# The Doctors’ Trial opens at Nuremberg Date: 1946 ## The fact On 9 December 1946 the Doctors’ Trial opened at Nuremberg against physicians and officials accused of murder and human experiments. The opening is a completed judicial event. It records that licensed physicians committed the crimes. It is not itself the 1933 Gleichschaltung, and it is not the 1947 Code, which is a separate Fact. ## Context German medical organisations had been coordinated by the Nazi state. Racial hygiene was taught as science. Oaths did not function as a brake. The trial is the accountability instrument; the crimes are the harm. Both belong on a Hippocratic-tradition dossier because the defendants were physicians claiming professional status. [Hippocrates](/people/hippocrates) of Cos is not the sole author of every Greek medical treatise later copied under his name, and he is not the signer of every later oath or code that quoted him. Shared work with unnamed Coan practitioners, Alexandrian compilers, Galen, Latin printers, medical faculties, and twentieth-century medical associations does not erase the Cos identity Plato used, and it does not make a fifth-century physician the author of the 1948 Declaration of Geneva. ## Evidence and sources LOC and USHMM independently document the opening date, charges, and medical character of the defendants. Official or archival record: Library of Congress — Nuremberg trials collection (https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/Nuremberg_trials.html; Library of Congress). ## Significance Worsening [institutional-corruption](/drivers/institutional-corruption) path (the crimes the trial records). High confidence on the trial record. The 1947 Code remains a separate improving Fact. Accountability and crime must not be collapsed into one row. The Code of 1947 is the improving twin. This opening date stores the professional disgrace the court named. A printed corpus does not vaccinate a child. An oath does not staff a clinic. ## What is established and what is not Established: the Doctors’ Trial opened on 9 December 1946 against physicians. Not established: that Hippocrates authorised racial hygiene. What would change the picture: a contradictory autograph, a securely dated Coan inscription naming a different author, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions acting in his name. The documentary trail can name an office, printer, code, trial, or treatise heading; it cannot name a complete Coan patient register. Confidence belongs on the impact path. Estimates of later harm from humoral treatment, where historians publish them, are attributed to those historians, not invented here. A Cos vita, a medieval oath manuscript, a Venetian folio, and a twentieth-century medical-association code are different instruments even when they share a heading. Hippocrates’ contribution, where it exists, is the name and the later use of treatises grouped under that name, not a modern ministry signature. Sharing labour with printers, editors, prosecutors, or assemblies is not a reason to drop the row and not a reason to treat the row as a clinical trial. Readers who want a birth certificate, a patient register, or a unique coefficient onto a modern indicator will not find those things in this instrument, and the page should not pretend otherwise. The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit to Cos in the fifth century BCE. If a number of deaths, doses, or pupils is not in the official or independent record named above, it is not supplied here. ## People - Hippocrates: https://factrail.ai/people/hippocrates ## Drivers - Institutional Corruption: https://factrail.ai/drivers/institutional-corruption ## Sources - https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/special-focus/doctors-trial - https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/Nuremberg_trials.html ## Methodology https://factrail.ai/methodology Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/de-nazi-doctors-trial-1946