- guardian.co.uk, Thursday August 3 2000 02.48 BST
In a letter to the European commission and parliament this week, 12 former patients and a sister of an alleged victim of the psychiatrist Heinrich Gross have asked Brussels intervene and petitioned for a body of experts and independent judges to review the case because, they said, the Austrian judicial system had "let them down".
Dr Gross, aged 84, has been accused of experimenting on the brains of hundreds of his child patients at the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna in 1944. He continued to experiment on his specimens until recently.
Last year he was charged with being an accessory to the murder of nine handicapped children, but he was released in March after being declared unfit to stand trial due to dementia. His opponents described his escape from trial as "Pinochet-like".
The former patients, many of whom have suffered life- long ill-health as a result of the experiments carried out on them, ask the commission to press for a trial, possibly on neutral territory.
Dr Gross was declared mentally unfit to stand trial twice this year. A second examination was ordered by the state prosecutor, shortly after the indefinite postponement of his trial, after Dr Gross gave a television interview in which he was lucid and articulate.
Ernst Illing, the head of Am Spiegelgrund clinic, was executed immediately after the second world war, and another doctor was jailed for 10 years.
Dr Gross, who received protection after joining the Social Democratic party, was sentenced to two years in prison in 1950, but the verdict was overturned by the high court.
He later went on to become one of the country's leading neurologists and its second highest-earning doctor as a court psychiatrist.
The case against him was reopened three years ago when new evidence came to light, including declassified papers from the East German secret police archives.
An investigation by doctors found that nine of the 400 brains of children aged between 10 days and 14 years in Dr Gross's private collection showed traces of poison, alleged to have been administered by Dr Gross.
On Tuesday Vienna announced a plan to erect a memorial to the victims of Am Spiegelgrund. Yesterday the city's medical director said the remains of the final 417 victims of the euthanasia programme would be buried in a grave of honour at the central cemetery.
On Tuesday a Vienna court ordered the state broadcasting corporation ORF to pay Dr Gross 30,000 schillings (£1,345) for undermining the presumption of his innocence in its recent coverage.
