Hundreds of German doctors who performed cruel medical experiments on humans during the Nazi era walked unpunished into post-war careers in universities, pharmaceutical firms or surgeries, according to a new book.
Ernst Klee, author of the German book "Auschwitz: The Nazi Doctors and Their Victims," said in a television interview that others emigrated to the United States directly after World War II to take up research jobs."The elite of the medical profession was involved, that can be proven," he said. "With these experiments, they laid the basis for their careers."
Typical experiments included the injection of concentration camp prisoners with the typhoid virus, limb amputations and inducing death by exposure to extreme cold.
One German physician who Klee said had cut off the legs of female concentration camp prisoners for experimental purposes was still working in a highly paid scientific research post at a German pharmaceutical group, the author said without identifying the physician.
"He earns more each month than what his victims were able to earn in the rest of their life," Klee said, citing one example. "Hundreds of people were, if they survived at all, turned into invalids."
Klee said the initial lack of evidence about experiments on humans and the Nazi euthanasia program meant very few doctors and other medical workers went before the Allied-organized Nuremberg war crime trials held after Germany's defeat in 1945.
The most infamous Nazi doctor of all, so-called "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele, is believed to have escaped to Argentina after the war and to have lived until 1979.
Mengele performed hundreds of medical experiments on twins, gypsies and dwarfs at the Auschwitz camp between 1943 and 1944, in an effort to find clues to producing a German "master race."