. NMT02-T0773
Volume II · Page 773
Military Tribunal II*
The indictment in this case contains three counts, which may be summarized as follows
Count One: War crimes, involving murder, slave labor, deportation of civilian population for slave labor, cruel and inhuman treatment of foreign laborers, and the use of prisoners of war in war operations by force and compulsion.
Count Two: War crimes, involving murder, subjecting involuntary victims to low-pressure and freezing experiments resulting in torture and death.
Count Three: Crimes against humanity, involving murder and the same unlawful acts specified in counts one and two against German nationals and nationals of other countries.
For reasons of its own, the Tribunal will first consider counts two and one, in that order, followed by consideration of count three.
More in detail, this count alleges that the defendant was a principal in, accessory to, ordered, abetted, took a consenting part in and was connected with, plans and enterprises involving medical experiments without the subjects' consent, in the course of which experiments, the defendant, with others, perpetrated murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, and other inhuman acts. The so-called medical experiments consisted of placing the subject in an airtight chamber in which the air pressure is mechanically reduced so that it is comparable with the pressure to which an aviator is subjected at high altitudes, and in experimenting upon the effect of extreme dry and wet cold upon the human body. For these experiments inmates of the concentration camp at Dachau were selected. These inmates presented a motley group of prisoners of war, dissenters from the philosophy of the National Socialist Party, Jews, both from Germany and the eastern countries, rebellious or indifferent factory workers, displaced civilians from eastern occupied countries, and an undefined group known as "asocial or undesirable persons."
__________
Concurring opinions were filed by Judge Musmanno, see pp. 797-859, and by Judge Phillips, see pp. 860-878.
