The Doctors' Trial
Sixty-one years ago today, the Nuremburg Tribunals concluded the series of hearings later known as "The Doctors' Trials".
In 1905, in the year of Einstein's Annus Mirabilis, German medicine -- and the German medical establishment -- were considered the pinnacle of human ability. American physicians and American medical schools aspired to German heights. The founders of many major fields of medicine were of German nationality. In medicine, as in physics, many of the leaders and best were German; and to be a serious scholar, one had to be fluent in German.
Just forty years later -- no more than two generations, no more than the span of a single physician's career -- Einstein had fled to America. Millions of his fellows who had been unable to flee were dead. Germany itself had been reduced to wreckage and plunged into darkness from end to end; the Eastern portion would not truly emerge for another forty years. And twenty German physicians -- many of them once leaders in German medicine -- stood trial for their role in the orchestration of unspeakable horror. Seven of them were ultimately hanged.
But the deeper truth that everyone understood, then and now, was that the physicians who stood trial were, in many senses, simply scapegoats. Certainly they had personally committed and were personally responsible for horrible atrocities. But the few who were actually brought before the court could not alone have possibly have committed the systematic, national-scale abuses, atrocities, and horrors that were the terrible legacy of the German regime first elected to power in 1932. Those put on trial might have been the leaders; but they could not have done what they did without followers. Without countless hundreds -- thousands -- of other physicians, nurses, and other staff willing to obey orders. Willing to cooperate.
And the entire regime could have never come to power without at least the acceptance of the professional classes. No foreign power imposed the National Socialist German Worker's Party upon the German republic. No invading army forced the German people to make the them the largest party in Germany's Reichstag in 1932. And in the now-hindsighted inevitable spiral downwards that would end in unspeakable darkness, there was no concerted resistance among physicians against what were even then manifestly obvious progression. In fact, there was very much the opposite. The physicians tried -- and executed -- for their crimes were simply the figures at the top of a very large pyramid. They could not possibly have forced German medicine and the German medical establishment to have perpetrated the horrors it was a part of -- unless the vast majority of that establishment was at least unwilling to resist. Unwilling to rise up. Unwilling to fight.
Even after sixty years, the breathtaking moral fall of the German medical establishment is stunning in it's scope. Stunning how the same system, the same individuals, who once were hailed as the brightest of humanity's light, the best examples of human potential, could within a single generation abet, acquiesce, and even aid some of the greatest atrocity and horror ever seen, a barbarian's slaughter with metered, engineered precision. Trying to understand how that happened -- what they were thinking, how they justified their own actions to themselves, what seeds within their desires and thoughts and judgements ultimately blossomed into a harvest of death that in the end consumed themselves as well -- holds many important lessons.
Lessons which remain important, even -- especially -- today.