Gerhard August Heinrich Rose (30 November 1896 – 13 January 1992) was a Nazi German physician and war criminal who performed medical atrocities on concentration camp prisoners at Dachau and Buchenwald without the subjects' consent. He infected Jews, Romani people, and the mentally ill with malaria and typhus. Following the Doctors' Trial, Rose was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to life in prison, but he was released in 1955.
Early life and education
Rose was born in Danzig (then part of West Prussia, Prussia, Germany, now Gdańsk, Poland). He attended high schools in Stettin, Düsseldorf, Bremen and Breslau. After graduation, Rose studied medicine at the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy for military medical education in Berlin. Rose's training was interrupted from 1914 to 1918 by the First World War. In 1914, he was active in the Pépinière Corps Saxonia. He moved to the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Berlin and to the Silesian Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Breslau to continue his studies. Rose completed the state medical examination on 15 November 1921, receiving the mark "very good". He received his doctorate on 20 November 1922, graduating . He was formally approved to practice medicine on 16 May 1922. In 1923, he became a member of the Corps Franconia Hamburg. Between 1922 and 1926, Rose worked as a medical assistant at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, at the Hygienic Institute in Basel and at the Anatomical Institute of the University of Freiburg.
China and Nazi Party membership
In 1929, Rose left Germany to work in China. He was a medical adviser to the Kuomintang government. In 1929, he was appointed director of the medical office in Chekiang. He was also the health adviser at the Ministry of the interior in Chekiang. He was unable to pursue his studies during his time in China.
In 1930, Rose joined the Nazi Party. His member number was 346.161.
Return from China
Rose returned to Berlin in September 1936, prior to the Second Sino-Japanese War. He took over as head of the Department of Tropical Medicine at the Berlin Robert Koch Institute on 1 October 1936. Beginning in the 1938 summer semester, Rose held lectures and exercises on tropical hygiene and tropical medicine at Berlin University. On 1 February 1943, Rose was named vice president of the Robert Koch Institute.
In 1939, Rose entered the medical branch of the Luftwaffe. In 1942, he was appointed advisory hygienist on tropical medicine in the medical service of the Luftwaffe. When the war ended, Rose held the rank of a general physician.
War crimes
Malaria experiments
Rose's predecessor as Head of Department at the Robert Koch Institute was Claus Schilling. Schilling had performed malaria experiments; Rose continued his experiments, mostly with psychiatric patients. In 1917, the Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg used malaria infection as a treatment for General paresis of the insane. Rose used the same treatment for schizophrenia.
Rose carried out his malaria experiments on the mentally ill at Dachau concentration camp, Buchenwald concentration camp, and with Russian prisoners in a psychiatric clinic in Thuringia.
Between 1941 and 1942, Rose tested new antimalarial drugs for IG Farben in Arnsdorf. The Arnsdorf sanatorium documented the malaria experiments which Rose performed. By July 1942, 110 patients had been infected by mosquito bites. In the first test series, which had 49 human subjects, four people died. The experiments in Arnsdorf coincided with the Aktion T4, the Nazi government's mass murder campaign against the disabled and mentally ill. Psychiatric patients in Arnsdorf were transferred to other institutions and killed there. According to the company, Rose sought out one of the main organizers of Aktion T4, Viktor Brack, and was promised that his subjects would not be transferred.
From January 1942 onward, Rose conducted human experiments in Dachau concentration camp to develop a vaccine against malaria.