Three Years After the Code

The Nuremberg Papers Were a Reading List

American judges wrote the rule. American officers went looking for the research it condemned.

The Nuremberg Trials were about more than prosecuting Nazi war crimes: they were about creating an indisputable account of the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. As America’s chief prosecutor at the trials,

On May 9, 1950, at a meeting on a project then called Bluebird, someone proposed that the Surgeon General of the Army search the Nuremberg trial papers for material on:

“drugs, narcoanalysis, and special interrogation techniques”

Those are the document’s words, not mine.

The record of that meeting is among more than twelve hundred documents released by the National Security Archive, and it was reported this spring by The Intercept.

Consider what was being requested.

The “Doctors’ Trial” at Nuremberg / Evolution of Justice in Florida / Library / The Court — — Florida Supreme

The Nuremberg papers were the evidentiary record of the Doctors’ Trial — United States v. Karl Brandt et al., not the better-known case against Goering and the others.

An American military tribunal opened it on December 9, 1946, against twenty-three German physicians and administrators. The judges delivered their verdict on August 19, 1947.