Western pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on people in East Germany before releasing their products in the west, according to research by the Institute of Medical History and Ethics in Berlin.
The investigation revealed that at least 900 such medical experiments took place in the German Democratic Republic between 1961 and 1989.
The tests were permitted by the communist government in charge at the time which received hard currency in exchange.
"The GDR authorities gave their country’s health system over to Western companies and a research laboratory, in order to finance their highly indebted planned economy,” the researchers said.
Their report was highly critical of the participating Western companies for taking advantage of the fact that East Germany was a dictatorship.
"The decisive competitive advantage for the Western companies was not the low costs, but the considerable time and efficiency bonus which the dictatorial GDR regime could offer," the report found.
Some of the biggest companies were involved, including Bayer, Pfizer and Roche. In all 75 firms from 16 countries were involved, including some in West Germany, Switzerland, France, the US and the UK.
The actual tests, however, appear to have been done according to the international standards of the time.
“We could not find evidence of systematic breaches [of international ethical codes] in the studies carried out in the GDR,” research leader Volker Hess said.
It could not be learned if the participants took part knowingly. “There is only fragmentary information about how the tests were explained from interviews between patients and doctors,” Hess said.
