Hardback: There is a Talmudic adage, quite disturbing, that applies to them: Tov she-barofim le-gehinom - "The best doctors are destined for hell."
This is a chilling story of human depravity and ultimate justice, told for the first time by an eyewitness, court reporter for the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Nazi doctors. This is the account of torture and murder by experiment in the name of scientific research and patriotism. Doctors from Hell (2005) includes trial transcripts that have not been easily available to the general public and previously unpublished photographs used as evidence in the trial.
The author, Vivien Spitz, describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for eighteen months while working on the trial. Once a Nazi sympathiser tossed bombs into the dining room of the hotel where she lived moments before she arrived for dinner. She takes us into the courtroom to hear the dramatic testimony and see the reactions of the defendants to the proceedings. The witnesses tell of experiments in which they were deprived of oxygen; frozen; injected with malaria, typhus, and jaundice; subjected to the amputation of healthy limbs; forced to drink sea water for weeks at a time; and other horrors.
This landmark trial resulted in the establishment of the Nuremberg Code, which sets the guidelines for medical research involving human beings.
Doctors from Hell is a significant addition to the literature on World War II and the Holocaust, medical ethics, human rights and the barbaric depths to which human beings can descend.
About the author: Vivien Spitz (1924-2014), the youngest court reporter at the Nuremberg Trials, gave over 500 speeches on the lessons of the Holocaust to schools, churches, synagogues, and professional groups internationally. She was honoured numerous times for her work, including commendations from Bill Clinton, Al Gore, US Senator Christopher Dodd, and the state of Israel. She was the first woman to report on the US Senate floor and has taken down the words of four presidents in Congress. In 2006, Spitz was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame.
She died in Texas in 2014 aged 89. In 2017, she appeared in older footage in the documentary Caring Corrupted: The Killing Nurses of the Third Reich. There is a collection of items donated by Spitz, including transcripts and photographs, in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives.
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