page_title: Claus Schilling
section_title: Dachau experiments
hierarchical_section_title: Claus Schilling / Biography / Dachau experiments
caption_attribution_description: English: Friedrich Hoffmann / Bedřich Hoffman, a Czechoslovak priest, testifies at the trial of former camp personnel and prisoners from Dachau. In his hand he holds a packet of records that show that 324 priests died at the camp after being exposed to malaria during Nazi medical experiments. (Locale: Dachau, [Bavaria] Germany) Deutsch: Friedrich Hoffmann / Bedřich Hoffman, ein tschechoslowakischer katholischer Priester, als Zeuge im Dachauer Prozess. In seiner Hand hält er eine Sammlung von Aufzeichnungen, die beweisen, dass 324 katholische Priester infolge von Malaria-Versuchen während ihrer Haft im nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager Dachau (Bayern/Deutschland) starben.
context_page_description: Claus Karl Schilling, also recorded as Klaus Schilling, was a German tropical medicine specialist who participated in the Nazi human experiments at the Dachau concentration camp during World War II.
  Though never a member of the Nazi Party and a recognized researcher before the war, Schilling became notorious as a consequence of his unethical and inhumane participation in human research under both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. From 1942 to 1945, Schilling's research of malaria and attempts at fighting it using synthetic drugs resulted in over a thousand cases of human experimentation on camp prisoners.
  Sentenced to death by hanging after the fall of Hitler's Germany, he was executed for his crimes against the Dachau prisoners in 1946.
context_section_description: Schilling returned to Germany after a meeting with Leonardo Conti, the Nazis' Health Chief, in 1941, and by early 1942 he was provided with a special malaria research station at Dachau's concentration camp by Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS. Despite negative assessments from colleagues, Schilling would remain in charge of the malaria station for the duration of the war.
  Although in the 1930s Schilling had stressed the point that malaria research on human subjects could be performed in an entirely harmless fashion, the Dachau subjects included prisoners who were injected with synthetic drugs at doses ranging from high to lethal. They had been exposed to malaria mosquitos in cages strapped to their hands or arms so as to ensure infection with the parasite. Of the more than 1,000 prisoners used in the malaria experiments at Dachau during the war, between 300 and 400 died as a result; among survivors, a substantial number remained permanently injured. A number of priests imprisoned by the Nazis were killed during the experiments.
  In the course of the Dachau Trials following the liberation of the camp at the close of the war, Schilling was tried by a U.S.  General Military Court, appointed at 2 November 1945, in the case of The United States versus Martin Gottfried Weiss, Wilhelm Rupert, et al. The defendants, 40 doctors and staff, were charged and convicted of offenses of the violations of laws and usages of war in that they acted in pursuance of a common design, did encourage, aid, abet, and participate in the subjection of Allied nationals and prisoners of war to cruelties and mistreatments at Dachau Concentration Camp and its subcamps. According to the August H. Vieweg testimony, the patients used in the malaria experiments were Poles, Russians, and Yugoslavs. At that time there was no formal code of ethics in medical research to which the judges could hold the accused Nazi doctors accountable. The "scientific experiments" exposed during the trials lead to the Nuremberg Code, developed in 1949 as a ten-point code of human experimentation ethics.
  The tribunal sentenced Schilling to death by hanging on 13 December 1945. His execution took place at Landsberg Prison in Landsberg am Lech on 28 May 1946. The execution was filmed by military personnel, who recorded Schilling's ascending the gallows and his hanging, along with a coffin marked "Dr Schilling, Claus."
caption: Czech priest, Friedrich Hoffman, testifies at the trial of former camp personnel and prisoners from Dachau concentration camp. In his hand he holds records showing that hundreds of priests died at the camp after being exposed to malaria during Nazi medical experiments.
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