Eugen Fischer - Postwar Investigation

Postwar Investigation

"Publicizing German medical atrocities could undermine wholesale public confidence in clinical science" To avoid the appearance that the entire medical community could no longer be trusted, the Nuremberg Medical Trial political appointees "... presented medical researchers as having been 'perverted' by the manipulative control of the SS and as poisoned by Nazism..." and instead that "the human experiments were so ill-conceived as not to be worthy of the status of science..."

"he authorities considered that further investigation of hospitals and universities was undesirable, ... if understaken on a large scale it might result in necessary removal from German medicine of large number of highly qualified men at a time when their services are most needed."

"On 19 September 1949 Heubner, and the KWG scientists Adolf Butenandt, Max Hartmann, and Boris Rajewsky cleared Verschuer. This Dahlem commission marked the reverse of the NMT, as it was a tribunal of peers (mostly tarnished by various degrees of complicity under National Socialism). The commission could easily reject that Verschuer was a racial fanatic, or that he collaborated with the SS -- for science under National Socialism did not necessarily work this way. It played down the significance of the This Dahlem commission marked the reverse of the NMT, Mengele link by stressing that he was only a camp doctor, who would have followed SS regulations against spreading information about Auschwitz as an extermination camp."

Thus, the ties of the German medical community—especially those at Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes—were not in any way associated with the death camps; therefore, medical science and the scientists should really be acceptable to the German public and the rest of the world. The SS, and medical personnel such as Mengele who were directly involved with the death camps, were fingered as the most responsible for the atrocities of National Socialism.

However, there is other information which contradicts this explanation: in the second half of 1944, the eyes of victims of experimentation from Auschwitz-Birkenau were sent to Karin Magnussen in multiple deliveries. Magnussen received no fewer than 40 pairs of eyes from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Also, the Hungarian prisoner pathologist, Miklós Nyiszli, noticed from the autopsy of Sinti twins that they had been killed not by disease, but by a chloroform injection to the heart. Nyiszli had to prepare their eyes and send them to the KWI-A.