Nuremberg Code

The Nuremberg Code was put forth by American judges at the second Nuremberg trial, where American prosecutors charged the Dachau doctors with "crimes against humanity." None of the German scientists expressed remorse. Most claimed that someone else had carried out the vilest experiments. All said that issues of moral and personal responsibility are moot in state-sponsored research. Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, testified that what was critical was "whether the experiment is important or unimportant." Asked his attitude toward killing human beings in the course of medical research, Brandt replied, "Do you think that one can obtain any worthwhile fundamental results without a definite toll of lives?"¹

Principles

The judges rejected such defenses and established the Code. Its main points were simple: researchers must obtain full voluntary consent from all subjects; experiments should yield fruitful results for the good of society that can be obtained in no other way; researchers should not conduct tests where death or serious injury might occur, "except, perhaps" when the supervising doctors also serve as subjects. The judges sentenced seven of the Germans, including Brandt, to death by hanging. Nine others received long prison sentences. Thus the U.S. government put its full moral force behind the idea that there were limits on what scientists could do to human subjects, even when a country's security was thought to hang in the balance.¹

Hypocrisy

The Nuremberg Code has remained official American policy ever since 1946, but, even before the verdicts were in, special U.S. investigating teams were sifting through the experimental records at Dachau for information of military value. The report of one such team found that while part of the data was "inaccurate," some of the conclusions, if confirmed, would be "an important complement to existing knowledge." Military authorities sent the records, including a description of the mescaline and Hypnosis experiments, back to the United States. None of the German Mind Control research was ever made public.¹

Nothing the CIA ever did in its postwar search for mind-control technology came close to the callous killing of the Nazi "aviation research." Nevertheless, in their attempts to find ways to manipulate people, Agency officials and their agents crossed many of the same ethical barriers. They experimented with dangerous and unknown techniques on people who had no idea what was happening. They systematically violated the free will and mental dignity of their subjects, and, like the Germans, they chose to victimize special groups of people whose existence they considered, out of prejudice and convenience, less worthy than their own. Wherever their extreme experiments went, the CIA sponsors picked for subjects their own equivalents of the Nazis' Jews and gypsies: mental patients, prostitutes, foreigners, drug addicts, and prisoners, often from minority ethnic groups.¹

The Code was suggested in essentially its final form by prosecution team consultant Dr. Leo Alexander, a Boston psychiatrist.¹