Karl Brandt was a surgeon who became Adolf Hitler's escort physician in 1934 and, five years later, one of the two men Hitler charged with organizing the killing of patients in German hospitals and asylums. The authorization, a single sheet on Hitler's personal letterhead backdated to September 1, 1939, named only Brandt and Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler's private chancellery. From that paper grew the program the regime called "euthanasia," a secret operation that took the lives of disabled children, patients in mental institutions, the old, and in time Jews, concentration camp prisoners and foreign forced laborers. By the last years of the war Brandt also held the highest medical office in the Reich, with authority over civilian and military health services alike.
After the war he was the first name on the indictment in the first of the twelve trials that American military tribunals held at Nuremberg. The case was formally titled United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al. and is known as the Doctors' Trial. On August 19, 1947, Military Tribunal I found him guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and membership in the SS, a criminal organization. The next day it sentenced him to death. His appeals to the American Military Governor and to the Supreme Court of the United States failed, and he was executed in Landsberg am Lech on June 2, 1948, together with six other defendants from the same trial.
Brandt was born on January 8, 1904, in Mülhausen, in Alsace, then part of the German Empire and today the French city of Mulhouse. After the First World War he moved to Thuringia and later to Dresden, where he passed his final school examinations in 1923. He studied medicine from 1923 to 1928 at the universities of Jena, Freiburg im Breisgau, Munich and Berlin, passed his state medical examination in 1928, and took his doctorate at Freiburg in 1929.
His surgical training took place at the Bergmannsheil, a hospital in Bochum, between 1928 and 1933, under a senior surgeon there. When that surgeon was called to the surgical clinic of the Charité in Berlin, Brandt followed him, first as an assistant and in 1934 as a senior physician. In 1940 he was named professor of surgery in the medical faculty in Berlin.
His political commitments ran alongside the medical career. He joined the National Socialist Party in 1932 (the tribunal gave January of that year), the SA in 1933, and in July 1934 the general SS, with the junior officer rank of Untersturmführer. In the summer of 1934, by June of that year, he became Hitler's escort physician, the doctor who traveled with Hitler and was attached to the Reich Chancellery. He rose steadily in SS rank: Obersturmführer on January 1, 1935, Obersturmbannführer in April 1939. In 1938 he was deferred from military call-up so that he could serve on the Reich Chancellery staff in wartime. In 1940 he transferred to the Waffen-SS, where he reached the equivalent of a major general on January 30, 1943, and of a lieutenant general, the rank of SS-Gruppenführer, on April 20, 1944.
The killing of disabled children came first. In the spring and summer of 1939 Brandt and Bouhler organized a secret operation aimed at children with severe disabilities. On August 18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior ordered physicians, nurses and midwives to report newborns and children under three who had severe disabilities. The age limit was later raised to include young people up to 17.
In the autumn of 1939 Hitler signed the authorization that covered the adult program. It charged "Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. med. Brandt" with enlarging the authority of physicians to be designated by name so that patients judged incurable could be granted what it called "a mercy death." The date of September 1, 1939, was written onto the document after the fact, to tie the killings to wartime measures. The order was never published and never given the force of a law. The tribunal at Nuremberg later found that no earlier German law supported the program, and that the secret order was its only authority. Participating doctors, staff and administrators were protected by it from prosecution.
The program took its code name, T4, from the address of its coordinating office in Berlin, Tiergartenstrasse 4. The office was a department of the Führer Chancellery, which stood apart from the ordinary ministries and Party offices. Bouhler, who held high rank but was not a physician, ran the administration. Brandt was the medical head.
In the autumn of 1939 the T4 office sent questionnaires to health officials, hospitals, mental institutions and nursing homes. The forms looked like statistical surveys. Each one was read by three physicians acting as "experts," and their verdicts went to a chief expert. Brandt later told the tribunal that the reviewers were senior men, among them university professors, and that the questionnaire recorded, among other things, whether the patient was a foreigner. From January 1940 the patients selected were taken by a transport company created for the purpose to collection points and then to one of six killing centers: Brandenburg on the Havel, near Berlin; Grafeneck, in southwestern Germany; Bernburg and Sonnenstein, in Saxony; Hartheim, near Linz in Austria; and Hadamar, in Hesse.
Neither the patients nor their relatives were asked for consent. Everyone who took part swore an oath of secrecy. In his own testimony Brandt said that the patients' consent was disregarded because, in his view, the mentally ill could not judge their situation, and that relatives were not asked because of the demand for secrecy, which he described as a political requirement set by Hitler.
The secrecy did not hold. Knowledge of the killings spread through Germany, and protests came from private people and public figures, above all from clergy. On August 3, 1941, the Catholic bishop of Münster denounced the killings from the pulpit. Later that month Hitler ordered the program halted. Brandt testified that he passed that order to Bouhler, that church opposition had been one factor, and that the intention was to resume after the war.
The halt ended only the centralized phase. The children's program was untouched by it. In August 1942 the killing of adults resumed in a more concealed, decentralized form, with local authorities setting the pace, and it went on until the last days of the war, reaching elderly patients, people injured in bombing raids and foreign forced laborers.
Brandt maintained at Nuremberg that his part had ended in the summer of 1941 and that he had given up his own authorization in 1942. The tribunal did not accept that his responsibility ended in 1941.
From 1942 Brandt's power grew well beyond the Chancellery. A decree of July 28, 1942, signed by Hitler, Wilhelm Keitel and Hans Lammers, made him plenipotentiary for health and medical services. Subordinate to Hitler alone, he was to carry out special tasks in balancing the needs of the military and civilian sectors for doctors, hospitals and medical supplies, and he was entitled to be kept informed of all fundamental developments in both the Wehrmacht medical service and the civilian health service and to "intervene in a responsible manner."
A second decree, of September 5, 1943, signed by Hitler and Lammers, made him general commissioner and charged him with the central coordination and direction of the entire medical and health services. His authority now reached medical science and research and the organizations that made and distributed medical supplies, and he could appoint deputies of his own. On August 25, 1944, a third decree, signed by Hitler, Lammers, Martin Bormann and Keitel, named him Reich Commissioner for Sanitation and Health for the duration of the war. His office was raised to the rank of a supreme Reich authority, able to give instructions to offices of the State, the Party and the Wehrmacht on medical matters. He had clashed for years with the Reich health leader over the line between their powers. The tribunal also recorded that he had at some point been relieved as escort physician and was reappointed in the autumn of 1944.
In the last weeks of the war Brandt fell from favor. On April 16, 1945, he was arrested by the Gestapo, accused of having sought contact with American forces. The next day a court in Berlin sentenced him to death. The sentence was not carried out. On May 2, 1945, after Hitler's death, he was released on the order of the provisional government under Karl Dönitz.
Three weeks later, on May 23, 1945, British forces arrested him in Flensburg, the northern town where the Dönitz government had its seat. He remained in Allied custody, and by 1947 he was held in the Nuremberg court prison.
Under Control Council Law No. 10, the United States set up its own military tribunals in its zone of occupation to try those not brought before the International Military Tribunal. The first case was the medical case. The indictment was filed on October 25, 1946, and served on November 5. The defendants were arraigned on November 21, 1946.
There were 23 defendants, 20 of them physicians, and Brandt stood first among them as the senior medical official of the German government. He was charged on all four counts. Count One accused the defendants of a common design or conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. Count Two charged war crimes and Count Three crimes against humanity, in each case through medical experiments on prisoners and civilians without their consent and, for Brandt and three others, through the "euthanasia" program, described in the indictment as the secret killing of the aged, the insane, the incurably ill, deformed children and others, beginning in German asylums and extended to camps and occupied territories between September 1939 and April 1945. Count Four charged membership in the SS, which the International Military Tribunal had declared a criminal organization. Brandt was one of ten defendants charged on that count.
The prosecution opened its case before Military Tribunal I on December 9, 1946. The tribunal was made up of three American judges from state courts and an alternate member who had served in the U.S. Department of Justice. Over almost 140 days of proceedings it heard 85 witnesses and received nearly 1,500 documents.
The prosecution's case on the "euthanasia" program came on January 10 and 13, 1947. The prosecution introduced the authorization of September 1, 1939, and argued that its date showed the program served the needs of total war rather than any humanitarian aim. Brandt's defense counsel objected that the document was a decree, drafted with Brandt's help, and not a letter. The prosecution also relied on an affidavit in which Brandt admitted his connection with the program, and read into the record an affidavit from his codefendant Viktor Brack, a senior official of the Führer Chancellery. Brack described Brandt as the medical head of the program and Bouhler as issuing many orders after their meetings. An organization chart signed by Brack, with Brandt at the top, was admitted as evidence. Brandt's counsel called the chart "completely incorrect" about his client's position and argued that Bouhler's office, not Brandt, had carried out the program. The tribunal admitted the chart on the condition that the defendants could later challenge its accuracy.
The defense opened on January 29, 1947. Brandt took the stand from February 3 to February 7. Questioned by his own counsel, he walked the tribunal through the questionnaires and the panel of reviewers, and argued that the small share of patients sent back from the killing centers proved that physicians had exercised independent judgment. On legality he said that the head of the State himself had given him the assignment. He told the tribunal that he had never regarded the program as unethical, that he had acted from humane motives, and that he could answer for what he had done before his own conscience. He said he had kept the work secret even from his own colleagues and denied any knowledge of the killing of concentration camp prisoners under the program's name, which he said he had first heard at the trial and attributed to the head of the SS.
On July 14, 1947, the tribunal ruled on Count One and did not convict any defendant on the conspiracy charge. Closing arguments followed. On July 19 each defendant addressed the tribunal in person. Brandt spoke first. He accepted that his name stood on the authorization, saying, "There was the decree and on it there was my name." He insisted that the program had never been meant as murder and that the burden he carried was a burden of conscience, not of crime.
The tribunal delivered its judgment on August 19, 1947. Its findings on Brandt opened with his career, the decrees of 1942, 1943 and 1944, and his arrests of 1945. On the "euthanasia" program it found that Brandt and Bouhler had jointly set the machinery in motion: they adopted a budget, laid down the procedure for selecting patients, and created the transport organization. It found that the program had been extended first to Jews and then to concentration camp inmates.
The tribunal stated plainly that it had no concern with whether euthanasia could be justified in the abstract, or whether a state could lawfully provide for it by legislation. What decided the question for the tribunal was the inclusion of people who were not German nationals, and it found that "the evidence is conclusive" that such people had been included in the program, without their consent, almost from its beginning. Brandt's claim that his responsibility had ended in the summer of 1941 it called difficult to believe, and it held that the claim would not help him even if true. Brandt admitted that once he had made the medical decisions he left the carrying out of the program to Bouhler. The tribunal called that failure to supervise the gravest breach of duty, and held that his dereliction had contributed to the extermination of non-German nationals, which was enough for criminal responsibility.
On the medical experiments the tribunal found that Brandt knew experiments were being carried out on concentration camp inmates and that they caused suffering, injury and death. In the series where it found the proof sufficient, it held that his position as the senior medical authority gave him a duty to investigate and to intervene, and that he had done neither. In several other series it found that his criminal responsibility had not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and one charge had been withdrawn. Its conclusion was that Brandt "was responsible for, aided and abetted, took a consenting part in," and was connected with plans and enterprises involving medical experiments on non-German nationals against their consent, and other atrocities, in the course of which murders and other inhumane acts were committed. Acts that were not war crimes it held to be crimes against humanity. As a member of the SS, it found, he was criminally implicated in those crimes. The tribunal found him "guilty, under Counts Two, Three, and Four, of the Indictment."
The same judgment contained the tribunal's statement of the conditions under which experiments on human beings could be lawful. Ten principles were set out under the heading "Permissible Medical Experiments," the first of them that "the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential." The passage became known as the Nuremberg Code.
The tribunal pronounced sentence on August 20, 1947, in open session, reading each defendant's convictions before his sentence. Brandt, found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and membership in an organization declared criminal by the International Military Tribunal, was sentenced to death.
Of the 23 defendants, 16 were found guilty. Seven were sentenced to death: Karl Brandt, Viktor Brack, Rudolf Brandt, Karl Gebhardt, Waldemar Hoven, Joachim Mrugowsky and Wolfram Sievers. Five received life terms and four received prison terms of ten to twenty years. Seven were acquitted.
Military Government Ordinance No. 7 sent every sentence of the American tribunals to the Military Governor for review, and under its Article XVII he could confirm, reduce or set aside a sentence. Petitions on behalf of the condemned men were filed with him. On November 22, 1947, the Military Governor of the United States Zone denied them, and the sentences were confirmed in identical orders.
Brandt's counsel then went to the Supreme Court of the United States. On February 16, 1948, in Karl Brandt, petitioner, v. The United States of America, No. 286, Miscellaneous, the Court denied the motions for leave to file petitions for writs of habeas corpus and prohibition. The same order disposed of the petitions of Viktor Brack, Rudolf Brandt and a fourth defendant. Three justices would have set the petitions for a hearing on the question of the Court's jurisdiction; one took no part.
On May 14, 1948, the Military Governor ordered the seven death sentences carried out. Karl Brandt was executed in Landsberg am Lech on June 2, 1948. He was 44.
The tribunal that tried Brandt was not the International Military Tribunal, which had tried the leading defendants in 1945 and 1946. Control Council Law No. 10, enacted by the Allied Control Council for Germany on December 20, 1945, gave each of them a uniform legal basis to prosecute war criminals in its own zone, and its Article II defined the offenses: crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity and membership in organizations declared criminal. The United States used it to bring twelve cases at Nuremberg, with 177 defendants in all; the medical case was the first. Prosecutions were brought by the American Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes.
Brandt denied to the end that the program was murder, and denied any part in extending it to Jews and to concentration camp prisoners. The tribunal rejected his claim that his responsibility ended in 1941 but did not decide how far he directed the decentralized killings of 1942 to 1945, beyond holding that his failure to supervise contributed to them.
The tribunal's verdict carries no count of victims.
The circumstances of his arrest and sentence in April 1945 are given with some variation. The tribunal recorded a Gestapo arrest on April 16, a death sentence by a Berlin court the next day and release on May 2 on the order of the Dönitz government. Other accounts date his release to May 3 and credit it to the intervention of Albert Speer, and place the first accusation of treason against him in October 1944.
January 8, 1904: born in Mülhausen, Alsace.
1923 to 1928: studies medicine at Jena, Freiburg, Munich and Berlin; state medical examination 1928; doctorate at Freiburg 1929.
1928 to 1933: surgical training in Bochum.
1932: joins the National Socialist Party; 1933, the SA.
July 1934: joins the SS; summer 1934, becomes Hitler's escort physician; senior physician at the Charité, Berlin.
Spring and summer 1939: organizes, with Philipp Bouhler, the secret killing of disabled children.
August 18, 1939: Interior Ministry decree requires disabled newborns and young children to be reported.
Autumn 1939: Hitler signs the authorization naming Bouhler and Brandt, backdated to September 1, 1939.
January 1940: transports of selected patients to the six killing centers begin.
1940: professor of surgery in Berlin; transfers to the Waffen-SS.
August 1941: Hitler orders the centralized program halted.
July 28, 1942: appointed plenipotentiary for health and medical services.
August 1942: the killings resume in decentralized form.
September 5, 1943: decree makes him general commissioner for medical and health services.
August 25, 1944: appointed Reich Commissioner for Sanitation and Health.
April 16 and 17, 1945: arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death by a Berlin court.
May 2, 1945: released on the order of the Dönitz government.
May 23, 1945: arrested by British forces in Flensburg.
October 25, 1946: indictment filed in Case No. 1, United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al.
November 21, 1946: arraignment.
December 9, 1946: trial opens before Military Tribunal I, Nuremberg.
January 10 and 13, 1947: prosecution presents the "euthanasia" evidence.
February 3 to 7, 1947: Brandt testifies.
July 19, 1947: personal statements of the defendants.
August 19, 1947: judgment; guilty under Counts Two, Three and Four.
August 20, 1947: sentenced to death.
November 22, 1947: petitions denied by the Military Governor; sentence confirmed.
February 16, 1948: U.S. Supreme Court denies leave to file habeas corpus and prohibition petitions.
May 14, 1948: Military Governor orders the sentence carried out.
June 2, 1948: executed in Landsberg am Lech.