. NMT02-T0121
Volume II · Page 121
Q. Among the controls, you figured thirty percent?
A. Yes. There were ten control persons in the first group of experiments and of them, three died.
Q. Three died? Well, but I assume that you have read through the Ding diary and let us assume for the moment that it is correct. Didn't you say that they also used control persons in the four or five other series of experiments?
A. In the controlled cases where they were testing the vaccine, the general mortality rate was thirty percent. But then there were these therapeutic experiments in which, according to the diary, blood infections were undertaken and, in this case, the diary does mention an unusually high mortality rate.
Q. Well, Professor, for your information, we have figured out five control series in the Ding diary, and I mean by controls those that were not treated with anything. The mortality ranges between fifty-fifty to one hundred percent and averaged eighty-one percent. Do you accept those figures as correct? I mean, do you think that's right?
Q. No. That does not correspond with the impression I got from the numbers in the diary, but I did not calculate it so precisely as all that. I looked at the individual experiments and it is true that, for instance, in these therapeutic experiments, Ding's work mentions a mortality of something like fifty to fifty-five percent, and then there is one series that deals with blood infection where of twenty people, I believe nineteen died.
Q. Let me put it to you, Professor, is it not a fact that they were not dealing with epidemic typhus in Buchenwald, but with a super-typhus, developed from man to man passage, which was much more virulent and much more deadly than any typhus you could expect in an epidemic?
A. That I cannot judge because I have no knowledge of the work done in Buchenwald and can only refer to what Ding's diary says, which I regard as unreliable.
Q. Well, if you regard it as reliable, Doctor, and if you figure out the deaths among the untreated control persons and find a mortality which averaged eighty–one percent, will you not, as a scientist and an expert on tropical diseases, concede that they had developed a highly virulent, something we might call a super-typhus, in Buchenwald? Isn't that right, Professor?
A. As a scientist, I am accustomed to state my opinion on the basis of reliable documentation and not on the basis of such falsifications which are produced for a special purpose.
Q. I can appreciate that you do not regard the document as reliable, Professor, but we will investigate that a little later.
