The Abuse of Psychiatry and (Psycho) Pharmacology in Nazi Regime and the Nuremberg Trials: Ethical Issues in Human Research

Abstract

After World War II, an international military court sentenced 20 Nazi doctors and 3 collaborators with crimes against the humanity at the Nuremberg Trials. For the past 70 years after Nuremberg Trials, the restoration to pre-Nazi’s ethical standard has been progressed. The eugenicist theories and the policies of racial hygiene were the fundamental axes of the Nazi euthanasia programs without paying attention to the basic ethics of the medicine. German psychiatry that it enjoyed an extraordinary international reputation, played a capital rôle in these programs and the mental patients supposed the main group of risk for these practices during the Nazi era. In this overview, we deal with, the historical perspective of the euthanasia programs of the mental patients, and the procedures for its execution, and the use of the mental patients as investigation tools. Direct consequence of the mentioned penal process gave birth to the Nuremberg Code, which has been considered as the fi rst international code of ethics for the medical experiments with human subjects. During the last 70 years, it has advanced substantially in the restoration of ethical codes and norms to protect patients in particular in the fi eld of psychiatry and psychopharmacology, and its culmination of advancement has been in the 1996 Declaration of Madrid.