There was another dramatic turning point in the doctors’ trial, and that involved the case of Dr. Kurt Blome. Blome was admittedly the director of biological weapons research for the Reich, which was not in itself a crime. But there were scores of documents in which Blome discussed the need to conduct experiments on human beings so as to further plague research at the Bacteriological Institute in Posen, where he was in charge. Blome’s defense, some of which he argued himself, was that he intended to experiment on humans but that he never actually performed the experiments. Intent, said Blome, was not a crime. The prosecution had been unable to find any witnesses to testify against Blome, and Blome used this fact in his defense. There was the testimony of Major General Walter Schreiber against Blome from the first Nuremberg trial, but the Soviets had refused to let Dr. Alexander interview Dr. Schreiber himself, so the veracity of his testimony was never independently verified. The prosecution presented many documents in which Blome discussed with Himmler his plans to experiment on humans. But there were no documents showing Blome’s actual guilt. There was another element of Blome’s defense that the prosecution was completely unprepared for, and that was Dr. Blome’s wife, Bettina, a physician and bestselling author. Frau Blome meticulously researched experiments that were conducted by the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during the war. This included malaria experiments on Terre Haute federal prison inmates. She also uncovered Dr. Walter Reed’s famous nineteenth-century yellow fever research for the U.S. Army, in which volunteer human test subjects had died. The defense counsel, Robert Servatius, picked up on this theme of U.S. Army human experimentation where Blome’s wife left off.
Servatius had located a Life magazine article, published in June of 1945, that described how OSRD conducted experiments on eight hundred U.S. prisoners during the war. Servatius read the entire article, word for word, in the courtroom. None of the American judges was familiar with the article, nor were most members of the prosecution, and its presentation in court clearly caught the Americans off guard. Because the article specifically discussed U.S. Army wartime experiments on prisoners, it was incredibly damaging for the prosecution. “Prison life is ideal for controlled laboratory work with humans,” Servatius read, quoting American doctors who had been interviewed by Life reporters. The idea that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and that both nations had used human test subjects during war, was unsettling. It pushed the core Nazi concept of the Untermenschen to the side. The Nuremberg prosecutors were left looking like hypocrites.