The judge told H?llenrainer that his statement did not make his conduct forgivable. That he had insulted the court. That it was the judgment of the tribunal that he be confined in the Nuremberg prison for a period of ninety days, as punishment for insulting due process.
Karl H?llenrainer spoke in a tidy, pleading voice. The power and conviction that had allowed him to almost fly across the courtroom with the intent of stabbing Dr. Beiglb?ck with his dagger was gone. Now H?llenrainer was on the edge of tears. “Would the Tribunal please forgive me?” H?llenrainer asked. “I am married and I have a small son.” He pointed at Dr. Beiglb?ck. “This man is a murderer. He gave me salt water and he performed a liver puncture on me. I am still under medical treatment.” Karl H?llenrainer pleaded for mercy from Judge Beals. “Please, do not send me to prison.”
The judge saw no room for clemency. Instead, Beals asked a guard to remove Karl H?llenrainer from the courtroom, referring to him as a “prisoner” now.
“My heart broke,” Vivien Spitz recalls. All she could do was lower her head. She was a professional court reporter and it was inappropriate for anyone to see that she was crying. Sixty years later, when recollecting the incident, she still wondered why Judge Beals did what he did. “It was impossible to be dispassionate.… Why ninety days? Why not one or two days—just to make a point? After all the torture the witness had suffered it seemed to me to be an outrageous elevation of process over substance.”
Karl H?llenrainer was removed from the courtroom. He was led down a long, secure corridor and into the prison complex, the same location where Dr. Beiglb?ck and all of the other Nazi war criminals were being held. It had been Dr. Alexander who had made the decision to put Karl H?llenrainer on the witness stand, and in his journal he wrote about how conflicted he felt about his decision. Dr. Alexander had spoken with H?llenrainer ten days before he testified against Beiglb?ck and was aware how upset H?llenrainer was, noting in a report how his hands shook. Karl H?llenrainer shared with Dr. Alexander that he suffered from a “tremendous feeling of inner rage” whenever he thought about what had happened to him at the Dachau concentration camp. H?llenrainer felt powerless, he said. He could close his eyes and “see the doctor in front of him who… had ruined his life and killed three of his friends.” Dr. Alexander knew how powerful H?llenrainer’s testimony would be. He was the only known victim of the saltwater experiments to have survived. Witness testimony was powerful, as his proved to be.
The thought of him being confined in a prison with the very doctors who had tortured him was unacceptable to Dr. Alexander, and that night he went to Judge Beals to advocate on H?llenrainer’s behalf. The judge showed clemency and released him, on bail, into Alexander’s custody. Four days later, on July 1, 1947, Karl H?llenrainer was allowed to continue his testimony. He rose to the occasion and provided harrowing details about what dying of thirst does to a man. He described how his friends “foamed at the mouth.” How “they had fits of raving madness” before succumbing to an agonizing death.
One of the Nazi doctors’ defense lawyers, Herr Steinbauer, was given an opportunity to cross-examine Karl H?llenrainer. Steinbauer accused H?llenrainer of lying.
“How can there be foam on a mouth which is completely dried out?” Steinbauer asked.
H?llenrainer said he was telling the truth.
“Listen, Herr H?llenrainer,” Steinbauer said, “don’t be evasive as Gypsies usually are. Give me a clear answer as a witness under oath.”
H?llenrainer attempted to answer.
“You Gypsies stick together, don’t you?” Steinbauer interrupted.
The exchange could have served as a metaphor for the whole trial. Through the eyes of a Nazi it was and always would be the übermenschen versus the Untermenschen. It was why General Taylor’s opening remarks sent such a powerful message. It wasn’t just the acts of the Nazi doctors that were “barbarous and criminal” but the very ideas that had engendered such acts.
Late at night, Dr. Alexander wrote a private letter to General Telford Taylor stating how he felt about the Nazi doctors on trial. “I feel that all of the accused today, Schaefer, Becker-Freyseng and Beiglb?ck, would admit that this problem [seawater drinkability] could have been solved in one afternoon with a piece of jelly [and] a salt solution.” Instead, Dr. Alexander wrote, “All of these men on the dock slaughtered for gain of scientific renown [and] personal advancement. They were like Tantalus, a mythical, ambitious ruler who slew his own child for reward.”
In a letter to his wife, Dr. Alexander penned a fascinating reveal: “Dr. Beiglb?ck from Vienna, turns out to have been in the same class with me during our final year at medical school,” before the war. The way Dr. Alexander remembered it, Beiglb?ck was caught cheating and had to leave the school. “He does not recognize me,” Dr. Alexander told his wife, “but I regularly recognize him.” Two men whose professional lives had begun so similarly had taken such radically diffent paths.