Karl Brandt

Karl Brandt was a German physician and senior Nazi medical official. He was involved in the regime’s euthanasia programme and medical crimes, and was tried and executed after the war following the Doctors’ Trial.

Karl Brandt was born in Mulhouse and died in Landsberg Prison. Brandt became one of Hitler’s personal physicians and a senior administrator of the Nazi killing programme known as Aktion T4; convicted at the Doctors’ Trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, he was executed in 1948.

Simon Scarrow’s Dead of Night places Karl Brandt’s real position within the Nazi medical hierarchy behind Horst Schenke’s investigation of a murdered SS doctor and a child’s unexplained death. Brandt’s association with Hitler and the regime’s organised killing of disabled patients gives the fictional murder case its wider institutional danger: the detective is not merely pursuing an individual criminal but approaching practices protected by the state itself.