On December 9, , an American military tribunal opened criminal proceedings against 23 leading German physicians and administrators for their willing participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity. In his opening statement, Taylor summarized the crimes of the defendants. The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful only are still alive; a few of the survivors will appear in this courtroom.
But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected. For the most part they are nameless dead.
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To their murderers, these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals. Siegfried Handloser was one of the men on trial. He was born in Konstanz. He entered the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy in Berlin in After passing the state examination in , he was employed in various positions in the medical service from Eventually, he became a consultant in the Reichswehr Ministry.
Handloser was a Lieutenant General in the medical service and medical inspector in the Wehrmacht. He also served as chief of medical services of the armed forces. He was found guilty of participation in high altitude, freezing, malaria, mustard gas, sulfanilamide, seawater, epidemic jaundice, and spotted fever experiments on humans. He also conducted bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration and bone-transplantation experiments. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The German Society for Internal Medicine DGIM was founded in Wiesbaden in and, with over 30, members, still is one of the largest medical-scientific professional societies in Europe.
Handloser effectively became the Nazi delegate In He only got here because of his political role, not through scientific achievement. He had not previously been a member of the DGIM. In October , and was named honorary professor. He was in charge of all the Wehrmacht medical personnelβincluding the medical units of the Waffen-SS.
