Today is the 54th anniversary of the famous Nuremberg "Doctors' Trial."
On September 9, 1946 in Nuremberg, Germany, the International Military Court held a hearing in which 23 German Nazi doctors were charged with participating in war crimes and committing crimes against humanity, etc.
Healing the wounded and rescuing the dying are a doctor's sacred duties. However, when the Nazis were in power, a large number of German doctors proved to be devoid of conscience and aided and abetted the evil-doers. About 49% of German doctors not only joined the Nazi Party, they also provided the technical expertise for a long list of atrocities. They conducted outlandish experiments on the human body, made comparisons between races, did experiments on twins, and began an inhumane sterilization program. They were the brains behind the death camps and the "final solution." Their sterilization plan forced tens of thousands drawn from the so-called "inferior" races to be sterilized. Unsatisfied with sterilizing one victim at a time, the Nazi doctors experimented with many kinds of brutal, large-scale sterilization procedures. Unsatisfied with using sterilization as a means of genocide, the Nazi doctors cooperated further with Hitler in finding faster ways to achieve the "final solution." The gas chamber was one of their heartless "masterpieces." The Nazi doctors were in charge of choosing the healthy prisoners to work as slaves in the "concentration camps," while sending those in poor condition to the gas chamber. They were also involved in helping the Gestapo torture the prisoners. They perverted medicine in order to assure that prisoners would be forced to endure the greatest amount of suffering and would not die too quickly. The race experiments made by the Nazi doctors provided the "scientific grounds" for Hitler's "Master race." It can be said that the Nazi doctors provided the crucial technical assistance to the crimes committed by Hitler's Nazism. That's why the "doctor's trial" was the first trial handled by the Nuremberg International Military Court after the trial of Hitler's lieutenants was completed.
Like the defendants in the other 12 cases tried in the Nuremberg International Military Court, Nazi doctors argued that they were just obeying orders. However, the evidence shows that there weren't any particular orders that impelled them to offend God and reason, and that no German doctor was persecuted because he refused to commit atrocities. The Nazi doctors had had the best education, and among them were some of the most famous medical scientists. But their education did not restrain them; they never considered that in abandoning their humanity they would only earn contempt. Though those Nazi doctors were very smart, they did not consider that the sophistical claim that they were "following orders" could not save their lives once the Nazi's power was reduced to smoke and ashes.
Most of the documents, treaties, and declarations today related to the protection of human rights, including the United Nations' "Human Rights Declaration," originated in reflections on the atrocities of World War II, especially after the investigations and trials conducted by the Nuremberg International Military Court. Based on the Nuremberg International Military Court, the International Justice Court was established in the United Nations. Since the International Justice Court can only try states instead of individuals, a resolution was advanced in 1998 in the United Nations to set up the International Criminals Court, directly in charge of investigating war criminals, genocide, and crimes against humanity so that such cases could not elude prosecution under the protection of a state or a government.
"Past experience, if not forgotten, is a guide for the future." Today I wonder whether those "doctors" and "nurses" who force injections of sedatives and nerve damaging drugs on healthy Falun Dafa disciples in the Chinese mental hospitals have ever thought of being tried in the International Criminals Court before the world. Do you feel that today you have more luck than those Nazi doctors did, when the whole world is attaching more and more importance to human rights? Or do you feel that you won't live to see the day that you are tried? Or do you plan to defend yourselves then by saying it was Jiang Zemin who seized your hands to force the injections? Did you ever think that in the near future, the vicious order that "one can never go too far in abusing Falun Gong" would not be an excuse at all for your having participated in the persecution?
Give yourself a chance, even if a small one! Confess to your own conscience!
A Dafa disciple in the United States
December 9, 2000
