. NMT02-T0169
Volume II · Page 169
was a different one than that which is objectively shown by this letter, and that you will not sentence me but will believe me in what I have not only told you, my judges, but others previously during my interrogations and what I have told my friends, at a time when this present situation had not arisen, in order to clarify my motives as being true.
With this hope I am looking forward to your judgment, and in that connection I am thinking of my children who, for years now, have lived under the protection of an allied power, and who will not believe that their father, after everything that he has suffered, could possibly have acted as an enemy to human rights.
I have nothing to add to the statements I have made from the witness box under oath. In administering therapeutical care, following established medical principles, as a woman in a difficult position, I did the best I could. Moreover, I fully agree with the statements made by my defense counsel and will refrain, at this late stage of the trial, from making any further statements.
Your Honors, when this war began I was a young doctor, 27 years of age. My attitude towards my people and my Fatherland took me to the front line as an army doctor. I there joined an armored division, where I remained until I was incapacitated due to the loss of an arm. For only a very brief period, during these years of war, I worked as a medical officer in a military hospital back home. There too, my conception of my duties was directed by the wish to serve my country. During this time of my work at home, I received the order, the execution of which made me a subject of the indictment of this trial.
The order for my participation in the experiments originate from my highest medical and military superior and was passed on to me, as the assistant and first lieutenant, through Professor Gebhardt. Professor Gebhardt was the famous surgeon and much honored creator of Hohenlychen. He was a scientific authority whom I looked up to with reverence and confidence. As a general of the Waffen SS he was my unconditional military superior. I believed him, that I had been earmarked by him to assist in the solution of an urgent medical problem which was to bring help and salvation to hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers, and which was to be a cure for them; and I believed that this problem
__________
¹ Tr. p. 11356.
² Tr. pp. 11356-11358.
