Carl Gebhardt was born on November 23, 1897, in Bavarian Haag, in Upper Bavaria, then part of the German Empire. He was the son of a doctor and a school friend of Heinrich Himmler, who later became head of the SS. Gebhardt was also in the same class as Himmler's brother and remained friends with the Himmler family throughout his life. His father, Dr. Franz Gebhardt, had served as the personal physician to Himmler's parents.
When World War I began on July 28, 1914, Gebhardt went on to serve as a soldier in the Imperial German Army from 1916 to 1918. He ultimately reached the rank of lieutenant in the reserves. After the war ended on November 11, 1918, he began studying medicine in Munich the following year.
In 1923, Gebhardt became a member of the Freikorps Oberland, a voluntary paramilitary organization that fought against communist and Polish insurgents. With the Freikorps, he participated in the Beer Hall Putsch, the failed coup attempt on November 8 and 9, 1923, during which Adolf Hitler led a coalition group in an attempt to overthrow the German government.
That same year, Gebhardt received his license to practice medicine, and in 1924 he earned his doctorate. From 1923 to 1933, he worked at the Surgical University Hospital in Munich, training under Ferdinand Sauerbruch. Sauerbruch developed several new types of limb prosthetics that for the first time enabled simple movements to be executed with a patient's remaining muscle.
In 1932, Gebhardt gained his habilitation. In January of the following year, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power. On May 1, 1933, Carl Gebhardt joined the Nazi Party.
In November 1933, he took over management of the tuberculosis sanatorium in Hohenlychen, which he transformed into an orthopedic clinic. There, Gebhardt started the first sports medicine clinic in Germany and developed sports programs for amputees and other disabled people.
In October 1933, Gebhardt married Mariana Hess, who was 14 years his junior. The marriage produced two sons, Jürgen, born in 1934, and Peter, born in 1937.
In 1935, Carl Gebhardt joined the SS, where on April 20 of the same year he was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer, equivalent to a major in the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht. That same year, he became the first professor of sports medicine in Berlin.
Between 1933 and 1939, Gebhardt contributed a great deal to the development of sports medicine. He wrote articles on physical medicine and rehabilitation and a textbook on sports rehabilitation, and he disseminated his ideas in Germany and throughout the rest of Europe.
In 1936, he distinguished himself as head of the medical department of the Academy for Exercise and Physical Training and as a senior physician of the 1936 Summer Olympics. The Hohenlychen Sanatorium became the sports sanatorium for the Third Reich and served as a central hospital for athletes who participated in the 1936 Summer Olympics.
In 1937, he became chairholder for orthopedic surgery at the University of Berlin. One year later, Gebhardt was appointed as Heinrich Himmler's personal physician.
When World War II started on September 1, 1939, with Germany's invasion of Poland, Gebhardt served as chief surgeon of the staff of the Reich. Under his direction, the Hohenlychen Sanatorium became a military hospital for the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS.
On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and a principal architect of the Holocaust, was mortally wounded by Czechoslovak paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš while in his convertible Mercedes. The same day, Himmler sent his personal physician, Dr. Carl Gebhardt, to Prague to assume care.
Hitler's personal doctor, Theodor Morell, suggested the use of the new antibacterial drugs sulfonamides, but Gebhardt thought Heydrich would recover and declined the suggestion. Despite a fever, Heydrich's recovery appeared to progress well, and Gebhardt decided to monitor Heydrich's recovery alone. According to Gebhardt, the intervention of several doctors could have led to harmful nervousness.
Though on June 3 Heydrich was able to eat his midday meal sitting up, a few hours later he collapsed, dying the next day. Heydrich's death was a debacle for Gebhardt, above all because he had refused help from prominent doctors such as Morell or Ferdinand Sauerbruch. He also found himself in a dangerous position when Morell remarked that the use of his new sulfonamide, named Ultraseptyl, could have led to a different outcome.
Himmler accused Gebhardt of negligence for not treating Heydrich with sulfonamides. To prove that sulfonamide was useless in treating the infections and that he was not responsible for Heydrich's death, Himmler advised Gebhardt to conduct medical experiments on prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.
Carl Gebhardt became the main coordinator of these experiments, and his assistants became Dr. Herta Oberheuser and Fritz Fischer. On July 20, 1942, the first sulfonamide experiments began on inmates at Ravensbrück concentration camp, located around 13 kilometers from the Hohenlychen Sanatorium.
The experimenters often used a hammer to break the legs of female prisoners, then infected open wounds with aggressive bacteria and monitored the healing with and without sulfonamide. The SS selected nearly 80 women, mostly Polish, for these experiments.
The women on whom these experiments were conducted nicknamed themselves "rabbits," because they felt used like experimental laboratory animals and because the experiments made them unable to walk, so they could only hop. Women in the sulfonamide-treated experimental group received little or no nursing care, while those in the untreated control group received better care. Not surprisingly, those in the control group were more likely to survive the experiments.
Many of the women died as a result, and those who survived often suffered permanent physical damage. On September 9, 1942, Himmler rehabilitated his childhood friend Carl Gebhardt, saying that everything had been done in Heydrich's treatment.
Believing it could help in treating amputee soldiers, Gebhardt and his assistants also tested various methods of setting and transplanting bones. Such experiments included amputations and were often performed without any anesthesia.
On one occasion, Gebhardt endeavored to transplant the scapula and shoulder of a Ravensbrück prisoner to a soldier at Hohenlychen who had lost a shoulder as a result of a sarcoma, a type of cancer. On another occasion, a prisoner had his legs amputated and carried away in a sack by Gebhardt, who then attempted to attach them to a soldier whose lower limbs had been amputated at Hohenlychen hospital.
Gebhardt, Oberheuser, and Fischer also carried out sterilization experiments on women and children, many of them Roma people, in an attempt to develop an efficient method of sterilization. They were also involved in forced abortions of women who were already seven or eight months pregnant. In addition to these forced abortions, they were also known for beating pregnant women to cause miscarriages and for killing newborns.
On January 16, 1945, Hitler took up residence in the Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery, which became the center of the Nazi regime until the last week of World War II in Europe. On April 22, 1945, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, with his wife and six children between the ages of 4 and 12, moved into Hitler's bunker.
On April 23, 1945, Gebhardt became president of the German Red Cross and approached Goebbels to take his children out of Berlin. However, Goebbels refused and, together with his wife Magda, committed suicide after having poisoned their six children with a cyanide compound.
On October 25, 1946, the US military government for Germany created Military Tribunal I, which conducted the first of the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings, the Medical Case trial. On November 5, indictments were served to 23 SS physicians, scientists, and officials.
The defendants were indicted on four counts: participation in the common design or conspiracy, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in criminal organizations. They were accused of committing murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhuman acts on German civilians and nationals of other countries through a series of specific medical experiments dealing with the effects of high altitude, low temperature, sea water, typhus, infectious jaundice, sulfa drugs, bone grafting, and mustard gas, as well as through the euthanasia and forced sterilization programs.
The defendants were arraigned on November 21, and the trial ran from December 9, 1946, to July 19, 1947. The tribunal rendered its judgment on August 20, finding 15 of the defendants guilty, seven not guilty, and one guilty only of membership in a criminal organization.
The sentences were announced on August 21. Seven were sentenced to death, five to life terms, and four to terms of between 10 and 20 years. While Gebhardt's assistants Oberheuser and Fritz Fischer received prison sentences, Carl Gebhardt was sentenced to death.
Military Tribunal I found Carl Gebhardt guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in an organization declared criminal by the judgment of the International Military Tribunal. The tribunal sentenced him to death by hanging.
During the trial, Gebhardt had shown no remorse and defended his actions, saying that he took full responsibility and that it was the best method of proving his work. Carl Gebhardt was 50 years old when he was hanged on June 2, 1948, in Landsberg prison in Bavaria. His last words were, "I die without bitterness, but regret that there is still injustice in the world."