Criminal Nazi Medical Experiments and the Public International Law

Abstract

The Nazi medical experiments were carried out during World War II – the years 1939 to 1945 and they were connected with establishing and administering concentration and extermination camps throughout the occupied Europe. Nazi medical experiments left their mark on people of various nationalities; however, their victims were primarily Jewish, Polish and Romani. Criminal experiments were also practiced on disabled people, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political prisoners and prisoners of the war. Criminal medical experiments were performed mainly in the German concentration camps, i.e. in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Kulmhof and Majdanek, which helped to hide them from the international community. The response to Nazi criminal medical experiments was the “trial of doctors” that took place from 1946 to 1947 at the US Military Tribunal No. 1 in Nuremberg.

The purpose of this article was to analyze and examine what impact Nazi medical experiments had on the shape of the international law. To achieve the purpose of this article, it was reasonable to use several research methods. To the fullest extent, the formal-dogmatic method was used, in which the international legal acts regulating the principles of medical experiments on human beings, especially those enacted after World War II, were analyzed. The indicated method was supplemented by a study of the literature on the subject and the views of the doctrine. The second method used in the article is a case study, consisting of an analysis of the course of the Nuremberg trials.