The 13 Steps

Arrogant SS General Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal surgeon, had had a pretty good idea of what was coming. In the courtroom at Nuernberg last year, while his trial droned on, he doodled on a sheet of paper. On one sheet he drew a wooden gallows with 13 steps leading to the rope and noose. Beneath it he wrote: "Heil Hitler, ich komme bald" (I'm coming soon). Last week, in the courtyard of the Landsberg prison, Karl Brandt went to his gallows.* With him went six other Nazi doctors and SS officers, including Karl Gebhardt, Himmler's physician, and bearded, Mephistophelean SS Colonel Wolfram Sievers, Military Research Institute head who, among other things, had gathered non-Aryan skulls for Himmler's notable collection.

The condemned men had been charged by a U.S. military court with killing in the name of a "macabre science." High-altitude tests, freezing, deliberate infection and liquid gas were among their means. Their victims were prisoners of war and the inmates of concentration camps. Brandt, as Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation, was held responsible for the deaths of 275,000 lunatics and cripples.

At the gallows, Brandt was unrepentant. He began a farewell speech. "It is no shame to stand on this scaffold. I served my fatherland as others before me . . ." He was still talking when the black hood dropped over his face. ^

* For news of another Nazi doctor, see MILESTONES.

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