Karl Franz Gebhardt was a Nazi physician and a war criminal. Gebhardt was the main coordinator of a series of medical atrocities performed on inmates of the concentration camps at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. These experiments were an attempt to defend his approach to the surgical management of grossly contaminated traumatic wounds, against the then-new innovations of antibiotic treatment of injuries acquired on the battlefield.
Karl Gebhardt
Photograph of Karl Gebhardt as a defendant in the Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Doctors' Trial was the first of 12 trials for war crimes of high-ranking German officials and industrialists that the United States authorities held in their occupation zone in Nuremberg, Germany, after the end of World War II. These trials were held before US military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal, but took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice. The trials are collectively known as the "subsequent Nuremberg trials", formally the "Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals" (NMT).
Courtroom at the trial, 12 December 1946
Image: Karl Brandt SS Arzt
Image: Siegfried Handloser NS Arzt
Image: Paul Rostock (NS Mediziner)
