING STATEMENT OF THE PROSECUTION

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* * * It is the most fundamental tenet of medical ethics and human decency that the subjects volunteer for the experiment after being informed of its nature and hazards. This is a clear dividing line between the criminal and what may be noncriminal. If the experimental subjects cannot be said to have volunteered then the inquiry need proceed no further. Such is the simplicity of this case.

What then is a volunteer? If one has a fertile imagination, suppositions cases night be put which would require a somewhat refined judgment. No such problem faces this Tribunal. The proof is overwhelming that there was never the slightest pretext of using volunteers. It was for the very reason that volunteers could not be expected to undergo the murderous experiments which are the subject of this trial that these defendants turned to the inexhaustible pool of miserable and oppressed prisoners in the concentration camps. Can anyone seriously believe that Poles, Jews. and Russians, or even Germans, voluntarily submitted themselves to the tortures of the decompression chamber and freezing basin in Dachau, the poison gas chamber in Natzweiler, or the sterilization X-ray machines of Aus- [...chwitz?]

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* Closing statement is recorded is mimeographed transcript. 14 July 1947, pp. 10718-10796.