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.
Up Next in Season 1
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Himmler’s Doctor and His Experiments ...
He was Heinrich Himmler’s personal physician — a man who turned medicine into cruelty. At the Ravensbrück concentration camp, SS doctor Karl Gebhardt conducted brutal experiments on women, breaking bones, infecting wounds, and amputating limbs in the name of “science.” What began as an attempt to...
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Nazi Doctor Who Made Camp Prisoners D...
In the final years of World War II, Austrian physician Wilhelm Beiglböck, serving as a Luftwaffe doctor, carried out brutal seawater experiments at the Dachau concentration camp.
Forty Roma and Sinti prisoners were forced to drink chemically treated seawater to test survival methods for downed Ge... -
The Nazi Doctor Who Experimented on t...
At the Ravensbrück concentration camp, SS doctor Fritz Fischer took part in some of the most horrifying medical experiments of the Nazi regime. Under the supervision of Karl Gebhardt and on orders from Heinrich Himmler, Fischer infected, mutilated, and amputated the limbs of Polish women — the so...
