[Aus...] chwitz? Is it to be held that the Polish girls in Ravensbrueck gave their unfettered consent to be mutilated and killed for the glory of the Third Reich? Was the miserable gypsy who assaulted the defendant Beiglboeck in this very courtroom a voluntary participant in the sea-water experiments? Did the hundreds of victims of the murderous typhus stations in Buchenwald and Natzweiler by any stretch of the imagination consent to those experiments? The preponderance of the proof leaves no doubt whatever as to the answer to those questions. The testimony of experimental subjects, eyewitnesses, and the documents of the defendant's own making, establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that these experimental subjects were nonvolunteers in every sense of the word.

This fact is not seriously denied by the defendants. Most of them who performed the experiments themselves have admitted that they never so much as asked the subjects whether they were volunteering for the experiments. As to the legal and moral necessity for consent, the defendants pay theoretical lip service, while at the same time leaving the back door ajar for a hasty retreat. Thus, it is said that the totalitarian "State" assumed the responsibility for the designation of the experimental subjects, and under such circumstances the men who planned. ordered, performed, or otherwise participated in the experiment cannot be held criminally responsible even though nonvolunteers were tortured and killed as a result. This was perhaps brought out most clearly as a result of questions put to the defendant Karl Brandt by the Tribunal. When asked his view of an experiment, which was assumed to have been of highest military necessity and of an involuntary character with resultant deaths, Brandt replied:

"In this case I am of the opinion that, considering the circumstances of the situation of the war, this state institution, which has laid down the importance of the interest of the state, at the same time takes the responsibility away from the physician if such an experiment ends fatally, and such responsibility must then be borne by the state." (Tr. p. 2567.)

Further questioning elicited the opinion that the only man possibly responsible in this suppositious case was Himmler, who had the power of life and death over concentration camp inmates, even though the experiment may have been ordered, for example, by the Chief of the Medical Service of the Luftwaffe and executed by doctors subordinated to him. Most of the other defendants took a similar position, that they had no responsibility in the selection of the experimental subjects.

This defense is, in the view of the prosecution, completely spurious. The use of involuntary subjects in a medical experiment is a crime,