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.

Following the Doctors' Trial, Rose was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to life in prison, but he was released in 1955.

After graduation, Rose studied medicine at the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy for military medical education in Berlin.

[4] In 1917, the Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg used malaria infection as a treatment for General paresis of the insane.

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.

[7] From January 1942 onward, Rose conducted human experiments in Dachau concentration camp to develop a vaccine against malaria.

[8] The isolation of the Jewish civilians in ghettoes and of foreign prisoners in the POW camps led to typhus outbreaks in the German-occupied East.

[16] On 4 October 1943, Haagen wrote to Rose to complain that he lacked the appropriate prisoners to carry out infection experiments on vaccinated persons.

In early 1944, the Institute of Hygiene of the Luftwaffe, led by Rose, settled into the Pfafferode sanatorium near Mühlhausen.

[18] In Pfafferode, led by Theodor Steinmeyer, patients were murdered by food deprivation and drug overdose as part of Aktion T4.

Evidence from the Nuremberg trials suggested that doctors from the Luftwaffe had carried out human experiments in concentration camps.

According to the medical historian Udo Benzenhöfer, investigations into lower-ranking people during the trials led the Allies to find higher-ranked defendants.

[20] In his testimony between 18 and 25 April 1947, he made numerous comparisons between the tests in German concentration camps and experiments that foreign researchers had carried out on humans.

[21] He claimed to have believed that the experiments in the Buchenwald concentration camp were "carried out on criminals sentenced to death.

"[clarification needed][24] On 31 January 1951, Rose's life sentence was reduced to fifteen years in prison by the American High Commissioner John J.

Rose's detention was accompanied by various efforts for his early release by his wife and Ernst Georg Nauck, director of the Hamburger Bernhard Nocht Institute.

[26] On 29 September 1950, the Free Association of German Hygienists and Microbiologists contacted John J. McCloy with a request for Rose's release.

They argued that, given his large professional experience and previous performance, "[Rose] will give science and humanity many valuable benefits when used as a last, after more five and a half years [in] prison.

"[27] In the weekly Hamburg newspaper Die Zeit, an article was published with the heading Zu Unrecht in Landsberg.

Those who wrote the petition argued that the men who had the highest authority over the typhus experiments had not been held accountable; in fact, they were being transferred to the US government service.

Mitscherlich testified on 21 October 1960 as a witness because he had issued the document collection Science without humanity about the doctors' trial.