Karl Brandt (Nazi physician)



Karl Brandt (January 8, 1904 – June 2, 1948) was selected the personal physician of Adolf Hitler in August 1944 and headed the administration of the Nazi euthanasia program from 1939. As Major General Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation he was involved in human experimentation, along with his deputy Werner Heyde and others.

Brandt was born in Mülhausen in the then German Alsace-Lorraine territory (now Mulhouse, France). He became a medical doctor in 1928. He joined the Nazi Party in January 1932, and became a member of the SA in 1933. He became a member of the SS in July 1934 and was appointed Untersturmführer. From the summer of 1934 he was Hitler's "Escort Physician". On September 1 1939, he was appointed by Hitler co-head of the T-4 Euthanasia Program, with Philipp Bouhler. He received regular promotions in the SS; by January 1943 he was a major general. On April 16, 1945 he was arrested by the Gestapo for moving his family out of Berlin. He was condemned to death by a court at Berlin. He was released from arrest by order of Doenitz on May 2, 1945. He was placed under arrest by the British on May 23, 1945.

Brandt was tried along with twenty-two others at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany. The trial was officially titled United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al., but is more commonly referred to as the "Doctors' Trial"; it began on December 9, 1946. He was charged with "special responsibility for, and participation in, Freezing, Malaria, LOST Gas, Sulfanilamide, Bone, Muscle and Nerve Regeneration and Bone Transplantation, Sea-Water, Epidemic Jaundice, Sterilization, and Typhus Experiments... [also] in connection with the planning and carrying out of the Nazi's T-4 Euthanasia Program of the German Reich... [and] with membership in the SS".

Judgment was pronounced on August 19, 1947. Brandt and six others were sentenced to death by hanging (all carried out at Landsberg Prison on June 2, 1948), nine were given prison terms of fifteen years to life, and seven were found not guilty.