The Nazi Anatomists
How the corpses of Hitler's victims are still haunting modern science—and American abortion politics.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2013/11/nazi_anatomy_history_the_origins_of_conservatives_anti_abortion_claims_that.html
In 1941, Charlotte Pommer graduated
from medical school at the University of Berlin and went to work for
Hermann Stieve, head of the school’s Institute of Anatomy. The daughter
of a bookseller, Pommer had grown up in Germany’s capital city as Hitler
rose to power. But she didn’t appreciate what the Nazis meant for her
chosen field until Dec. 22, 1942. What she saw in Stieve’s laboratory
that day changed the course of her life—and led her to a singular act of
protest.
Stieve got his “material,” as he called the bodies he used for
research, from nearby Plötzensee Prison, where the courts sent
defendants for execution after sentencing them to die. In the years
following the war, Stieve would claim that he dissected the corpses of
only “dangerous criminals.” But on that day, Pommer saw in his
laboratory the bodies of political dissidents. She recognized these
people. She knew them.
Courtesy of Kelisi/Creative Commons
On one table lay Libertas Schulze-Boysen, granddaughter of a Prussian
prince. She’d been raised in the family castle, gone to finishing
school in Switzerland, and worked as the Berlin press officer for the
Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She joined the Nazi Party in 1933.
On a hunting party, she flirted with Hermann Göring, commander of the
Luftwaffe, the German air force. But in 1937 Schulze-Boysen joined the
resistance with her husband, Harro, a Luftwaffe lieutenant. They helped
form a small rebel group the Nazis called the Red Orchestra.
When Libertas started working for Hitler’s movie empire in 1941, she
gathered photos of atrocities from the front for a secret archive. Harro
was transferred to Göring’s command center and with other dissidents
started passing to the Soviets detailed information about Hitler’s plan
to invade Russia. The Gestapo decoded their radio messages in 1942 and
arrested Harro at the end of August. They came for Libertas eight days
later. Both she and her husband were sentenced to death for espionage
and treason.
Now Harro’s body lay on another table in the lab. Pommer could see
that he had been hanged and Libertas had been decapitated by guillotine.
On a third table, Pommer identified Arvid Harnack, another member of
the Red Orchestra who had been a key informant for the American Embassy
as well as the Soviets. In the 1920s, Harnack had studied economics as a
Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, where he wandered
into a literature class by mistake and met a young American teaching
assistant named Mildred Fish.
They traded English and German lessons and got married on her brother’s
farm. After the couple moved to Germany, Mildred also helped the
resistance effort by carrying messages and trailing her husband to
meetings to make sure he wasn’t being followed. They were caught in the
same Gestapo operation that ensnared the Schulze-Boysens. "Can you
remember Picnic Point, when we got engaged?” Arvid asked his wife in his
final letter to her from prison. “And before that our first serious
talk at lunch in a restaurant in State Street? That talk became my
guiding star.” At the time, Mildred was serving a six-year sentence for
her part in the Red Orchestra. Before he was executed, Arvid wrote to
his family about his joy that her life had been spared. But Hitler refused to accept the sentence, and Mildred, too, would be beheaded on his order two months later.*
“I was paralyzed,” Pommer later wrote of the sight of the bodies. “I
could hardly perform my task as an assistant to Professor Stieve, who
did his scientific study as always with the greatest diligence. I could
barely follow.”
Pommer was 28. Libertas Schulze-Boysen was 29 when she died. In her
last letter to her mother, she said she’d asked for her body to go to
her family. “Don’t fret about things that possibly could have been done,
this or the other,” she wrote. “If you can, bury me in a beautiful
place amid sunny nature.”
Pommer stopped working for Stieve—and left the field of
anatomy—because of what she saw that day in his laboratory. She went on
to help resist the Nazis herself, by hiding the child of a man who
participated in the “July Plot” to assassinate Hitler in 1944. In the
spring of 1945, just before the war’s end, Pommer was herself sent to
prison.
By that time, German anatomists had accepted the bodies of thousands of people killed by Hitler’s regime.
Beginning in 1933, all 31 anatomy departments in the territory the
Third Reich occupied—including Poland, Austria, and the Czech Republic
as well as Germany—accepted these corpses. “Charlotte Pommer is the only
one we know of who left this work because of what she learned about the
bodies,” says Sabine Hildebrandt, a historian and anatomist at Harvard
Medical School.
Unlike the research of Nazi scientists who became obsessed with
racial typing and Aryan superiority, Stieve’s work didn’t end up in the
dustbin of history. The tainted origins of this research—along with
other studies and education that capitalized on the Nazi supply of human
body parts—continue to haunt German and Austrian science, which is only
now fully grappling with the implications. Some of the facts,
amazingly, are still coming to light. And some German, Austrian, and
Polish universities have yet to face up to the likely presence of the
remains of Hitler’s victims—their cell and bone and tissue—in university
collections that still exist today.
This history matters for its own sake. It also matters for debates
that remain unresolved—about how anatomists get bodies and what to do
with research that is scientifically valuable but morally disturbing.
Then there’s this eerie relevance: Stieve’s work was the source of an
explosive controversy in the 2012 U.S. elections. It’s the basis for a
claim that Republicans in Congress threw like a piece of dynamite into
the abortion debate: The idea that women rarely or never get pregnant
from rape.
To take a step back for a moment, in one sense, the use of executed
prisoners for science isn’t surprising. For centuries, anatomists around
the globe struggled to find an adequate supply of bodies. The need was
keen—without corpses, there could be no dissection for research and
medical training. In France, the bodies of poor people who died in
hospitals were used widely in the 1700s.
An 1832 law in Britain permitted access to the unclaimed bodies of
anyone who died in a prison or workhouse. In the United States, medical
students robbed graves, often of African-Americans. ‘‘In Baltimore the
bodies of colored people exclusively are taken for dissection because
the whites do not like it, and the colored people cannot resist,’’ a
British travel writer observed in 1838. When paupers were the target of
body snatching, the practice was justified by their poverty. “Why would
those who have made war on society or have been a burden to it be
permitted to say what shall be done with their remains?” the Washington Post
asked in an 1877 editorial. “Why should they not be compelled to be of
some use after death, having failed to be of value to the world during
life?”
Courtesy of Ahle, Fischer & Co. Bau GmbH/Creative Commons
Before Hitler, German anatomists had complained to the government for
decades about the lack of supply. They had the right to claim the
bodies of the executed, but few death sentences were carried out. That
changed as the Nazi courts ordered dozens and then hundreds of civilian
executions each year, for an estimated total of 12,000 to 16,000 from
1933 to 1945. (The 6 million who were killed in concentration camps are
counted separately, as are the many millions more who were otherwise
mass-murdered.) Plötzensee and other prisons delivered to anatomists a
sudden abundance. In the mid-1930s, British anatomists described with
envy the “valuable sources of material” their German counterparts had.
The “sources of material” included many people the Nazis sentenced to
death for minor crimes, such as looting, and many convicted for
political crimes that particularly incensed the regime, ranging from
treason to the vague offense of “defeatism.” The victims included
political protesters like the Schulze-Boysens and the Harnacks, who would one day be seen as heroes.
By refusing them graves, anatomists such as Stieve humiliated the
victims’ families and disturbed the peace of the dead. A few of these
anatomists followed the Nazis further down their twisted path: They
committed or acceded to acts of mass killing, in the name of science and
from inside the halls of academe.
Stieve had a taste for the
theatrical: He liked to wear his long black academic robe to give
lectures. At the age of 35, he became the youngest doctor to chair a
German medical department. That was in 1921, soon after Stieve backed a
coup that would have knocked out the Weimar Republic in favor of
authoritarian rule. Stieve was a nationalist about language, too: He
supported a drive to replace Anglified words like April and Mai with
Germanic alternatives. Stieve welcomed Hitler for his promise to
restore the country’s pride, although he did not join the Nazi Party.
Like most academics, Stieve did not protest when the Nazis began to
expel Jews from universities in 1933.
Stieve’s main research interest, throughout his career, was the
effect of stress and other environmental conditions on the female
reproductive system. He studied whether hens would lay eggs with a caged
fox nearby, and he set up conditions of stress for newts. Stieve
studied human uteruses and ovaries when he could get them from accident
victims or from gynecologists who’d removed the organs in the course of
an operation. Before the Nazis, the access that German anatomists had to
the bodies of executed prisoners was of less use to Stieve. During the
Weimar Republic, no women received death sentences.
The Third Reich and the war changed that. At Plötzensee alone the
Nazis executed 3,000 people. Stieve agreed to take all these bodies off
the hands of the prison officials—many more than he needed for his
research. By accommodating Plötzensee, he won concessions that aided his
work on the “unprecedented number of women” now available to him, as
the German anatomist and historian Andreas Winkelmann puts it. In 1942,
when the prison shifted the time of executions to the evening, Stieve
visited the prison and got the time moved back to the morning so he
could continue to process organs and tissues on the same day. He also
got details of the women’s medical histories before they died, including
information about their menstrual cycles, their reactions to the prison
environment, and the impact of receiving a death sentence.
We know this because Stieve kept a list.
The official record of the bodies he received was lost when the
Institute of Anatomy’s registry was destroyed in 1945, either
deliberately or in a bombing. But a Protestant minister who tended to
the Plötzensee prisoners during the war helped search for and record
information about them afterward. He reported that in 1946, Stieve
handed him a typed list of names—the people whose bodies he had used. It
was located decades later in German government archives, with
handwritten additions. There were 182 names: 174 women and eight men.
Their ages ranged from 18 to 68, with most of reproductive age. Two of
the women were pregnant when they were killed. The majority were
executed for political reasons. They came from Germany, for the most
part, and seven other countries. Libertas Schulze-Boysen is No. 37 on
Stieve’s list. Mildred Harnack is No. 87.
Courtesy of National Archives, College Park, Md.
Stieve published 230 anatomical papers. With the data he gathered
pre-execution, as well as the tissues and organs he harvested and
studied, he could chart the effect of an impending execution on
ovulation. Stieve found that women living with a looming death sentence
ovulated less predictably and sometimes experienced what he called
“shock bleedings.” In a book published after the war, Stieve included an
illustration of the left ovary of a 22-year-old woman, noting that she
“had not menstruated for 157 days due to nervous agitation.”
Stieve drew two conclusions that continue to be cited (for the most
part, uncritically). He figured out that the rhythm method doesn’t
effectively prevent pregnancy. (He got the physiological details wrong
but the conclusion right.) And he discovered that chronic
stress—awaiting execution—affects the female reproductive system.
In August 2012, then–Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri said
that women can prevent themselves from getting pregnant after a
“legitimate rape.” Following an uproar, Akin lost his bid for a Senate
seat.* Still, a few other Republicans have
followed along, arguing that rape rarely results in pregnancy, to
explain why they oppose an exception for rape victims in laws that
restrict access to abortion. Whether they know it or not, Stieve’s work
is the source for their discredited claim. The American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists warned that saying rape victims rarely
get pregnant was “medically inaccurate, offensive, and dangerous.” But
the anti-abortion doctor Jack Willke, former head of the National Right
to Life Committee, insisted otherwise. "This goes back 30 and 40 years,”
he told the Los Angeles Times in the midst of the Akin furor.
“When a woman is assaulted and raped, there's a tremendous amount of
emotional upset within her body." Willke has written that "one of the
most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant” is
“physical trauma."
Where did he get this idea? In 1972, another anti-abortion doctor, Fred Mecklenburg, wrote an essay in a book financed by the group Americans United for Life in which he asserted that women rarely get pregnant from rape. Mecklenburg said that:
The Nazis tested the hypothesis that stress inhibits ovulation by selecting women who were about to ovulate and sending them to the gas chambers, only to bring them back after their realistic mock killing, to see what effects this had on their ovulatory pattern. An extremely high percentage of these women did not ovulate.
Mecklenburg got his facts wrong. Plötzensee Prison wasn’t the gas
chamber. And the prolonged trauma of anticipating execution isn’t the
same as the shock of rape. But when Hildebrandt, the Harvard historian
and anatomist, read about Mecklenburg’s rationale after I wrote about it for the New York Times Magazine and Slate, she recognized the handiwork of Stieve.
Mecklenburg had quoted a presentation on a “Nazi experiment” by another
obstetrician, from Georgetown University, at a 1967 Washington, D.C.,
conference on abortion. That doctor had to be talking about Stieve,
Hildebrandt says, since “there is no other ‘Nazi experiment’ like this.”
It was another link in the chain from Stieve to Mecklenburg to Willke
to today’s anti-abortion Republicans.
Hildebrandt wrote to me about Stieve, and that’s how I learned about
her work. She is 55 and was born in Germany; her parents were children
during the Third Reich. “It was always around us,” she said. “I had no
Jewish neighbors. I went to an elementary school named after a member of
the German resistance.”
Hildebrandt came to live in the United States in 2002. Her interest
in the history of anatomy is recent. “In many ways it was helpful for me
to formulate my first ideas all by myself, with physical distance from
Germany,” she said. “I didn’t have to worry about treading on anyone’s
toes. I’m not a brave person.”
Courtesy of Privatbesitz/Creative Commons
By contrast, Hildebrandt says that Stieve “never doubted himself.”
She thinks he refused to see that the ethics of how he procured bodies
shifted under the Nazis. “He knew better, but he didn’t want to realize
it, because this was a great opportunity for him,” she says. “He really
could do the work that he always wanted to do.”
When I asked to learn more about Stieve, Hildebrandt sent me to
Winkelmann, the German doctor and lecturer in anatomy at Charité, the
major university hospital in Berlin. Born in 1963, Winkelmann is also of
the “grandchildren generation,” as he put it when we spoke by phone. I
asked him how he got interested in Stieve, and he said, “Stieve was a Berlin anatomist like me. He is part of my history. He worked in the same building that we work in today.”
Winkelmann has helped make the ethical case against Stieve. “His
research cannot be validated without justifying, at least to some
extent, the entire Nazi justice system, which was instead one of
injustice,” he argued in a 2009 article, co-written with Udo Schagen, a medical historian at Charité.
Stieve abetted the Nazis with his willingness to accept far more bodies
than he needed for research, and he kept his supply line quiet. And
Winkelmann pointed out that Stieve’s “use of the terror of death row as a
sober scientific variable is undoubtedly callous.”
But Winkelmann has also pleaded for a kind of mercy for Stieve—or at
least for nuance. “People tend to forget that it was only in the 1950s
and ’60s that body donation programs were invented,” he said. “Stieve
thought using the bodies of executed prisoners was something normal to
do. He didn’t do research to prove some people were subhuman, as some
doctors did. I don’t think that vindicates what he did, but you could
say, at least he didn’t do that.”
Winkelmann has also pushed back against two allegations that turn
Stieve into a monster. William Seidelman, a University of Toronto
medical professor who has written extensively on medicine in the Third
Reich, thinks Stieve allowed SS officers to rape women on his list
before they were executed, so he could study the migration of sperm.
Seidelman’s allegation is based on a 1997 letter from a former student
of Stieve. Winkelmann’s co-author, Schagen, spoke to the former student,
and they think he was repeating a rumor or misinterpreting Stieve’s
remarks about his work. None of Stieve’s papers discuss sperm migration.
The former student has since died, and Seidelman stands by his
accusation. Winkelmann calls it “far-fetched.” But he adds, “I can
understand how Seidelman would think it’s true, because whenever you
look into Nazi medicine, you find that the very worst things—they have
happened.”
Case in point: There is a rumor that Stieve’s lab made soap from the
remains of the victims. Winkelmann has refuted that one, too. “But
another anatomist named Spanner did make bodies into soap,” he told me.
Rudolf Spanner was director of the Danzig Anatomical Institute. He didn’t go into mass production—“Professor Spanner’s Soap Factory” is a myth.
But the remains of 147 unidentified people were found in Spanner’s
institute after the war, and “during several interrogations Spanner
conceded the production of small amounts of soap for anatomical purposes
but was not prosecuted,” Hildebrandt writes.
After the war, Stieve falsely insisted that he hadn’t conducted
research with the bodies of political prisoners. The anatomist, he
argued, “only tries to retrieve results from those incidents that belong
to the saddest experiences known in the history of mankind.” He
continued to see himself as a man of science. “In no way do I need to be
ashamed of the fact that I was able to reveal new data from the bodies
of the executed, facts that were unknown before and are now recognized
by the whole world.”
Like almost every other anatomist of his time, Stieve was never
professionally penalized or prosecuted for conducting research on the
corpses of murdered prisoners. He continued to direct his university’s
Institute of Anatomy until his death from a stroke in 1952. Stieve’s
obituaries didn’t describe his negotiations with Plötzensee Prison over
the timing of executions to ensure the daily delivery of fresh bodies.
They lauded him as a highly respected scientist who loved hunting and
mountaineering.
Winkelmann told me a strange story that supports his interpretation
of Stieve as blinded by science, not ideology. In 1944, Stieve dissected
one of his own friends. Walter Arndt was a doctor and zoologist who
converted to Judaism in 1931. He was executed after being convicted for
criticizing the Nazis. “Stieve took out his heart and kept it,”
Winkelmann told me.
“Stieve wanted to donate his own body to science when he died,” he
continued. “But his wife objected. So in the end, he was buried.”
With the war’s end came an early
chance for investigation. The occupying military governments operating
after the war tried to find the bodies of political dissidents and
foreign nationals. And families looking for their loved ones started
visiting Germany’s anatomical institutes. The procurement of bodies had
been an open secret. “Thus, anatomists were asked about the identity and
fate of the bodies remaining in their institutes’ storage spaces,”
Hildebrandt writes.
Often, however, identification was out of reach—documents had been
lost, dissected bodies rendered unrecognizable. At the Nuremberg trials,
23 doctors faced charges.
But those few charged with crimes were the physicians at the Nazi
forefront: the ones who experimented on live subjects in the
concentration camps, not the much larger number of academics who stayed
in the universities. “Many people in the medical profession who played
leading roles during the Third Reich retained power after the
war—especially in the academy,” Seidelman told me. “They were able to
keep the lid on things.”
Courtesy of the Museum of Natural History in Vienna
Half of Germany’s doctors had joined the Nazi Party. Despite the
denazification that followed the war, almost all of them continued
practicing. “People didn’t want to know,” said Arthur Caplan, a New York
University bioethicist and author of When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust.
“Who would be the doctors if not the doctors from before the war? Who
else would staff the universities? The German establishment wasn’t
looking to weed out all the doctors who’d done bad things.”
So it was expedient when an influential German physician, asked to
study the matter, declared at a 1948 national meeting that among the
country’s 90,000 doctors, only 300 to 400 had been involved in Nazi
crimes. Other doctors quickly adopted this assessment, “as it
conveniently allowed them to declare that the National Socialist medical
atrocities were committed by only a few perverted psychopaths,”
Hildebrandt writes.
Caplan emphasizes that this is a trap. He argues for the importance
of seeing the doctors who took advantage of Nazi immorality to benefit
their research not as “kooks,” but instead as typical and conventional
for their time and place. “One of the great challenges in all of ethics
is, how do mainstream, legitimate people do evil things?” he said. “It’s
not like we can necessarily stop it. But to understand how it
happened—that is our best shot.”
The more perspective gained, perhaps, the more this kind of
far-reaching inquiry becomes possible. In the years after the war,
though, when the horrors of the camps were fresh, punishing the worst of
the worst doctors took precedence. The single German anatomist who went
to prison was one of them.
Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
Johann Paul Kremer
was an SS officer as well as an anatomist at the University of Münster.
There he had conducted animal experiments on hunger. Detailed to
Auschwitz, he continued his research on humans. He would observe
prisoners, he said later, “and when one of them interested me because of
a highly advanced state of starvation, I commanded the orderly to
reserve that patient for me, and inform me of when that patient would be
killed with the help of an injection.” Kremer often witnessed the
killings. He collected tissue and sent it back to Münster.
In another facet of his job, Kremer selected 10,717 prisoners for death
on the train ramp in Auschwitz. For that, he was sentenced to death in
Poland in 1948. He served 10 years before he was released and returned
to Münster.
Other anatomists ensconced in the academy, meanwhile, got away with
terrible crimes even when the Allies had direct knowledge of them. In
June 1945, a Boston neurologist named Leo Alexander, a consultant for
the United States secretary of war, visited Julius Hallervorden, a
doctor and member of the Nazi Party who in 1938 became head of the
neuropathology department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research
(one of the world’s pre-eminent psychiatric research centers, with a
building financed in the 1920s by the Rockefeller Foundation).
Hallervorden showed Alexander a collection of 110,000 brain samples from
2,800 people. Hallervorden said that with the director of his
institute, Hugo Spatz, he had harvested the brains of victims of the T-4
killings—the Nazi program to gas psychiatric patients at six
“euthanasia” centers in Germany and Austria. “Hallervorden was present
at the time of the killings and removed brains from the murdered
victims,” Seidelman writes.
Alexander reported what he learned, but no one took action against
Hallervorden and Spatz. They were allowed to help relocate the Kaiser
Wilhelm institute to Frankfurt, Germany, where it was renamed the Max
Planck Institute for Brain Research. They continued to be recognized for
their signature scientific accomplishment: In 1922, Hallervorden and
Spatz had discovered a degenerative brain disease that was named after them.
The two neuropathologists finished their careers and died in the
1960s. In 1982, Hallervorden was honored by a German university; the
citation called him “the grand old man of German and international
neuropathology.”
Now, because of Hallervorden and Spatz’s later methods, the disease
they discovered is called something else. That is the right decision,
NYU’s Caplan says. While he does not think science has to throw out
Hallervorden and Spatz’s findings, he also has rules for dealing with
tainted data. “If you use it, you had better be sure you don’t have any
choice,” he said. “The purpose should be life-saving or very, very
important. And you have to admit you are using it, but without giving
credit to the person who gave you the tainted experiments. You say,
‘This came from a prominent German scientist under the Nazis.’ But you
don’t recognize them by name.” That is fitting. But it took a long time
to get there.
By the 1980s, the doctors and
scientists of the World War II generation no longer ran Germany’s
medical schools and anatomical institutes. They’d passed the baton to
their pupils. But this second generation was hardly more eager to dig
into the past. When German medical students and a few researchers,
Seidelman among them, started asking questions about the conduct of
anatomists under Hitler—and the status of the slides and tissue samples
they’d left behind as teaching materials—their queries mostly ran into a
wall of denial. The professors rebuked the new generation of students
for demanding more information, scolding them for being Nestbeschmutzer, for “dirtying the nest.”
The wall of denial began to crack, though, when a German historian
and journalist, Götz Aly, persisted in applying for access to the Max
Planck Institute’s specimen collection. Once he got inside, Aly
identified some of the T-4 euthanasia victims and started pushing for
the burial of the specimens. It was a novel idea.
The director of the Max Planck Institute resisted, contesting Aly’s
claims. But Aly had solid evidence. In small groups, German medical
students began taking up the same cause. At the University of
Heidelberg, where Gerrit Hohendorf (now a professor at the Technical
University of Munich) was a student, “They didn’t want an independent
inquiry or students to deal with these things,” he told me. “We
organized a student lecture series on our own with no support by the
medical faculty or teachers of medicine. We heard something about
children being euthanized at the Heidelberg psychiatric hospital, so we
went into the hospital and asked the professors.”
The new wave of attention crested at the University of Tübingen in
1989, when student demand for an inquiry sparked national press
attention. TV and print stories spotlighted the continuing use of
Nazi-era specimens for research and teaching. Demonstrators protested
outside the German Embassy in Israel, and the Israeli minister of
religion demanded that Chancellor Helmut Kohl return the remains of all
Nazi victims for proper burial. Aly added fuel to the fire with an
article quoting Hallervorden saying “the more the better” about the
brains he’d acquired. “I have not heard of one German anatomist who
after the war repudiated Nazi practices and buried his ill-gotten
collection,” Aly wrote.
Two important books appeared—Doctors Under Hitler, by York University historian Michael Kater, and Oxford Brookes historian Paul Weindling’s volume on health, race, and German politics.
Caplan held the first conference on medicine and science during the
Nazi era in Minnesota. A proposal to boycott German data collected under
Hitler was a major topic. The University of Tübingen issued a public
apology and set up a commission to investigate that served as a model
for other schools. And the Max Planck Society admitted that its
collection contained the tissue of euthanasia victims—including 700
children.
The Max Planck Society buried these remains in a May 1990 memorial
service. It was the demand Aly had been making. But it wasn’t enough, in
the view of Seidelman and Caplan, who’d begun to play a leading activist role among Western researchers.
Seidelman protested the disposal of the human specimens in a mass
grave, without uncovering “who these people were, how they died,” and
how their remains had been used for almost half a century. He and Caplan
called for an international commemoration and bioethical inquiry. It
didn’t happen. “They weren’t ready,” Seidelman says.
In 1992, the German government ordered all state universities to
investigate their anatomical collections. Some followed Tübingen. Others
followed the Max Planck example of mass disposal. “The victims’ bodies
were seen as ‘polluting’ German universities,” Weindling, the British
historian, writes. And some universities brushed off the government’s
order or claimed they couldn’t comply because their buildings had been
bombed during the war.
The effort to carry out a full national inquiry foundered at a time of momentous distraction: The Berlin Wall fell
in November 1989, and the Soviet Union soon collapsed. Amid the
upheaval, indifference won out. As one anatomy professor said two
decades later, at the age of 96, when he was interviewed
about the use of the bodies of the executed at his Vienna institute:
“Nobody cared, and why should we have cared?” A 77-year-old colleague
echoed him: “Nobody cared.”
Pernkopf atlas/Urban & Schwarzenberg. Scans via Codex99.
The two men were talking about a controversy that flared up at their
own institute. It concerned a work of lasting scientific importance, one
that occupies its own niche and is used by doctors and researchers
around the world: the Pernkopf atlas.
Eduard Pernkopf toiled over his four-volume atlas in Vienna for more
than 20 years beginning in 1933. “He put in 18-hour days dissecting
human bodies and supervising a team of artists who painted what he
revealed in intricate detail,” Heather Pringle explains in Science. The New England Journal of Medicine
called the atlas “an outstanding book of great value” in 1990. “If
you’re a serious anatomist like I am, you still look at the thing,
because it has more detail than anything else,” Hildebrandt says. “And
some of the images pop up in later anatomy books.”
Pernkopf was a Nazi. As dean of the medical school at the University
of Vienna, he expelled Jews from the faculty faster than any university
official in the Third Reich. Nazi insignia appear in his atlas, woven
into the signatures of the artists. A Columbia professor of dentistry,
Howard Israel, started asking about the insignia in 1994. “His wife gave
him the atlas as a gift when he was in dental school,” Seidelman says.
“He used it every day.”
Seidelman brought Israel’s concerns to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
museum in Jerusalem. One of the men portrayed in the atlas had a shaved
head—was he a Jewish concentration camp victim? Letters started flying
back and forth between Yad Vashem and Vienna. Austrian officials at
first denied that any illustrations in the atlas came from the Nazi era.
The hair of all cadavers was shaved at the institute, they said.
“We pointed out why they were wrong,” Seidelman says. At a 1999
University of Vienna symposium called Medicine Under Scrutiny, the
rector of the university announced a committee of investigation. “He
said he’d turned to the faculty of medicine, and he realized they’d
lied,” recalls Seidelman, who also spoke at the symposium. “For him to
stand up in public and say that—it was risky. It was a big deal.”
The investigating committee documented the delivery of 1,377 bodies
to the university from the execution chambers of the regional Vienna
court. The images in the Pernkopf atlas could not be traced to
individual victims, but the historians I talked to think there is a
great likelihood that the drawings depict people executed by the Nazis.
And there was more: a link between university scientists and Heinrich Gross, the doctor who headed the infants’ ward of Spiegelgrund,
the children’s wing of the Vienna Psychiatric Hospital, during the war.
Gross did painful experiments on living children there, some of whom
died as a result. One child who survived said the children called Gross
“the Scythe”; another remembered that his arrival on the ward “was like a
cold wind coming.” All told, 772 children were killed at Spiegelgrund, about half of them from Gross’ ward. In 1948, he was charged with murder. But the penal code he was prosecuted under did not define murder to include disabled people
because they were “not capable of reasoning.” He was found guilty only
of manslaughter, and when Gross appealed and won, the prosecutor chose
not to retry him.
Courtesy of Haeferl/Creative Commons
Gross returned to Spiegelgrund (it had been renamed) and continued
his research using brain specimens from the children who had been killed
there. He published 35 papers, some written with University of Vienna
faculty. He also testified as a psychiatric expert in thousands of cases
in the Austrian court. In 1975, he was awarded the Austrian Cross of
Honor for Science and Art.
As the University of Vienna committee brought renewed attention to
this history, evidence against Gross also surfaced in the files of the
Stasi, the East German secret police. In 1999, he was indicted for
murder again. But Gross’ lawyers said he had Alzheimer’s and could not
understand the proceedings against him. The court accepted this defense.
But Seidelman does not believe it. “Do you know what Gross did?” he
asked. “He smiled and went off to a coffee shop with his friends and
family to celebrate.”
Gross lived for six more years, until the age of 90.
In 2002, the wartime human specimens at the University of Vienna were
buried in the city’s Jewish cemetery, and the brains of the Spiegelgrund
children were placed in the main graveyard. The Austrian Cross was
stripped from Gross the following year.
The long-buried history of Nazi-era
anatomy is surfacing now because of a burst of investigation by the
third postwar generation. These scholars also want to memorialize the
victims. “I never expected to see this reckoning in my lifetime,”
Seidelman told me. Still, it is “just a beginning,” Hildebrandt wrote last year with Christoph Redies, director of the anatomy department at Germany’s Jena University and another leader in the new history, following the first public symposium on anatomy during the Third Reich, held by Germany’s prestigious international anatomical society, Anatomische Gesellschaft, founded in 1886.
Hildebrandt has tracked down evidence showing that after World War
II, during the Allied occupation, the Allies questioned anatomists at 11
of the 31 anatomical institutes at universities in Germany, Austria,
Poland, and the rest of the territory occupied by the Third Reich. Since
1992, when the German government ordered the universities to
investigate their anatomical collections and their wartime histories,
only 14 of the 31 universities have done full-fledged and thorough
examinations. The other 17 conducted preliminary investigations or none
at all. This means they still have a giant Henrietta Lacks problem. For
example, at Jena, which opened its collections to outside inspection in
2005, more than a dozen paraffin blocks with histological specimens,
taken from four people executed under Hitler, have been found in the past three years. It’s impossible to say what lies in the collections of the schools that have not undertaken this kind of inquiry.
In Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 best-seller about Lacks,
whose cervical cancer produced a fast-growing cell line that became the
basis for decades of scientific advances, the author raises deep
ethical questions about the use of Lacks’ cells: After all, she and her
family never consented to any of the research done with her tissue.
Courtesy of I.M. Bondarenko Archive/Creative Commons
Informed consent is the moral difference between the fate of the
bodies of Libertas and Harro Schulze-Boysen and of voluntary donors.
Anatomists and medical students do need cadavers. Science does need
bones and tissue. The utilitarian case for using the bodies of the
executed or people who die in public institutions and whose corpses go
unclaimed is that the scientific benefit is greater than the moral harm.
And the deceased will never know.
When informed consent is not the rule, the people whose bodies and
tissues go to medicine have been overwhelmingly the poor and the
marginalized. In an article in Clinical Anatomy
published last year, bioethicist Gareth Jones and anatomist Maja
Whitaker, both from New Zealand, called for an international standard of
informed consent. “Anatomists should cease using unclaimed bodies,”
they write.
That would change the ongoing practice in some African countries and
also in Bangladesh, India, and Brazil, Jones and Whitaker say, where
bequests are rare or nonexistent. It would also require the law to
change in parts of the United States. “Maryland, Pennsylvania, North
Carolina, Michigan, and Texas, automatically pass on unclaimed bodies to
state anatomy boards,” the authors write. There are concerns, too,
about the use of bodies of the executed in China.
In an email, Jones told me he sees the state laws that still allow
for the use of unclaimed bodies as “a historic hangover.” It’s time for
these statutes to go. Countries without a tradition of body donation
pose a greater dilemma, but Jones thinks cadavers could be sent from
places where there is a good supply to those where there is not. “We
have not seriously begun to consider this,” he wrote. “Bodies are
bequeathed where there are good relations between those requiring bodies
(anatomy departments) and those able to provide the bodies (ordinary
people in the community). This requires mutual trust and understanding,
something that is built up over many years. In my estimation this side
of bequeathing has been seriously overlooked and downplayed by
anatomists.” The same can apply to organ donation.
As Jones and Whitaker write, “There will always be tension between
obtaining a satisfactory range of acceptable human material both for
teaching and research, and abiding by demanding ethical standards.” The
field of anatomy has long failed to get the balance right. That helps
explain what went so wrong among the anatomists of Nazi Germany. “It is
deeply unfortunate that they belonged to a discipline that at that time
gave little thought to ethics (a criticism that applied for many years
after the 1940s in any country),” Jones wrote to me. “Consequently they
were operating in an ethos that allowed for appallingly unethical
behavior. This in no way justifies any of their practices, but if
anatomy as a discipline had been radically different, at least some of
the horrors of this corner of Nazi atrocities may not have taken place.”
Courtesy of Hans-Joachim Lang
In 2001, Hubert Markl, president of the Max Planck Society, gave a landmark speech
about the wartime culpability of the society’s doctors and scientists.
Markl acknowledged that Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor who
selected people for life or death at Auschwitz, did his perverse research on twins
with his mentor, an anthropologist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the
precursor to the Max Planck Society. In attendance were a few survivors
of Mengele’s experiments. Markl apologized to them personally. “It is a
painful way to meet the past when one personally stands face to face
with the victims of these crimes,” he said. “I beg you, the surviving
victims, from the bottom of my heart to forgive those who, no matter
what their reasons, failed to ask you themselves.”
This is the latest stage of reckoning: Trying to attend to the
victims and to their memory. The most startling breakthrough comes from
German journalist and Tübingen culture professor Hans-Joachim Lang. He
has identified all of the Jews selected for gassing by August Hirt, director of the anatomical institute in Strasbourg who had a singularly ghoulish plan for their remains.
Hirt was interested in adding to a collection of skulls at the
University of Strasbourg. “Although extensive skulls collections existed
from nearly all races and peoples,” the Jews were missing, he wrote to
the director of an SS research group established to prove Aryan
superiority. “From the Jewish-Bolshevik commissars, who embody a
disgusting, but characteristic type of subhuman, we have the opportunity
to acquire a tangible scientific document by securing their skulls.”
Hirt was essentially competing with the Natural History Museum in
Vienna, which procured Jewish skulls from another anatomist, Hermann
Voss. In consultation with the staff of Heinrich Himmler, Hirt received
permission to go ahead. Two staff members were sent to Auschwitz to
separate out a group of Jews, 30 women and 79 men. They were examined
according to the standards for racial typing of the time: Their skin,
hair, and eye color were noted and coded using special tables, and the
shapes of their heads, foreheads, noses, mouths, and ears measured.
Fifty-seven of the men and 29 of the women were chosen. They were gassed
in a special chamber and their bodies delivered to Hirt at his
anatomical institute.
Hirt stored the bodies in the basement. In the end, he didn’t work on
them—he lacked the equipment during the course of the war. At the war’s
end, Himmler ordered the bodies destroyed. But in January 1945, after
the liberation of Strasbourg, the London Daily Mail reported
their discovery in the anatomical institute. Accused as a fanatic, Hirt
pointed out that bodies could be found in every anatomical institute.
The corpses, he wrote, “are the usual cadavers for dissection training.”
Courtesy of Hans-Joachim Lang
Hirt went into hiding in April of that year and committed suicide two
months later. It turned out that Himmler’s order had been partially
followed: The heads of 70 of the bodies had been removed and cremated.
The French military, which controlled Strasbourg, gave up trying to
identify them and buried the bodies in the local Jewish cemetery in a
mass grave.
But the French left behind documents showing that Hirt’s lab workers
had forgotten to remove the concentration camp numbers on some of the
bodies. And one of those workers revealed at the Nuremberg doctors’
trials that he had written the numbers down without knowing what they
were. He kept the piece of paper.
After a long search, Lang found a copy of it in the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum. He translated the numbers back into names. He found
pictures of a few of the victims. He learned their cities of origin. One
man, Frank Sachnowitz, came from Norway.
His brother, who survived Auschwitz, wrote in a memoir that his father
had planted an apple tree—a tree of life—for himself, his wife, and each
of their eight children in the family garden. Before the war.
In 2005, a memorial stone with the names of the victims was added to their grave. Lang created a website about them. “Remembrance of their fates … does not, as is often said, return dignity to the victims,” he wrote this year in an article in Annals of Anatomy.
“It is not the victims who lost their dignity, but rather those who had
persecuted them. The perpetrators should not be allowed to have the
final word.”
Courtesy of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Center Osnabrück
Hildebrandt also sees this as her mission: “to turn numbers back into names,” as she puts it. She has publicized Stieve’s list, giving the BBC photographs and details of some of the women and helping Slate with this piece. She opens one of her articles with a 1946 quote:
The difficulty is, you see, that our imaginations cannot count ... And if I say one died—a man I have made you know and understand ... then perhaps I have told you something that you should know about the Nazis.
The words come from a man who knew the power of narrative: Erich Maria Remarque. He wrote All Quiet on the Western Front,
the classic novel about World War I. Remarque served in a World War I
battle with Hitler. But the Nazis banned and burned his book. He left
Germany for Switzerland in the 1930s. His sister, Elfriede Scholz,
remained in the country with her husband and two children. She was
found guilty of “undermining morale” in 1943 for saying she thought the
war was lost. "Your brother is unfortunately beyond our reach—you,
however, will not escape us,” the judge said when he gave Scholz a death
sentence. Like Libertas Schulze-Boysen and Mildred Harnack, she was
executed in Plötzensee Prison, and her body was given to Stieve.
Hildebrandt has counted about 2,000 execution victims of Nazi-era
anatomy who have been individually identified. She points out that
still, “existing memorials rarely name individuals.” Weindling has been
trying to identify the victims of all Nazi-era medical experiments,
including those from the T-4 euthanasia killings. He has been blocked by
the rules for German archives, which dictate that the names may not be
released for privacy reasons because they were once psychiatric
patients.
Courtesy of the German Resistance Memorial Center*
And yet, so many years have passed—is privacy really the reigning
concern? As I wrote this piece and lived with its horrors, the
photographs of the women and men at its center held me close. They are
young. They are full of life. They are wearing the hats and clothing of
my grandparents’ generation. I learn little from the faces of the
anatomists. But I could look forever at Libertas and Harro
Schulze-Boysen, and Arvid and Mildred Harnack, and Frank Sachnowitz.
I could not find a photograph of Charlotte Pommer. She never married
or had children. She died in a retirement home near Munich in 2004 and
donated her body to anatomy.
Correction, Nov. 6, 2013: This article
originally misstated the date of Mildred Harnack's death. She was
executed two months after her husband, not 15 months. (Return.)
This article also stated that former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin lost a bid
for re-election to his House seat. He lost a bid for the Senate. (Return.)
Correction, Nov. 7, 2013: Due to a production
error, this article misidentified the source of a photo of Arvid and
Mildred Harnack. It is from the German Resistance Memorial Center.
Update, Nov. 7, 2013: This article has
been updated to clarify that in addition to the 6 million people who
were killed in concentration camps, most of them Jews, many millions
more who were murdered by the Nazis, including Soviet prisoners of war,
Roma, and ethnic Poles and Slavs, were excluded from the number of
civilian executions from 1933 to 1945.
Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor and the Truman Capote Fellow at Yale Law School. She is the author of Sticks and Stones.
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