History of Sorts

On December 9, 1946, an American military tribunal opened criminal proceedings against 23 leading German physicians and administrators for their willing participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was Telford Taylor, and the chief prosecutor was James M. McHaney. In his opening statement, Taylor summarized the crimes of the defendants.

“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.”

Siegfried Handloser was one of the men on trial. He was born in Konstanz. Since World War I, he has been in the German Army Medical Service. He entered the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy in Berlin in 1903. After passing the state examination in 1910, he was employed in various positions in the medical service from 1928-32. Eventually, he became a consultant in the Reichswehr Ministry.

Handloser was a Lieutenant General in the medical service and medical inspector in the Wehrmacht. He also served as chief of medical services of the armed forces. He was found guilty of participation in high altitude, freezing, malaria, mustard gas, sulfanilamide, seawater, epidemic jaundice, and spotted fever experiments on humans. He also conducted bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration and bone-transplantation experiments. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Handloser joined the committee of the German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM-Deutsche Gesellschaft für Innere Medizin) in 1937. The German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM) was founded in Wiesbaden in 1882 and, with over 30,000 members, still is one of the largest medical-scientific professional societies in Europe.

Handloser effectively became the Nazi delegate In 1938. He only got here because of his political role, not through scientific achievement. He had not previously been a member of the DGIM.

Handloser was promoted to the position of Army Group physician of the Nazi Army Group Command 3. In October 1939, and was named honorary professor.

Handloser’s career took him to Army Group Command 3 in Vienna in 1938. He was an Army Medical Inspector and Army Surgeon in the General Quartermaster’s Office of the Army High Command from February 1941. He was appointed the first Chief of Wehrmacht Medical Services (“Chief W San”) at the High Command of the Wehrmacht in June/July 1942.

Handloser cooperated with Ernst Robert Grawitz, “Reichsarzt-SS und Polizei,” but was not his superior. He was in charge of all the Wehrmacht medical personnel—including the medical units of the Waffen-SS.

Handloser became responsible for all medical crimes in the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. He experienced increasing criticism during the war, as there were deficiencies in medical supplies, which eventually came to a complete collapse.

Handloser attended a meeting on December 29, 1941, at which it was decided to conduct human experiments to test typhus vaccines at Buchenwald Concentration Camp.

The tests resulted in the deaths of about 100 people. Handloser actively operated the organization of forced prostitution in the territories occupied by the Nazis, using his position as chief of the Wehrmacht Medical Service. Handloser strove to minimize the danger of venereal disease and to prevent “sexual intercourse with Jewish women.”

Orderly prostitution was also intended to avoid undesirable contact with women in the occupied territories, which could have been used for espionage purposes. After Hitler refused parole for soldiers convicted of homosexual acts in 1942, Handloser turned his attention to this issue as well. In this context, the establishment of more Wehrmacht brothels to “remedy the sexual emergency” was discussed.

Handloser was convicted by the American Military Tribunal No. 1 (the Doctors’ Trial) in August 1947 and sentenced to life imprisonment. This was later reduced to 20 years, but in 1954, he was released shortly before dying of cancer in Munich at the age of 69. He was shown compassion where he had none himself.

Sources

https://www.dgim-history.de/en/biography/Handloser;Siegfried;1126

https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz25809.html

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/defendants-in-the-doctors-trial