Look up the 1946\1947 'Doctors Trials' at Nuremberg. Several Luftwaffe doctors and medical personnel were convicted of war crimes over human experimentation at concentration and POW camps.
I'll spare the forum the grizzly details.
Now, now, he did ask, after all.
Hermann Becker-Freysang, Captain (Stabsarzt) in the Luftwaffe's medical service. He was interested in the effects of salt water on healthy people, so he force-fed or injected it into 50 Dachau inmates to see what would happen. Biopsied their livers without anesthetic. All of them died. He wrote a paper about it.
Gerhard Rose, Brigadier General (Generalarzt) in the Luftwaffe. He gave 1200 Dachau inmates malaria, but hey, almost 800 of them lived!
Oskar Schroeder, Colonel? (Generaloberstabsarzt) of the Luftwaffe medical service. He and Dr. Rose thought it would be interesting to give inmates typhus, in nicely controlled experiments where some of them were given what might have been an antidote. Many of them lived, too!
Georg August Weltz, Lt. Colonel? (Oberfeldarzt) of the Lutfwaffe medical service, was actually acquitted. The others received sentences much shorter than their experimental subjects got.
I also count one "consulting physician to the Luftwaffe," two staff members of the Department for Aviation Medicine at the German Experimental Institute for Aviation, and one from the Institute for Aviation Medicine, if that was different. Not Luftwaffe officers, you understand.
You can see how all of these experiments were closely related to Luftwaffe concerns (oddly enough, the high-altitude experiments where inmates were depressurized until they died were conducted by other, perhaps more serious doctors).
- oldman
