Karl Genzken

Karl August Genzken, who lived from 1885 to 1957, was a physician of the Nazi era who rose to the rank of SS-Gruppenführer, equivalent to major general, in the Waffen-SS and served as chief of its Medical Office. According to the article he committed medical atrocities on prisoners in several concentration camps. After the war he was tried in the Doctors' Trial held at Nuremberg in 1947, convicted as a war criminal and for crimes against humanity, and sentenced to life imprisonment. That sentence was later commuted to twenty years, and he was released in 1954. His case belongs to the history of medical ethics, because it shows a physician in a senior administrative post answering in court for abuses carried out on people in custody.