2014/02/12 by Howard Brody, Sarah E. Leonard, Jing-Bao Nie +1 · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Health Professions · Medicine · Psychology · #Medical History and Research #Ethics in medical practice #Biomedical Ethics and Regulation #Political science #Government (linguistics) #World War II #Nazism #Key (lock) #Biological warfare #Law #Criminology #Psychology #Computer security #Politics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0963180113000753
openalex publication_date 2014/02/12 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
In 1945-46, representatives of the U.S. government made similar discoveries in both Germany and Japan, unearthing evidence of unethical experiments on human beings that could be viewed as war crimes. The outcomes in the two defeated nations, however, were strikingly different. In Germany, the United States, influenced by the Canadian physician John Thompson, played a key role in bringing Nazi physicians to trial and publicizing their misdeeds. In Japan, the United States played an equally key role in concealing information about the biological warfare experiments and in securing immunity from prosecution for the perpetrators. The greater force of appeals to national security and wartime exigency help to explain these different outcomes.