Waldemar Hoven

Waldemar Hoven (1903 to 1948) was a Nazi physician at the Buchenwald concentration camp and a convicted war criminal. He conducted human experiments on typhus that led to the deaths of many camp prisoners, and he was one of the organizers of Aktion T4, the Nazi euthanasia initiative that resulted in the systematic murder of between 275,000 and 300,000 disabled people. He was sentenced to death and hanged on 2 June 1948. His case belongs in a medical atlas because it shows how the authority of a doctor was turned to killing, and why later codes of research ethics treat consent and the protection of vulnerable people as foundations of the profession. He is recorded as a perpetrator, not as a contributor to healing.