As Adolf Hitler’s personal physician and Commissioner for Health and Sanitation, Karl Brandt became one of the central figures behind Nazi Germany’s medical crimes. Convinced that some lives were “unworthy of life,” he co-led the secret T4 Euthanasia Program that gassed and starved more than 250,000 men, women, and children with physical or mental disabilities — the first large-scale mass-murder operation of the regime and a grim precursor to the Holocaust.
Brandt also authorized and personally participated in deadly human experiments at concentration camps, where prisoners were mutilated, infected, and left to die in the name of “science.” At the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Defiant until the end, he claimed he had acted “humanely.” On June 2, 1948, the physician who once swore to heal was executed for mass murder.