"Crimes against the Nervous System": Neurological References During the Nuremberg Doctors' Trials.

The Nuremberg Trials were a sequence of tribunal sessions held by the Allied Forces between November 1945 and October 1946 with the intent of prosecuting prominent representatives of the Nazi Party for crimes committed before and during the war. Because medical experiments in human prisoners were among the most heinous offenses, a specific series of court cases, known as the Doctor's Trials (the USA vs. Karl Brandt et al), was carried out. A considerable part of the official documents of the Nuremberg Trials has been recently made publicly available through the Nuremberg Trials Project, an initiative of the Harvard Law School Library. We performed a comprehensive analysis of the Doctors' Trials original documents (NMT 1: Medical Case) as well as other available academic and historical sources focusing on references to the nervous system, neurosurgical, and neurologic diseases. Besides providing a brief glance of a unique source of original historical documents, this historical vignette also attempts to fulfill, at least in some limited sense, the moral duty toward the Holocaust victims laid on our generation by remembering their fate.