Topic 5: The Nuremberg Tribunals

Trials of Nazis who had committed war crimes (crimes against humanity and genocide) were held at Nuremberg in Germany in the late 1940s. One group of the accused were 23 drug company executives from I. G. Farben accused of slavery and looting, but Nazi doctors carried out the experiments, and they too were charged with crimes against humanity. Following the trials, the countries of the world drew up and agreed the Nuremberg Code with forbids medical experiments on human beings without their informed consent and also imposes on those in charge of the experiment a duty to end the experiment in harm is likely to result.

In 1996, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a 50th Anniversary issue remembering the trial and the need for the Code, reminding us that liberty is always threatened. In an article titled Not unique to one place or time; they could happen here, the journal mentions how the Code came into being. Fittingly, the Nuremberg Tribunal hearings were held in Hitler’s Palace of Justice. Nuremberg had also been the location for some of Hitler’s largest rabble-rousing rallies. To quote again from the BMJ, “But, as several articles in this anniversary issue of the BMJ make clear, the records of these trials have also left us with a legacy we still shrink from confronting.” Experiments on human beings have continued to this day.

This is a summary of the Nuremberg Code

The Nuremberg Code aimed to protect human subjects from enduring the kind of cruelty and exploitation the prisoners endured at German Nazi concentration camps. The 10 elements of the code are:

  1. Voluntary consent (to be experimented on) is essential
  2. The results of any experiment must be for the greater good of society
  3. Human experiments should be based on previous animal experimentation
  4. Experiments should be conducted by avoiding physical/mental suffering and injury
  5. No experiment should be conducted if it is believed to cause death/disability
  6. The risks should never exceed the benefits
  7. Adequate facilities should be used to protect subjects
  8. Experiments should be conducted only by qualified scientists
  9. Subjects should be able to end their participation at any time
  10. The scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment when injury, disability, or death is likely to occur
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