War crimes of a medical nature committed by the Nazi regime surpass all of the inhumanities of man to man recorded in human history"om the view of Dr. Andrew C. Ivy , chairman of the department of physiology at Northwestern university medical school.
D.r Ivy, soon to become a vice president of the University of Illinois in charge of the institution´s professional schools in Chicago, has just returned from Germany, where he made a three week survey for the war crimes commission as a result of which between 70 and 90 German medical men will be tried as war criminals.
Nazi Doctors Indicted
In his report to the commission, Dr. Ivy pointed out that there were two classes of medical crimes: Non-experimental and experimental. In the first group were these crime:
Mass killing, including that done to rid the reich of persons too old or weak to work, or killings to make room for newcomers in crowded concentration camps; many methods were used, among them exposure to potassium cyanide fumes and intravenous injections of deadly drugs.
Murder to obtain specimens for anthropological museums.
Mutilation, either wanton or for the apparent purpose of ¨training¨ medical students.
Brutality, such as injection of drugs to cause convulsions in prisoners who failed to stand at rigid attention, performance of operations by nonmedical personnel, and unhygienic conditions in hospitals, prisons, and concentration camps.
Human Rights Disregarded
In the experimental category of medical crimes, Dr. Ivy listed those ¨committed against human beings without their consent and in complete disregard of their human rights,¨ and declared that many were committed so that they failed to avoid unnecessary suffering and injury, and with death a premeditated end, Included in this group were:
1. Injection of virulent typhus into a nonimmunized ¨control¨ group of humans.
2. Introduction of living tuberculosis germs into the trachea.
3. Experiments on phosphorus burns of the skin.
4. Cutting away of muscle ligament or shortening of limb bones to determine functional impairment.
5. Transplanting of tissues of various sorts, and attempts to transplant legs and organs [long recognized by medical science as impractical].
6. Introduction of ¨gas gangrene¨ germs into humans.
7. Experiments involving rupture of the uterus, artificial insemination, and attempts to produce multiple births to increase the reproduction rate among the Germans. Indecencies, Dr. Ivy said, marked many of these crimes.
Experiments in Sterilization
The survey also said cited nazi experiments in secret methods of sterilizing enemy populations. These included placing the dried juice of a plant in the food, secretly subjecting the persons to X-rays while they were filling out governmental forms, and injecting a sterilizing agent into women while ostensibly performing a routine physical examination.
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