The trial of two German doctors charged with poisoning Jews used as “guinea pigs” for so called medical experiments during the Nazi regime, opened today before a military court in the French city of Mets.
The two doctors, Eugen Hagen and Otto Brickenbach, are accused of killing at least 90 inmates a of a Nazi concentration camp with injections of typhus virus and other germs and with poison gases. Four other doctors who assisted them in the atrocity experiments at the University of Strassbourg, but who have escaped from France, will be tried in absentia. Hagen, a former member of the German Central Committee to Fight Cancer, once served as a researcher in yellow fever at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Brickenbach is a former Heidelberg University professor.
The trial has attracted nationwide interest in France, and the French Academy of Science has asked for permission to record the proceedings. Many French scientists and medical men have applied for permission to witness the proceedings.
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