Bruno Weber (doctor)

Bruno Nikolaus Maria Weber (1915 to 1956) was a German physician and bacteriologist who served as an SS officer at Auschwitz, where he headed the sanitary-bacteriological investigation authority of the Waffen-SS and Police, also called the Hygiene Institute. He was born in Trier, and according to a fellow SS doctor he earned a doctorate in medicine in the United States before the war. The institute was set up to contain typhoid and other epidemics that threatened camp staff, to supply SS hospitals, to run blood, urine and faeces analyses and to test new drugs such as sulfonamides. Weber also used the camp laboratory for unethical experiments on prisoners, including injecting them with mismatched blood groups to test compatibility and giving barbiturates and morphine derivatives in mind-control trials. He was later an SS doctor at Dachau. Arrested by British forces in 1946 and questioned in Poland, he was not prosecuted and died a free man in Homburg. His case is a record of medicine used for atrocity, not a model of practice.