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Ex-inmates of Nazi Camps Demonstrate; Ask Trials for Nazi Camp Doctors

August 6, 1958
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Former concentration camp prisoners demonstrated here today demanding that German officials active in the mistreatment and murder of prisoners during the Nazi regime should be brought to trial. They asked specifically that all camp doctors and judges who presided over Nazi special courts giving a legal veneer to the inhumanities of the Hitler regime be investigated with an eye toward prosecution.

A former physician in the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women pleaded innocent today at a hearing in Kiel to charges of having conducted inhumane “experiments” on women and children in the camp and having killed and maimed many of them.

The defendant, Dr. Hertha Oberhauser, through her attorneys, pleaded that she had performed only three “mercy killings” of women prisoners. Dr. Oberhauser, defending her medical license at hearings before the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry of the Interior, insisted she was innocent of these charges, for which the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal sentenced her to 20 years’ imprisonment in 1947.

The license revocation hearing was prompted by protests from the British Medical Association which submitted evidence that Dr. Oberhauser had injected poisons and inserted bacteria, and foreign matter into the limbs of her victims during her so-called experiments.

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