. NMT02-T0068
Volume II · Page 68
could have been carried out in an epidemiological manner. I represented that point of view before Grawitz and Himmler from the very beginning.
Q. You stated yesterday that to test this matter in an epidemiological way, a large number of persons would have had to be vaccinated and compared with a large number of persons who were not vaccinated. Would such a long experiment have been possible considering the circumstances prevailing during the war?
A. Such a test would have been possible. It was actually introduced by me within the framework of the ministry. It is a matter of course, however, that the results can only be collected at a very late date and can only be exploited at a much later date. In the case of the entire experiment we were concerned with bridging over this space of time.
Q. In carrying out this examination one could have found that one vaccine has only a very small effectiveness, as was actually found out in the case of the Behring vaccine. In that case would you say that the mortality of persons vaccinated with the inferior vaccine would have been much greater than the entire amount of fatalities as they occurred in Buchenwald? You know that the statement regarding the fatality figures fluctuated between 100 and 120.
A. That could be assumed to be the case with certainty. A comparison is the manner in which all tests are carried out in this field. I shall give you a few examples for that. When Emil von Behring in the year 1890 discovered the diphtheria serum, it was at first used by a physician of the Berlin Charité in the case of diphtheria-infected children. He treated about 1,200 children suffering from diphtheria with that serum. He registered a mortality rate in the case of these children, in spite of the treatment, of approximately 22 percent. Just as many children did not receive the serum but were treated in a different manner. In this group the mortality rate was double, approximately 44 percent. These 240 or 250 children who died, and who were in that control group could certainly have been saved if they had been given the blessing of that diphtheria serum. But that was in reality the purpose of that test and one had to take into account that a larger ratio of fatalities would result in the group to be compared and that then the value of the serum would be recognized.
Q. I think that this example will suffice. In that case you are really admitting that an objection against experiments in Buchenwald could not be justified?
A. During the war I did not work on any disease as ardently as on typhus. I treated thousands of patients who fell ill with typhus
