Karl Gebhardt

Karl Franz Gebhardt (1897 to 1948) was a German physician and war criminal. He was the main coordinator of a series of medical atrocities carried out on inmates of the concentration camps at Ravensbruck and Auschwitz. The experiments were an attempt to defend his own approach to the surgical management of grossly contaminated traumatic wounds against the then new antibiotic treatment of battlefield injuries. After the Second World War he stood trial in the Doctors' trial, American Military Tribunal No. I, one of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials. He was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, condemned to death on 20 August 1947 and hanged at Landsberg Prison in Bavaria on 2 June 1948. The atlas records him as a documented example of medicine used to commit crimes, not as a model of practice.