Thread: EU Leader Calls for Throwing Out Nuremberg Code

Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code

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The Nuremberg Code

1.The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.
The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.
2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill, and careful judgment required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.
The Nuremberg Code is the most important document in the history of the ethics of medical research.1-6 The Code was formulated 50 years ago, in August 1947, in Nuremberg, Germany, by American judges sitting in judgment of Nazi doctors accused of conducting murderous and torturous human experiments in the concentration camps (the so-called Doctors' Trial).7 It served as a blueprint for today's principles that ensure the rights of subjects in medical research. Because of its link with the horrors of World War II and the use of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps for medical experimentation, debate continues today about the authority of the Code, its applicability to modern medical research, and even its authorship.1,2,4,5,8 The chief prosecutor at the Doctors' Trial, General Telford Taylor, believed that one of the three U.S. judges, Harold Sebring, was the author of the Code.2 Two American physicians who helped prosecute the Nazi doctors at Nuremberg, Leo Alexander and Andrew Ivy, have each been identified as the Code's author.5,8-11 A careful reading of the transcript of the Doctors' Trial, background documents, and the final judgment reveals that authorship was shared and that the famous 10 principles of the Code grew out of the trial itself.
In this article I will explain the important role that physicians had in the prosecution of the Nazi doctors and in the formulation of the Nuremberg Code and summarize how medical researchers have used the Code as a guide over the past five decades.

The Doctors' Trial

The main trial at Nuremberg after World War II was conducted by the International Military Tribunal. The tribunal was made up of judges from the four allied powers (the United States, Britain, France, and the former Soviet Union) and was charged with trying Germany's major war criminals. After this first-of-its-kind international trial, the United States conducted 12 additional trials of representative Nazis from various sectors of the Third Reich, including law, finance, ministry, and manufacturing, before American Military Tribunals, also at Nuremberg. The first of these trials, the Doctors' Trial, involved 23 defendants, all but 3 of whom were physicians accused of murder and torture in the conduct of medical experiments on concentration-camp inmates.7
The indictment of the defendants was filed on October 25, 1946, 25 days after the conclusion of the first Nuremberg trial by the International Military Tribunal. The Doctors' Trial began on December 9, 1946, and ended on July 19, 1947. The case was heard by three judges and one alternate. Thirty-two prosecution witnesses and 53 defense witnesses, including the 23 defendants, testified. A total of 1471 documents were introduced into the record. Sixteen of the 23 defendants were found guilty; 7 of them were sentenced to death by hanging, 5 to life imprisonment, 2 to imprisonment for 25 years, 1 to imprisonment for 15 years, and 1 to imprisonment for 10 years. Seven were acquitted. The sentences were confirmed by the military governor, and, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case, the executions were carried out at the Landsberg prison.
For the United States and its chief prosecutor, Telford Taylor, the trial was a murder trial (and murder had been identified by the International Military Tribunal as a crime against humanity). Nonetheless, as Taylor pointed out in his opening statement, this was “no mere murder trial,” because the defendants were physicians who had sworn to “do no harm” and to abide by the Hippocratic Oath.12 He told the judges that the people of the world needed to know “with conspicuous clarity” the ideas and motives that moved these doctors “to treat their fellow human beings as less than beasts,” and that “brought about such savageries” so that they could be “cut out and exposed before they become a spreading cancer in the breast of humanity.”12 One recurring theme was the relevance of Hippocratic ethics to human experimentation and whether Hippocratic moral ideals could be an exclusive guide to the ethics of research without risk to the human rights of subjects. In the trial's exploration of ideas that shaped medical-research ethics, three physicians had central roles: Leo Alexander, an American neuropsychiatrist, Werner Leibbrand, a German psychiatrist and medical historian, and Andrew Ivy, a renowned American physiologist.
LEO ALEXANDER

Leo Alexander, a Viennese-born American physician, had joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps in 1942, before being stationed in England at the American Eighth Air Force base. At the end of the war, Alexander was sent on a special mission under the Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, an intelligence organization with members from several nations, and charged by orders from Supreme Headquarters of Allied Expeditionary Forces to gather evidence for the Nuremberg trials. Two days before the opening of the Doctors' Trial, Alexander gave Taylor a memorandum entitled “Ethical and Non-Ethical Experimentation on Human Beings,” in which he identified three ethical, legal, and scientific requirements for the conduct of human experimentation.9 The first requirement established the right of the competent experimental subject to consent or refuse to participate in these terms: “the subject should be willing to undergo the experiment of his own free will. . . .” The second focused on the duty of physicians as expressed in the Hippocratic Oath, which Alexander restated in research terms: “the medical Hippocratic attitude prohibits an experiment if the foregone conclusion, probability or a priori reason to believe exists that death or disabling injury of the experimental subject will occur.” The third characterized good research practices.
On April 15, 1947, Alexander gave Taylor a second memorandum.9,11 In it he set forth in greater detail six specific conditions for ethically and legally permissible experiments on human beings. The first stated that

the legally valid voluntary consent of the experimental subject is essential. This requires specifically the absence of duress, sufficient disclosure on the part of the experimenter and sufficient understanding on the part of the experimental subject of the exact nature and consequences of the experiment for which he volunteers, to permit an enlightened consent.

The five other conditions established the humanitarian nature and purpose of the experiment and the scientific integrity and obligations of the investigator to the welfare of the subject.
WERNER LEIBBRAND

On January 27, 1947, Werner Leibbrand, a German psychiatrist and medical historian at Erlangen University, opened the debate on medical ethics at Nuremberg.12 He explained to the court that German physicians at the beginning of the 20th century had adopted a “biologic thinking” according to which a patient was a series of biologic events, and nothing more than “a mere object, like a mail package.”12 Leibbrand insisted that such a view precluded any human relation between physicians and their patients and that it represented a perversion of Hippocratic ethics and “a lack of morality and reverence for human life.”12 He strongly condemned physicians who conducted experiments on subjects without their consent, and testified that this was also the result of biologic thinking.
During cross-examination, defense lawyers asserted that “civilized” nations such as France, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States had performed dangerous medical experiments on prisoners, often without their consent. They cited American malaria experiments12-14 to argue that Nazi physicians had followed common research practices. Leibbrand replied that this American research also was wrong because “prisoners were in a forced situation and could not be volunteers.”12 Leibbrand insisted that “the morality of a physician is to hold back his natural research urge which may result in doing harm, in order to maintain his basic medical attitude that is laid down in the Oath of Hippocrates.”12 This strong accusation of American research by the prosecution's first medical-ethics witness created major unanticipated problems for the prosecution. It therefore became necessary to broaden the scope of the trial by defining the conditions under which risky human experimentation is ethically permissible.
Defense lawyers explained that Nazi doctors were ordered by the state to conduct such experiments as the high-altitude, hypothermia, and seawater experiments on inmates at the Dachau concentration camp to determine how best to protect and treat German fliers and soldiers. They contended that these experiments were necessary and that the “good of the state” takes precedence over that of the individual.12 Leibbrand replied that “the state could order deadly experiments on human subjects, but the physicians remained responsible for [not] carrying them out.”12 Once these physiologic experiments became the centerpiece of the trial, reliance on psychiatrists alone was not possible. The prosecution needed a prestigious medical scientist who was an authority on research physiology and whose wartime scientific interests corresponded to those of the Nazi doctor defendants. This expert was Andrew Ivy.
ANDREW IVY

Andrew Ivy was an internationally known physiologist and a noted scientist. He also had first-hand knowledge of the Stateville Penitentiary experiments on malaria12,13 in his home state of Illinois, which the Nazi defendants attempted to liken to those performed on concentration-camp inmates. When the secretary of war, through the surgeon general of the army, asked the board of trustees of the American Medical Association to nominate a medical advisor to the Nuremberg prosecution, Ivy emerged as the natural nominee. On June 12, 1947, Ivy came to Nuremberg for the third time, this time to testify in rebuttal for the prosecution. His testimony, the longest of the trial, lasted four days.12
In direct examination, Ivy presented to the judges three research principles that he had formulated at the request of the American Medical Association and which, he said, reflected common research practices.12 His document entitled “Principles of Ethics Concerning Experimentation with Human Beings,” adopted by the American Medical Association House of Delegates in December 1946, read in part:

1. Consent of the human subject must be obtained. All subjects have been volunteers in the absence of coercion in any form. Before volunteering, subjects have been informed of the hazards, if any. Small rewards in various forms have been provided as a rule.
2. The experiment to be performed must be based on the results of animal experimentation and on a knowledge of the natural history of the disease under study, and must be so designed that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment. The experiment must be such as to yield results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods of study, and must not be random and unnecessary in nature.
3. The experiment must be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons and so as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury and only after the results of adequate animal experimentation have eliminated any a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur. . . .15

Ivy explained that these common-sense principles mirrored the understanding shared by everyone in practice in the medical community.12 The first principle was that a physician would never do anything to a patient or subject before obtaining his or her consent. Ivy also asserted that, unlike Leibbrand, he did not consider prisoners to be in an inherently coercive situation and thus unable to give consent, because in democratic countries where the rights of individuals are respected, prisoners can always say yes or no without fear of being punished.12 He testified:

The American malaria experiments with 800 or more prisoners were absolutely justified, scientifically, legally and ethically even if they bring with them danger to human life. To treat malaria was an important scientific problem, and so long as the subjects volunteer and are explained the hazards of the experiments, there is no ethical reason against it. . . . If prisoners condemned to death are volunteers, then it was ethical to do just that.12

During cross-examination, Ivy acknowledged that there were no written principles of research in the United States or elsewhere before December 1946 and that the principles adopted by the American Medical Association were expressly formulated for the Doctors' Trial.12 Ivy also recognized that the right of the research subject to withdraw from an experiment may not always exist, as in the malaria experiments in which the subjects had already been infected, or in dangerous experiments in which the subjects could be severely injured or fatally harmed. Ivy agreed with Leibbrand that researchers must refuse to conduct experiments on human beings when ordered by the state in order “to save lives,” because in such cases subjects would not be volunteers. He declared that “[t]here is no justification in killing five people in order to save the lives of five hundred” and that “no state or politician under the sun could force [him] to perform a medical experiment which [he] thought was morally unjustified.”12 Ivy also stressed that the state may not assume the moral responsibility of physicians to their patients or research subjects, arguing that “[E]very physician should be acquainted with the Hippocratic Oath [which] represents the Golden Rule of the medical profession in the United States, and, to [his] knowledge, throughout the world.”12 When, finally, defense counsel asked Ivy to reconcile the Hippocratic moral maxim that forbids physicians to “administer a poison to anyone even when asked to do so” with conducting potentially lethal experimental interventions on volunteer subjects, Ivy replied, “I believe this Hippocratic commandment refers to the function of the physician as a therapist, not as an experimentalist, and what refers to the Hippocratic Oath is that he must have respect for life and the human rights of his experimental patient.”12

Medical Ethics and Human Rights

The judges at Nuremberg, although they realized the importance of Hippocratic ethics and the maxim primum non nocere, recognized that more was necessary to protect human research subjects. Accordingly, the judges articulated a sophisticated set of 10 research principles centered not on the physician but on the research subject. These principles, which we know as the Nuremberg Code, included a new, comprehensive, and absolute requirement of informed consent (principle 1), and a new right of the subject to withdraw from participation in an experiment (principle 9). The judges adopted much of the language proposed by Alexander and Ivy but were more emphatic about the necessity and attributes of the subject's consent and explicitly added the subject's right to withdraw.
In the traditional Hippocratic doctor–patient relationship, the patient is silent and dutifully obedient to the beneficent and trusted physician.16-18 Obviously, the patient must seek the physician's help and initiate the therapeutic relationship with the physician.17 But once patients agree to be treated, they trust that the physician will act in their interest, or at least will do no harm.17,18 In research, which is outside the beneficent context of the physician–patient relationship, this trust may be misplaced, because the physician's primary goal is not to treat; rather, it is to test a scientific hypothesis by following a protocol, regardless of the patient-subject's best interest. It is therefore only through a conflation of treatment and research that Alexander and Ivy believed they could expand on Hippocratic ethics to protect the rights of subjects in human experimentation.19,20 Their Hippocratic view of medical research may have prevented them from adequately appreciating the risks to research subjects, which are many times greater than the risks to patients who are merely being treated.21 Hippocratic ethics, even when supplemented with informed consent, tend to submerge the subject's autonomy into what the physician-investigator thinks is best for the subject.
Informed consent, the core of the Nuremberg Code, has rightly been viewed as the protection of subjects' human rights. The key contribution of Nuremberg was to merge Hippocratic ethics and the protection of human rights into a single code. The Nuremberg Code not only requires that physician-researchers protect the best interests of their subjects (principles 2 through 8 and 10) but also proclaims that subjects can actively protect themselves as well (principles 1 and 9). Most strikingly, for example, in Hippocratic ethics the subject relies on the physician to determine when it is in the subject's best interest to end his or her participation in an experiment. In the Nuremberg Code, the judges gave the subject as much authority as the physician-researcher to end the experiment before its conclusion (principle 9).

50 Years after Nuremberg

The Nuremberg Code has not been officially adopted in its entirety as law by any nation or as ethics by any major medical association. Nonetheless, its influence on global human-rights law and medical ethics has been profound.6 Its basic requirement of informed consent, for example, has been universally accepted and is articulated in international law in Article 7 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).6,22 Informed consent, with specific reliance on the Nuremberg Code, is also the basis of the International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects, the most recent guidelines promulgated by the World Health Organization and the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (1993).23
The World Medical Association, established during World War II, has been accused of purposely trying to undermine Nuremberg in order to distance physicians from Nazi medical crimes.24 The election of a former Nazi physician and SS member, Hans-Joachim Sewering, to the presidency of that organization in 1992 added credibility to that accusation.24 (Because of public criticism, Sewering later withdrew.) Nonetheless, the various versions of the Declaration of Helsinki promulgated by the World Medical Association since 1964, although attempting to have peer review supplement informed consent and even supplant it as their central principle in the context of “therapeutic research,” all implicitly acknowledge Nuremberg's authority. Both the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki served as models for the current U.S. federal research regulations, which require not only the informed consent of the research subject (with proxy consent sometimes acceptable, as for young children), but also prior peer review of research protocols by a committee (the institutional review board of the hospital or research institution) that includes a representative of the community.25
The Nuremberg Code focuses on the human rights of research subjects, the Declaration of Helsinki focuses on the obligations of physician-investigators to research subjects, and the federal regulations emphasize the obligations of research institutions that receive federal funds. Nonetheless, by insisting that medical investigators alone cannot set the rules for the ethical conduct of research, even when guided by beneficence and Hippocratic ethics, and by adopting a human-rights perspective that acknowledges the centrality of informed consent and the right of the subject to withdraw, the Nuremberg Code has changed forever the way both physicians and the public view the proper conduct of medical research on human subjects. Fifty years after Nuremberg, we recognize the human-rights legacy of the Nuremberg Code and are better able to face the critical challenge of applying the Code in its entirety and enforcing its human-rights provisions.

Author Affiliations

From the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, University and Woodland Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19104, where reprint requests should be addressed to Dr. Shuster.

Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code | NEJM

The Nuremberg Laws

Archives Receives Original Nazi Documents That “Legalized” Persecution of Jews

Winter 2010, Vol. 42, No. 4
By Greg Bradsher

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Law for the Safeguard of German Blood and German Honor barred marriage between Jews and other Germans. (National Archives Gift Collection)

It was in Nuremberg, officially designated as the "City of the Reich Party Rallies," in the province of Bavaria, where Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party in 1935 changed the status of German Jews to that of Jews in Germany, thus "legally" establishing the framework that eventually led to the Holocaust.
Ten years later, it would also be in Nuremberg, now nearly destroyed by British and American heavy bombing, where surviving prominent Nazi leaders were put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The war in Europe ended in May 1945, and soon the attention of the Allies turned to prosecuting those Third Reich leaders who had been responsible for, among other things, the persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust.
The trials began November 20, 1945, in Nuremberg's Palace of Justice, which had somehow survived the intense Allied bombings of 1944 and 1945.
The next day, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, named by President Harry S. Truman as the U.S. chief counsel for the prosecution of Axis criminality, made his opening statement to the International Military Tribunal.
"The most serious actions against Jews were outside of any law, but the law itself was employed to some extent. They were the infamous Nuremberg decrees of September 15, 1935," Jackson said.

The so-called "Nuremberg Laws"— a crucial step in Nazi racial laws that led to the marginalization of German Jews and ultimately to their segregation, confinement, and extermination—were key pieces of evidence in the trials, which resulted in 12 death sentences and life or long sentences for other Third Reich leaders.
But the prosecution was forced to use images of the laws from the official printed version, for the original copies were nowhere to be found.
However, they had been found earlier, by U.S. counter-intelligence troops, who passed them up the line until they came to the Third Army's commander, Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. The general took them home to California. There, they remained for decades, their existence not revealed until 1999.
Finally, this past summer, the original copies of the laws, signed by Hitler and other Nazi leaders, were transferred to the National Archives.
Third Reich Began Persecutions
Years Before Laws Enacted in 1935
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The signature page of the Law for the Safeguard of German Blood and German Honor. Adolf Hitler s signature is at the top of the list. (National Archives Gift Collection)

The Nuremberg Laws made official the Nazi persecution of the Jews, but the “legal” attack on the Jews actually began two years earlier.
After the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, they became increasingly engaged in activities involving the persecution of the Jewish and other minority populations. They did it under the color of law, using official decrees as a weapon against the Jews.
In 1933 Jews were denied the right to hold public office or civil service positions; Jewish immigrants were denaturalized; Jews were denied employment by the press and radio; and Jews were excluded from farming. The following year, Jews were excluded from stock exchanges and stock brokerage.
During these years, when the Nazi regime was still rather shaky and the Nazis feared opposition from within and resistance from without, they did nothing drastic, and the first measures appeared, in relative terms, rather mild.
After Germany publicly announced in May 1935 its rearmament in violation of the Versailles Treaty, Nazi party radicals began more forcibly demanding that Hitler, the party, and the government take more drastic measures against the Jews. They wanted to completely segregate them from the social, political, and economic life of Germany. These demands increased as the summer progressed.
On August 20, 1935, the U.S. embassy in Berlin reported to the secretary of state:
To sum up the Jewish situation at the moment, it may be said that the whole movement of the Party is one of preparing itself and the people for general drastic and so-called legal action to be announced in the near future probably following the Party Congress to be held in Nuremberg beginning on September 10th. One has only to review the statements made by important leaders since the end of the Party's summer solstice to realize the trend of affairs.
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The Reich Citizen Law stripped German Jews of their German citizenship. (National Archives Gift Collection)
James G. McDonald, high commissioner for refugees under the League of Nations, then in Berlin, wrote in his diary August 22 that "New legislation is imminent, but it is difficult to tell exactly what the provisions will be. Certainly, they will tend further to differentiate the Jews from the mass of Germans and to disadvantage them in new ways."
William E. Dodd, the American ambassador to Germany, on September 7 sent a long dispatch to the secretary of state regarding current development in the "Jewish Situation." He reported "it appears that even now discussions are still continuing in the highest circles respecting the policy to be evolved at the Nuremberg party Congress." He added:

It is believed that a declaration respecting the Jews will be made at Nuremberg which will be followed by the announcement at the Congress itself, or shortly thereafter, or a body of legislation whose ultimate character will depend upon the result of the discussions now in progress. Either one or the other will probably contain drastic features to appease the radicals but may be offset by certain appearances of moderation to be emphasized later to facilitate such dealing abroad. . . . An idea that may influence policy at Nuremberg, and in any case now seems to be uppermost in the minds of Party extremists, is that, however drastic the measures adopted, they will be formally rooted in law, and that the sanctity with which law is regarded, and the discipline with which it is observed in Germany, may impress foreign opinion favorably.

On September 9, McDonald wrote Felix Warburg, a major American Jewish leader, that he was unable to get a clear picture what may be expected in the threatened new legislation, but "One can only be certain that the result will be to penalize the Jews in various ways and on the basis of pseudo-legality, which causes grim forebodings."
Nazi Rally in Nuremberg
Hailed Passage of the Laws
At their annual rally held in Nuremberg on September 15, Nazi party leaders announced, after the Reichstag had adopted them, new laws that institutionalized many of the racial theories underpinning Nazi ideology.
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The Reich Flag Law established the the swastika flag as the new national flag of Germany. (National Archives Gift Collection)
The so-called Nuremberg Laws, signed by Hitler and several other Nazi officials, were the cornerstone of the legalized persecution of Jews in Germany. They stripped German Jews of their German citizenship, barred marriage and "extramarital sexual intercourse" between Jews and other Germans, and barred Jews from flying the German flag, which would now be the swastika.
On September 16, Ambassador Dodd sent a cable to the secretary of state about the Nuremberg Laws. He wrote:

So far it is only possible to say that main trend of Nuremberg congress was to cater to radical sentiment within the Party. The laws passed last night concerning citizenship, the swastika as national flag and for protection of German blood and honor (by means of preventing marriage and sexual intercourse between Aryan and Jews and flying of the German flag by the latter) obviously need further definition and Foreign Office advised waiting for executive supplementary regulations. [These, issued on November 14, provided specific definitions of who a Jew was.]

Dodd followed up the next day with a dispatch to the secretary of state regarding the Nuremberg Party Congress: "Race propaganda and psychology ran through practically all the speeches like a scarlet thread, obviously in preparation for the laws that were to be adopted by the Reichstag."
He added: "The new laws against the Jews deceive very few people that the last word has been said on that question or that new discriminatory measures will not eventually follow within the limit of what is possible without bringing about too great a disturbance in business."
On September 19, Dodd sent the secretary of state two copies of the Reichsgestzblatt [Reich Law Gazette] of September 16, which contained the Nuremberg Laws and also included translations of them.
In transmitting them, Dodd wrote: "The anti-Jewish legislation should be sufficiently severe to please Party extremists for some time."
They were not. More persecutions followed in the years before World War II began in 1939. The extermination of the Jews and others followed, not only in Germany, but through most of Europe.
Original Nuremberg Documents
Are Found, But Then Disappear
The Moscow Declaration of 1943, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Marshal Josef Stalin, took note of the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans and laid down the policy that the major criminals would “be punished by the joint decision of the Governments of the Allies."
But first the war had to be concluded before the Moscow Declaration could be implemented.
As the Allied forces overran Germany in April 1945, on April 20 (Hitler's birthday), elements of the Third and 45th Infantry divisions of the U.S. Seventh Army entered Nuremberg and after hard fighting effectively secured the town. A week later, Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, and the week after that, the Germans surrendered.
Now the Moscow Declaration could be put into effect.
Meanwhile, in late April 1945, M.Sgt. Martin Dannenberg, leading the 203rd U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Detachment, working with the U.S. Third Army, was roaming through Bavaria with two other men, carrying out various CIC assignments.
An informant led him and his team to a bank vault in the town of Eichstaett, about 45 miles due south of Nuremberg. There, a German financial official who had a key opened the vault, then handed over to the American soldiers some documents in a yellow envelope, sealed with red wax swastikas.
Dannenberg slit the top of the envelope and pulled the documents out. The first thing he saw was the signature "Adolf Hitler."
Sgt. Frank Perls, a German-born Jew (though baptized as a Protestant) who joined the U.S. Army in 1943 after fleeing his homeland in 1933, was one of two men accompanying Dannenberg. Translating the documents, Perls quickly realized they were the infamous Nuremberg Laws.
Dannenberg turned them over to his commanding officer, who ordered Dannenberg and Perls to deliver them to the U.S. Third Army commander, Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
War Crimes Trials Begin
—Without Original Copies
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Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and other defendants sit in the courtroom of the German war crimes trials in Nuremberg, 1945. (238-NT-592)
On May 2, less than a week after the CIC special agents found the Nuremberg Laws and a few days before the war in Europe ended, Truman appointed Associate Justice Jackson as chief of counsel for the United States in its prosecution of the Allied case against the major Axis war criminals.
During the next three months, Jackson spent most of the time in London negotiating with the British, French, and Soviet representatives over an agreement to prosecute the major Nazi war criminals before an international tribunal. They would reach agreement on August 8.
Meanwhile, immediately after Jackson's appointment, the staff of the Office of the United States Chief of Counsel, which grew to more than 600 personnel, started collecting documentary evidence that could be used by the prosecutors.
Among the evidence gathered were volumes of the Reichsgestzblatt, which contained various German laws, decrees, and regulations, including those relating to the persecution of the Jews.
In the September 16, 1935, edition were the Nuremberg Laws, which had been adopted by the Reichstag the previous day and promulgated by its president, Hermann Goering. Photostats and translations of them were placed in the U.S. evidence file and eventually made available to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
The prosecutors may have wished they had the original laws themselves, as they would have made for dramatic evidence since two of the defendants, Wilhelm Frick and Rudolf Hess, had signed them. But, unfortunately, they did not. General Patton had them.
Patton Ignores Orders,Takes
Original Copies To California
Patton, like so many of his soldiers, was a souvenir hunter.
Rather than ensuring the copies of the Nuremberg Laws that he received from Dannenberg and Perls were delivered to the appropriate authorities, he took them home to California after the war in Europe was over.
In doing so, Patton was violating Supreme Headquarters Allied Expedition Forces (SHAEF) and 12th Army Group directives of November 9 and 23, 1944, issued by Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar N. Bradley, respectively, regarding seizing and holding Nazi party and German government records.
Six months after Patton took the Nuremberg Laws to California, the trial began. Justice Jackson, in his opening statement to the court on November 21, as noted earlier, referenced the Nuremberg Laws, citing the version published in the Reichsgestzblatt of 1935.
During the tribunal's December 13 session, an assistant trial counsel for the United States addressed the court about the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In making his presentation, he said: "When the Nazi Party gained control of the German State, a new and terrible weapon against the Jews was placed within their grasp, the power to apply the force of the state against them. This was done by the issuance of decrees."
He then proceeded to list them, including the Nuremberg Laws as published in the 1935 Reichsgestzblatt. After discussing them, he asked the court to take judicial notice of the published decrees. From a legal perspective, theReichsgestzblatt was certainly authoritative and acceptable to the tribunal under its charter regarding rules of evidence, but it certainly would have been more dramatic and effective to have confronted the defendants with the originals, as the prosecutors did with other documents.
The trial would go on another 10 months, with references often made to the Nuremberg Laws. On September 30 and October 1, 1946, the tribunal rendered judgment. Of the three defendants most closely associated with the Nuremberg Laws, Herman Goering and Wilhelm Frick were sentenced to death, and Rudolf Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Missing Documents Reemerge.
Now in the National Archives
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Gen. George S. Patton presented the Nuremberg Laws to Huntington trustee Robert Millikan on June 11, 1945. (Courtesy of the Huntington Library)
A week later, with his work over, Justice Jackson sent President Truman a final report about his activities and noted that the war crimes documentation, including captured records, was the property of the United States and that an agency should take custody of it on behalf of the United States.
"The matter," he wrote, "is of such importance as to warrant calling it to your attention."
Two months later, the records of the U.S. Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality were offered to the National Archives, and in 1947 the National Archives accessioned them. Within the records are photostatic and translated copies of the Nuremberg Laws as published in the Reichsgestzblatt and referred to during the trial.
General Patton had deposited the original Nuremberg Laws at the Huntington Library, near his home in the Los Angeles area in June 1945; Patton died as a result of injuries received in an auto accident in Germany in December 1945 and had left no instructions regarding the laws.
Their existence at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens was not revealed until 1999, when they went on display for 10 years at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles until late 2009.
In the summer of 2010, the National Archives accepted donation from the Huntington Library of the original Nuremberg Laws—63 years later than they would have if Patton had turned them over to the appropriate authorities.
Greg Bradsher, an archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration, specializes in World War II intelligence, looted assets, and war crimes. His previous contributions to Prologue have included articles the discovery of Nazi gold in the Merkers Mine (Spring 1999); the story of Fritz Kolbe, 1900–1943 (Spring 2002); Japan's secret "Z Plan" in 1944 (Fall 2005); Founding Father Elbridge Gerry (Spring 2006); the third Archivist of the United States, Wayne Grover (Winter 2009); and Operation Blissful, a World War II diversionary attack on an island in the Pacific (Fall 2010).
Note on Sources
Published in 42 volumes, the Trial of the Major War Criminals before The International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg 14 November 1945–1 October 1946 (Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1947–1949), contains the day-to-day proceedings of the tribunal and documents offered in evidence by the prosecution and defense.
Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, D.C. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), vol. I, Chapter 12, contains information about documents, including those not introduced as evidence during the International Military Tribunal, relating to the persecution of the Jews in Germany.
The State Department's Central Decimal File, 1930–1939 (General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59), under decimals 862.00 and 862.4016, contains reports on political developments in Germany and the persecution of German Jews. Also useful regarding the persecution of the Jews in Germany beginning in 1935 is Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart, and Severin Hochberg, eds., Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald 1935–1945 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, 2009).
Useful for understanding the adoption of the Nuremberg Laws, their discovery by the Counterintelligence Corps team in 1945, General Patton's acquisition and disposition of them in 1945, their custody by the Huntington Library (1945–1999), and their subsequent exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center is Anthony M. Platt with Cecilia E. O'Leary, Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler's Nuremberg Laws, From Patton's Trophy to Public Memorial (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006).

Articles published in Prologue do not necessarily represent the views of NARA or of any other agency of the United States Government.




The Nuremberg Laws | National Archives

COVID Shot Mandates and the Nuremberg Code

Jul 30, 2021

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The so-called “vaccines” against COVID-19 have only been approved for experimental and investigational use, and as Liberty Counsel pointed out, the government mandates are violating federal law. Interestingly, the FDA includes on its website the Nuremberg Code which emphasizes that people cannot be forced to take experimental drugs without their full consent. However, neither the federal law nor the Nuremberg Code mean anything to Joe Biden and the Department of Justice (DOJ). All of the COVID-19 mRNA injections (Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson) have received only authorization of emergency use (EUA) and not full FDA approval. The EUAs for both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA experimental injections and any other EUA shot require fact sheets to be given to vaccination providers and recipients. These fact sheets state clearly that getting the “vaccine” is optional. For example, the one for recipients states, “It is your choice to receive or not receive the COVID-19 vaccine,” and if “you decide to not receive it, it will not change your standard of medical care.” The issue of forced medical experimentation in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s and the related trials of doctors and public health officials led to the adoption of the Nuremberg Code.The Nuremberg Code was created in 1947 in Germany because Nazi doctors were conducting inhumane and often deadly experiments on prisoners in concentration camps without their consent. Those doctors involved in these horrible crimes attempted to excuse themselves by arguing that there were no explicit rules governing medical research on human beings in Germany during the period. During the Nuremberg trials, those doctors and Nazis were found guilty of crimes against humanity. Therefore, the Nuremberg Code was developed in response to this experimentation to protect humans in medical research. The Nuremberg Code consists of 10 principles. The first principle states the voluntary consent of the human subject is essential in any experiment on people. Other principles include experiments should be for the good of society, that all unnecessary physical and mental suffering or injury should be avoided, and no experiment should be conducted if there is good reason to believe it may result in death or a disabling injury. The Nuremberg Code also states that people should be free to withdraw from the experiment if they are suffering, and that scientists must be prepared to end the experiment if they have good reason to believe it may cause injury, disability or death to the subject if it continues. The Nuremberg Code (from the National Institutes of Health website):

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that, before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment. The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

1. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.

1. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study, that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.

1. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.

1. No experiment should be conducted, where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.

1. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.

1. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.

1. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.

1. During the course of the experiment, the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end, if he has reached the physical or mental state, where continuation of the experiment seemed to him to be impossible.

1. During the course of the experiment, the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgement required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

[“Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10”, Vol. 2, pp. 181-182. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949.] Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Forcing people to receive one of these experimental COVID injections is a violation of federal law and ethical principles set forth in the Nuremberg Code. The Nazi doctors were found guilty of crimes against humanity. Why are we repeating this dark history in America by forcing people to inject an experimental drug into their bodies? The history of the Nazi regime forcing people to undergo medical experiments cannot be forgotten and must not be repeated. Businesses, schools and governments that require these experimental shots have learned nothing from this dark history or the failed Swine and Anthrax vaccines. We will not let Joe Biden and the DOJ twist the law and hurt people.” Liberty Counsel provides broadcast quality TV interviews via Hi-Def Skype and LTN at no cost.

COVID Shot Mandates and the Nuremberg Code - Liberty Counsel (lc.org)

Nuremberg Code Outlaws Forced Medical Procedures, Including Vaxes

Published on April 14, 2021
Written by sott.net

Image: US Army

The ‘Doctors’ Trial’ during the Nuremberg Trials following WW2, which established the Nuremberg Code regulating the ethics of medical intervention.Some people might not be familiar with the verb “to dissemble”, but we all need to become familiar with it, because there is a lot of dissembling going on.

It basically means to deliberately conceal something or obfuscate it, so that one’s attention is misdirected or deflected from whatever the Dissembler wishes to obscure. Like the truth. And in this case, the truth about the Nuremberg Code and the protection it provides us from accepting any forced medical procedure or therapy at all.
Together with casting doubts and slander, dissembling is one of the chief tools in the propagandist toolbox.
A few days ago, I wrote an article explaining that forced vaccinations are a violation of the Nuremberg Code. Note the word, “forced”. In fact, any forced medical procedure or therapy is against the Nuremberg Code.
All medical procedures and therapies must have fully informed and freely given consent, to the greatest extent possible – which means that people who are conscious and able to decide things for themselves remain in control of their medical destiny.
It’s only when you are in desperate straits and unconscious that medical professionals are allowed to step in and make decisions “for you”.
This is all cut and dried and set in cement since the 1940s, but now we have people trying to dissemble it and water it down and reinterpret the Nuremberg Code as applying only to medical experimentation.
It does not.
The Code itself explains exactly what it applies to, and even though the cases giving rise to the Code arose from medical experiments in Concentration Camps and involved forced medical experimentation on unwilling subjects, the core of the Nuremberg Code rose to the occasion and outlawed all kinds of forced medical procedures and therapies. Not just experimental procedures.
Any medical procedure or therapy that you don’t want to participate in, you have the full, free, and unprejudiced right to refuse. Period.
Go back and read Article 6, Sections 1 and 3, of the Nuremberg Code for yourselves.
Don’t take anyone else’s word for it. Not even mine. Be sure. And make good use of the information if anyone comes to your door with a needle in hand.
Another good one to quote in their faces is their own cherished Roe vs. Wade decision, the excuse for allowing abortion on demand. My body, my choice. That applies to every aspect of your body, what you take out and what you put into it, too.
Here is an example of a dissembling ‘news’ article so that you can see exactly how they dissemble the actual important information and misrepresent it to mean something else:

Image: © boomlive.in
The same article draws attention to the fact that the Nuremberg Code doesn’t make vaccination illegal. Who said it did? They are deliberately creating a False Argument as a means to obfuscate.
The Nuremberg Code makes FORCED vaccination illegal – along with all other forced medical procedures and therapies. The Nuremberg Code doesn’t single out vaccinations or any other procedure or therapy – it outlaws all forced procedures and therapies with the same broad brush.
So if you want to be vaccinated, after being fully informed of all the possible downsides and consequences, after understanding exactly what the vaccine contains, after understanding that you will have extremely limited rights of recourse if you voluntarily take the injection and something goes wrong – then you are free to take your chances and do as you will. It’s your choice.
The Nuremberg Code won’t protect you from your own fully disclosed consent.
But it will protect you from being imposed upon by politicians and “private security forces” hired by banks that are colluding in this scheme to defraud America under color of law.
The Nuremberg Code gives you full standing, if they attempt to violate it and force any kind of involuntary or undisclosed vaccination on you by any means – whether by wrestling you to the ground or by threatening to deprive you of any other right or privilege, including the right to travel and use public facilities.
All indications are that we are entering a very dark chapter in American history. You will need to stay alert and stay informed, and you are not being given straight information from any of the commercial media channels or their acolytes and paid trolls. You need to read things with a critical eye and be able to discern the tricks the propagandists employ.
Now read the actual Nuremberg Code Sections – Article 6, Sections 1 and 3.
Then stand your solid ground against forced medical procedures of any kind and also against all the dissembling BS artists out there, because they are multiplying like bunnies in spring. You can take a stand against this Plague of Liars, by joining other like-minded and alert Americans who have reclaimed their birthright political standing and who are now undertaking the responsibility of self-governance – concerning their health and all other matters – via their State Assembly.
Comment:
The author has since acknowledged that she mixed up the Nuremberg Code with later codifications under international law that gave primacy to the principles of informed consent and individual choice in public health programs.
The ‘Article 6, Sections 1 and 3’ she refers to is the following from the 2006 UN Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights:
Article 6, section 1:

Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.

Article 6, section 3:

In no case should a collective community agreement or the consent of a community leader or other authority substitute for an individual’s informed consent.

Clearly, mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations fall foul of the Nuremberg Code, on multiple counts.
The Covidians will of course talk their way around the Nuremberg Code by claiming it only applies to medical experiments, whereas Covid-19 vaccines are rubber-stamped as ‘legitimate govt-approved health programs’.
They’re not. They’re completely experimental, and fall foul even of today’s lax vaccine regulations, which have been ‘suspended’ under the patently false claim that Covid-19 is a ‘deadly pandemic’ presenting a ‘dire threat to global public health’.
Anyone who is involved in pushing through or carrying out mandatory vaccination programs ‘because Covid’ will be in breach of the Nuremberg Code and international law. As such they will have ‘gone Nazi’ and be personally liable in any future trials for crimes against humanity.
Remember, post-WW2 trials for crimes against humanity established that “I was just carrying out orders” is NOT a legal defense.
See more here: sott.net

Nuremberg Code Outlaws Forced Medical Procedures, including Vaxes | Principia Scientific Intl. (principia-scientific.com)

NUREMBERG 2.0 - FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

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SGT Report

too late; there will be Tribunals; the Rats are going to start running for the Hide Locations; it is going to be biblical

Brave German Parliament Member: "Will You Tell them You Were Just Following Orders?”

BRAVE German EU Parliament Member Delivers SOS Message On Behalf of “COVID” Oppressed Australian Citizens: “So what will you tell your grandchildren? Will you tell them you were just following orders?” [VIDEO]

By Patty McMurray | Dec 7, 2021

In the age of the CCP virus, bravery is becoming more and more uncommon. Citizens worldwide have freely and without question surrendered fundamental human rights simply because their government told them to. Protests are raging around the world as more and more citizens rise up against authoritarian rule and fight back with every last breath for their freedoms.
Besides Communist China and North Korea, Australia has become, without a doubt, the worst nation in the world for stripping its citizens of their fundamental human rights in the name of “safety” from COVID.

This video gives the world a look inside the “concentration camps” where unvaccinated and people and people exposed to COVID are being shipped. As you watch this horrific video, remember that only two years ago, Australians were free citizens.



Zaid Hamid
@ZaidZamanHamid

Concentration camps are already up and running in Australia.. Where unvaccinated people are being locked down & isolated..The society is now divided between vaccinated and unvaccinated...While the definition of vaccinated is evolving every week....The worst nightmare is here...

Watch on Twitter

4:22 AM · Dec 4, 2021

Trending: BREAKING: Newsmax Reports Pope Francis “Is Dying”

Some of the world’s largest protests against human rights abuses are taking place in Germany, a nation committed to never again allowing a totalitarian regime to control its citizens against their will.
The incredibly courageous EU MP Christina Anderson delivered a powerful videotaped message for the citizens of Australia. In her passionate plea, the German EU MP asks the world to join her in solidarity against the atrocious abuses against its citizens.

​Here’s a transcript of her SOS message to the world on behalf of the “people of Australia”:

“I will do whatever I can to make it known to the world that your once free and liberal democracy has been transformed into a totalitarian regime which tramples on human rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law…I am a German, and we once asked our grandparents how they could have just stood by in silence, allowing a horrific totalitarian regime to come about. Anyone could have known; all they had to do was open their eyes and take a look. The vast majority chose not to. So what will you tell your grandchildren? Will you tell them you did not know? Will you tell them you were just following orders? You need to understand it is not about breaking the fourth wave. It is about breaking people…We need to stop our governments from transforming our free and democratic societies into totalitarian regimes. We need to do it now. We need to stand up now.”

Watch:

Video at the page Link

Americans who watch the atrocities taking place in formerly free nations like Australia are getting a preview of what it looks like when citizens accept that they are defenseless

BRAVE German EU Parliament Member Delivers SOS Message On Behalf of "COVID" Oppressed Australian Citizens: "So what will you tell your grandchildren? Will you tell them you were just following orders?" [VIDEO] (100percentfedup.com)

Start the New Nuremberg II Tribunals; this simpleton is trying to stop them.... it will fail

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NUREMBURG tribunal's are in the Cue

9-minute mark of the video

How We Can Defeat Our Zionist Occupied Governments - SonofEnos (bitchute.com)

Thread: NUREMBURG TRIALS 2.0 GRAND JURY DAY 3 (ENGLISH)