“They’re Dropping Like Flies Out Here.” History of U.S. prisoner experimentation

On August 20, 1947, Gerhard Rose, one of Germany’s pre-eminent medical figures, stood in the prisoners’ dock at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, awaiting his sentence for “murders, tortures, and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science.”1 The prestigious German physician had overseen a series of experiments at the Buchenwald and Natzweiler concentration camps, in which numerous healthy inmates were deliberately infected with yellow fever, smallpox, typhus, cholera, and diphtheria germs. Hundreds of these inmates died.