page_title: Euthanasia trials
section_title: Trial of Kurt Blome
hierarchical_section_title: Euthanasia trials / Nuremberg Doctors' Trial (1946-1947) / Trial of Kurt Blome
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Kurt Blome as a defendant in the Medical Case Trial at Nuremberg. [Photograph #07326], Portrait von Kurt Blome als Angeklagter im Nürnberger Ärzte Prozess. [Fotografie#07326]
context_page_description: The Euthanasia trials were legal proceedings against the main perpetrators and accomplices involved in the euthanasia killings of the Nazi era in Germany.
  The first euthanasia trial was held by the United States in October 1945 to prosecute doctors and nurses at the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre for killing Polish and Russian workers sick with tuberculosis in summer 1944. Euthanasia was a tangential issue at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, held by the United States from December 1946 to August 1947, as only four of its twenty-three defendants were charged with participation in the euthanasia programme: Karl Brandt, Viktor Brack, Waldemar Hoven, and Kurt Blome. Brandt, Brack, and Hoven were convicted, sentenced to death, and executed; Blome was acquitted.
  There was a euthanasia trial held in the Soviet occupation zone in Dresden in June 1947 to prosecute those who had worked at the Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre in Pirna. There were 15 defendants, including Paul Nitsche, the director of the T4 Medical Office. Four of the defendants, including Nitsche, were sentenced to death and executed.
context_section_description: Kurt Blome was the deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich and was in charge of Germany's biological weapons programme. He was arrested by American troops in Munich on May 17, 1945. The U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, the agency in charge of the U.S. biological weapons programme, saw great value in appropriating the expertise of Nazi scientists and using it for their own purposes. As Hitler's top biological weapons expert, Blome was seen as the most important Nazi scientist for the Chemical Warfare Service to interrogate. They wanted to include him in Operation Paperclip, a secret postwar U.S. project that brought hundreds of Nazi scientists to America so that they could continue their military research for the U.S. government. However, this plan had to be abandoned, or at least postponed, when the Soviets unexpectedly announced on August 12, 1946 that Walter Schreiber, the former surgeon general of the Third Reich, was going to testify against the defendants at the International Military Tribunal, which he did on August 26, 1946. Much of his testimony focused on Kurt Blome and his research on the plague, even though Blome was not on trial. Schreiber claimed that Blome had engaged in torturous human medical experiments during the war.
  As a result of Schreiber's unusual testimony, Blome was arrested and sent to the prison complex at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice on August 28, 1946. He was no longer being considered for Operation Paperclip, as he was now going to be a defendant in the upcoming Doctors' Trial, which began on December 9, 1946. Although Blome had been in charge of Germany's biological weapons programme, that was not in itself a crime. However, the prosecution had many documents in which Blome repeatedly discussed his plans to conduct plague research on human beings. In his defense, Blome argued that he had intended to experiment on human beings but never actually did so. The prosecution could not find any witnesses to testify against Blome, a fact that he used to argue his innocence.
  Additionally, Blome's wife Bettina researched experiments conducted by the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during the war, including malaria experiments on prisoners at Terre Haute. The defense counsel Robert Servatius found an article from Life magazine from June 1945 that described experiments performed by the OSRD on 800 U.S. prisoners during the war. Servatius read the entire article in the courtroom. Because it discussed U.S. Army experimentation on prisoners, it significantly weakened the prosecution's case, as it made them look like hypocrites; they were prosecuting German doctors for involvement in the same kinds of experiments American doctors were engaged in. The Nuremberg judges made this statement about Blome's acquittal: "It may well be that defendant Blome was preparing to experiment on human beings in connection with bacteriological warfare, but the record fails to disclose that fact, or that he ever actually conducted the experiments."
caption: Blome as defendant in the Doctors' Trial, Nuremberg
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