The only photo of Gerhard Kretschmar, a five-month-old German baby with severe disabilities. His parents were ardent Nazis. In 1939, at the request of his father, who described him as a “monster”, Gerhard was murdered at the direction of Karl Brandt. He was the first victim of Aktion T4 [624 x 882].

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Karl Brandt was never tried for Gerhard Kretschmar’s murder. What happened to his parents is a mystery.

However, Karl Brandt was the chief defendant at the Doctors’ Trial. He was tried for conspiracy to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in a criminal organization. The charges related to crimes committed against Allied nationals under his position as the key administrator of Aktion T4 and his command responsibility over human experimentation at concentration camps during the war.

>”The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures, and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science. The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful only are still alive; a few of the survivors will appear in this courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected. For the most part they are nameless dead. To their murderers, these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals.”

With Brandt’s position inherently proving his guilt in the murders of hundreds of thousands of people, the legal outcome for him at the trial was inevitable:

>”Military Tribunal I finds and adjudges the defendant Karl Brandt guilty, under counts two, three, and four, of the indictment.”

So was the sentence:

>”Karl Brandt, Military Tribunal I has found and adjudged you guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in an organization declared criminal by the judgment of the International Military Tribunal, as charged under the indictment heretofore filed against you. For your said crimes on which you have been and now stand convicted Military Tribunal I sentences you, Karl Brandt, to death by hanging. And may God have mercy upon your soul. The officer of the guard will remove the defendant Brandt.”

Despite Brandt being directly complicit in the deaths of no less than 275,000 people, some frantically lobbied for clemency on his behalf. Pleas were made by dozens of people, including representatives of the churches, such as Eugen Gerstenmaier, the chairman of the relief organization of the Evangelical Church in Germany. Amongst Brandt’s other advocates were numerous medical health professionals, such as surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, renowned pathologist Robert Roesle, pharmacologist Wolfgang Hübner, the gynaecologist Walter Stoeckel, and the historian of medicine Paul Diepgen. They claimed Brandt had acted with noble motives. U.S. military governor Lucius Clay turned down their pleas for mercy.

>”Regardless of what inner convictions Dr Brandt may have held, he was directly responsible for much of the suffering and death caused to the unfortunate concentration camp victims chosen to be used as subjects in brutal medical experiments. In justice to these persons who underwent torture and death, I am unable to grant clemency in this case.”

Karl Brandt, 42, and his six condemned codefendants were executed by hanging at Landsberg Prison in Allied-occupied Germany on June 2, 1948. Under American military law, he was granted 90 seconds to make a final statement. The vast majority of those hanged either said nothing or were defiant to the end. Brandt was no exception.

>”How can the nation which holds the lead in human experimentation in any conceivable form, how can that nation dare to accuse and punish other nations which only copied their experimental procedures? And even euthanasia! Only look at Germany, and the way her misery has been manipulated and artificially prolonged. It is, of course, not surprising that the nation which in the face of the history of humanity will forever have to bear the guilt for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that this nation attempts to hide itself behind moral superlatives. She does not bend the law: Justice has never been here! Neither in the whole nor in the particular. What dictates is power. And this power wants victims. We are such victims. I am such a victim.”
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>”It is no shame to stand upon this scaffold. This is nothing but political revenge. I have served my Fatherland as others before me.”

Brandt continued to talk. The executioners told him that he was out of time and needed to end his speech. However, he refused to stop. Eventually, the executioners ran out of patience and placed the hood over his head as he spoke.

Aktion T4 really was the start of the long and arduous path that would eventually lead to the Holocaust…