Dr. Sabine Hildebrandt - Anatomy in "Nazi" Germany: Politics, Science, and Ethics

Neb Hildebrand. She's um an assistant professor of pediatrics in the division of General Pediatrics, the Department of Medicine here at Boston Children's Hospital and a lecturer in global health and social medicine at HMS. After her medical studies in uh at the University of Marburg in Germany, and a professional start in experimental rheumatology, she became an anatomical educator. Uh, in this capacity, she worked at the University of Michigan Medical School, uh, from 2002 to 2013, and since that time, she's been here at Harvard. Uh, Her research interests include the history of ethics, uh, history and ethics of anatomy, specifically the history of anatomy in National Socialist Germany, a field in which she's an internationally recognized expert. One focus of her work is the restoration of biographies of victims of the Holocaust. Her educational approach integrates anatomy, medical history, and medical ethics, and she teaches the these topics here at uh Harvard Medical School and Harvard College. Uh, her book, her recent book entitled The Anatomy of Murder, Ethical and Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich was just published in 2016 and is the first systematic study of anatomy during National Socialism. I'm very glad she could come speak to us today. I'm sure she'll provide a very, uh, truly fascinating glimpse into this subset of medical history. Thank you, Doctor Hildebrand. Thank you, Laura, for this introduction and for the opportunity to speak here about uh today about anatomy and National Socialist Germany that is in Nazi Germany. Sorry, I will talk about the politics and science and ethics involved in this history. So we will start with the story of Libertas and Hardel Schulzer Boys and you see them here. In the year 1938, at the time, they had been married for two years. Uh, Libertas was a publicist in the German movie industry based in Berlin, and Hadel was an officer in the aviation ministry of the Reichs government in Berlin. Both of them were opposed to Hitler's regime and his party and very soon uh joined a group of political dissidents that later became known as the Red Orchestra. The group was discovered in August of 1942 and they were all imprisoned. Libertas and Havel were put on trial on the 19th of December 1942, and on that day, they received a death sentence. Like all prisoners on death row, Libertas was allowed to write a letter of farewell to her mother, and uh she wrote this on the day of her execution, the 22nd of December 1942. In this letter, she voiced very clear ideas of what should happen to her body after her death. She wrote, as a last wish, I have asked that my material substance be left to you. If possible, bury me in a beautiful place amidst sunny nature. However, Liberta's wishes were not heeded. Instead, the following happened, and we know this from the report of another young woman who was a physician and an aspiring anatomist and worked as an assistant to Professor Hermann Steel, the chair of anatomy in Berlin. So Charlotte wrote, on 22nd of December 1942, 11 men and 5 women were decapitated. 15 minutes later, they were laid out on the dissection tables in the Anatomical Institute. She that is Liberta's lay on the 1st table. On the 3rd table, the big lifeless body of her husband huddle. I felt paralyzed and could hardly assist Professor Siebu who, as always, carried out his scientific exploration with great care and uncommon diligence. After the impressions of that night, I resigned from my position. Steber, however, remained as chair of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Berlin until his death in 1952. This was possible because he had not joined the Nazi Party, the NSDAP. However, we know from his publications that he used hundreds of bodies of the executed for his research. These were persons who were executed after court trials. Until 1920, Steve had done animal research on the influence of the nervous system and stress on the male and female reproductive system, an innovative scientific approach at the time. And in the 1920s, he realized that he could interpret the situation of death row inmates as a reflection of his animal research in the human system. So he performed a research on the bodies of executed men in the 1920s. Women were not executed in the Weimar Republic at the time. And uh when from 1935 on, the Nazis started also executing women, he performed research on the effect of severe psychological trauma on menstruation patterns and the morphology of the reproductive organs of these women. As far as we know, he had no access to these prisoners before their deaths. He received the clinical data from the prison wardens and prison physicians. Now, how can we explain the fate of Liberta Schulze Boysen and the research by anatomists such as Hermann Steer? We have to look at the various facets of anatomy during the so-called Third Reich. You see here a charcoal drawing by the medical illustrator Leopold Metzenbauer, who in Vienna, 1943, uh recorded here the arrival of coffins with bodies of the executed at the Vienna Institute. So we have to look at the interaction between anatomists and politics. We have to look at the changes of body procurement after 1933 and how these changes affected anatomical education and anatomical science at the time. And here, we will see very clear stages of ethical transgression. And then we will have to look at the continuities, consequences, and legacies of this history for the present. So starting with the relationship between anatomists and politics, we have to realize that as soon as the National Socialists, the Nazis came into power in January 1933, 1 of their first goals was the centralization of the leadership of German universities in the hands of the Vice Ministry of Education in Berlin. This leadership had formerly lain in the hands of the individual German states and was now centralized. And this ministry was also responsible for the anatomical institutes, specifically in research funding, recruitment of faculty, the professional society, the Anatomische Gellschaft, and body procurement. In terms of the latter, it shared this one's responsibility with the Ministry of Justice when it was about prisoners and executed persons. The Nazi regime also sought an alignment of all science with the Nazi doctrine and its utilization for war purposes. Within 3 months, laws were on the book that led to the dismissal of all so-called non-Aryan and politically opposed faculty. These were 20% of all those academics employed in German universities in 1933. When we look specifically at the anatomists, we have currently political data for 176 of 233 German anatomists, and of these 176, 54 saw, saw their careers disrupted, uh, for so-called racial or political reasons whereby this disruption could mean anything from having to change jobs to forced migration to incarceration and being murdered in the concentration camps. Of the remaining 122 anatomists, 99 joined the Nazi Party. 42 joined the SA. These were the stormtroopers or brown shirts, and 13 joined the SS the Nazi elite troupe. Only 10 anatomists had no political affiliation with the Nazis. And the anatomists had decisive roles in the state-supporting science of racial hygiene, which was the German version of the internationally leading science of eugenics at the time. Uh, among these anatomists leading was Eugen Fischer, the chairman of anatomy in Freiburg until 1927. At that time, he became the founding director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were the predecessors of what nowadays is called the Max Planck Institute in Germany that you may be familiar with. Um, he was also the rector of, uh, the University of Berlin from 1933 to 1934. As a physical anthropologist, anatomists contributed to the scientific legitimation of the Nazi policies through the ideas of racial hygiene. They served as leaders in research on racial hygiene and racial theory. They Served as teachers of racial hygiene and they served as judges in genetic health high courts that decided over sterilization. This, this was forced sterilization and ultimately euthanasia, so, uh, the so-called euthanasia program. Ideas from racial hygiene supported the victimization of certain parts of the German population whose bodies were then used within the anatomical body procurement. Another leading Nazi uh among the anatomists was the Austrian Eduard Perkopf. In 1933, he was made chair of the anatomy department at Vienna University in the same year, he joined the Nazi Party and the stormtroopers. These formations were at that time still illegal in Austria. Austria was annexed in 1938 at the so-called Anschluss into uh Nazi Germany and that at that time, Perkoff was made Dean of the Vienna Medical School. In this capacity, he oversaw the dismissal of 53% of the faculty for so-called racial or political reasons. In 1943, he was also made president of Vienna University. And after 1945, he was one of the few anatomists who permanently lost their positions in German academia. Nevertheless, he became very well known because he authored an atlas that some of you may be familiar with, the so-called Topographical Anatomy of Man, that he published in four volumes between 1937 to 1960, and the first American edition came out in 19. 63. This atlas was uh very popular, especially among surgeons, especially among head and neck surgeons, because of the great detail and the new printing technique that enabled such brilliant images as the one you see here of the head and neck situs here. Apparently, it took many decades after the war until the 1990s when the users of the Athos looked a little bit closer and looked at the signatures that the medical illustrators had left, uh, during the war years on some of these images. It was New York surgeon Howard Israel, who then, uh, uh, talked to his colleague, Canadian medical historian, uh, Bill Seidelman, uh, and asked him about the, uh, swastika and Errich Lapi signature, the double S in Karl Entresser's name that during the war years was the SS runs, uh, here from the SS uniform badge. And Franz Sparkes normally uh uh drawn for like that during the year 44 again, SESS runs. This and other specificities of these images led uh uh Seidelmann and Israel to contact the Yad Vashem Murta Authority in uh Jerusalem to send an inquiry to Vienna Medical. University. And in 1996, uh, after much denial, Vienna University started an historical inquiry into the background of the Perkoff atlas, and this historical senatorial project confirmed that not only was Perkov an avid Nazi, but the medical illustrator had Nazi affiliation. In addition to that, more than 1300 bodies of persons who were executed after civilian and military trials had been delivered to the anatomical department, and that it was highly likely that some of the images from Perkov's Atlas were based on the bodies of these victims of the Nazi regime. Um, and this leads us to the changes in body procurement after 1933. Now, uh, the traditional anatomical body procurement up to 1933, uh, was the bodies of so-called unclaimed person. These are persons who died in public institutions and, uh, whose families or friends did not claim them for the burial. These by law were allowed to be delivered to the. Anatomical departments. Among these traditional legal sources were bodies of deceased psychiatric patients, bodies of persons who had committed suicide, bodies of, uh, deceased prisoners, and of course, also bodies of executed persons. Indeed, this is historically the first legal source of anatomical body procurement altogether. Now, after 1933, we see increasing numbers of victims of the Nazi regime among these bodies. Among the deceased psychiatric patients, we have patients that were murdered within the so-called euthanasia programs by the Nazis. Uh we, among the persons committing suicide, we have increasing numbers of Jewish citizens among the deceased prisoners. We have increasing numbers of political prisoners due to the new Nazi legislation. Uh, more deaths in, uh, following violence, especially in the Gestapo prisons, and more so-called natural deaths in the increasingly expanding network of prison camps, the concentration camps, camps of forced laborers, and prisoners of war. In addition to all these quote unquote natural deaths, we have the bodies of persons who were executed following, uh, uh, court trials. And we see under the Nazis an exponential rise of these, uh, numbers of executed persons. Uh, Up till 1933, during the so-called Weimar Republic between 1919 and 1933, there were about 200 executions exclusively of men. Now under the Nazis, we see the, a rise to more than 30,000 executions uh following civilian and military trials. These are conservative estimates. Um, and among these 30,000 were now also from 1935 on women, even pregnant women. Now, at the moment, we have a sufficient number of studies from individual anatomical departments in Germany. There were more than 30 at the time, historically, uh, uh, the, a sufficient number of studies that allows us an estimate of the total number of bodies delivered to the departments and that lies currently at 30,000 to 35,000. We do not know how many of these executed persons. were actually, uh, persons who were victims of the Nazi regime, but we have an evidence-based estimate from the University of Tubingen, where it was thought that 2/3 of the total body supply came from victims of the Nazi regime. All of the anatomical departments without exception, use the bodies of the executed, and this was independent of the uh political convictions of the anatomists. And we know that the um common uh mode of the, uh, of, uh, execution was decapitation as this very drastic image of a young uh victim is shown here from uh Vienna. We have currently a documented number of 3,938 persons whose, uh, who were executed and whose bodies were delivered to 20 departments, so the final number will be much higher. Uh, many of them have been identified by name, and we are currently in the process of, uh, reconstructing the biographies of these victims. Sorry. I have concentrated on the victims whose bodies were used by Steve for his research. Um, it was known that after the war in 1946, the Soviet, uh, military had asked Steve to produce a list of names of all the persons whose bodies were used in the anatomical department. Mysteriously, the body register that had been lost at the department, but he came up with a partial list from his research notes in 1946. So he Gave this list with 182 names to the authorities and this list is archives in various copies in uh Berlin. I was able to obtain a copy of this list and took this, uh, to the memorial site of the German resistance in Berlin, where my historian colleagues are collecting documentation of all persons who were executed at the Berlin, uh, Platzens prison site. Uh, the colleagues were kind enough to share all this information for, uh, uh, with me so that we have been able to reconstruct most of these, uh, biographies. We know now that there were 174 women's names on this list and 8 men's names. We know, uh, their age distribution. Uh, they were as young as 18 and as old as 68. Steve used all of their bodies for research, as we know from his publications. We also know their nationality. 2/3 of them were German, the rest were Polish, French, Czech, Belgian, Austrian. There was 1 Soviet citizen and one US citizen. This was, by the way, Mildred Harnack Fish uh from Minnesota and, um, who was also part of the Red Orchestra, a political dissident group. And we know their religious affiliations. There were Jehovah's Witnesses among them. Protestants, Catholics, Jewish, and atheists, and we know the reasons why they had been put on trial. Nearly half of them had been accused of treason. 25% of them had received a death sentence for theft. This was possible under Nazi law. Also, there were laws against subversion. Subversion was telling bad jokes about Hitler or doubting the final victory of Hitler's regime. And uh the accusations of arson and murder often also have political backgrounds. These women came from all walks of life. They were homemakers, social workers, administrators, political activists, lecturers, forced laborers, artists, tailors, dancers. All of them shared the fate of being executed and having their bodies used by Steel for research. There were many other anatomical purposes, uh, that, um, were served with these bodies, among them, anatomical education and more research. We do not know how the work and the learning from bodies of victims of the National Socialist regime affected a whole generation of physicians who learned on these bodies. We have very few actually of them who after the war voiced their, uh, talked about their memories. One of the few is Holmer von Dietwort, who after the war became, um, uh, uh, quite well-known German publicist. He was a medical student in Berlin during the war years. He studied with Stephen. You see him here in his army uniform because medical students were also, um, uh, were recruited into the military. He remembered, we students knew on whose human remains our gain of anatomical knowledge rested. And in the urban centers, this was particularly well-known because there were these bright red posters that announced everywhere the uh name and the reason for the uh of the executions of these persons. In addition, he was one of the very few, uh, Persons who after the war reflected on their potential complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime, he wrote, Did this knowledge alone also mean that we were complicit? The answer to this question isn't easy, but I tend to think that it is yes. We have similar public admissions of potential guilt, uh, from none of the anatomists. Uh, that includes also the anatomical educators. None of them ever, uh, publicly admitted any guilt. Uh, among these educators was Hermann Foss, an anatomist in Halle, Germany, who in 1937 joined the Nazi Party because he hoped that would further his somewhat stalled career. Uh, indeed, in 1941, he was made chairman of anatomy in the newly founded German University of Posen in occupied Poland. There he had to, um, establish a new department of anatomy in needed bodies, and we know about his, uh, manner of, uh, uh, acquiring these bodies from his diary, which was found at the Anatomical Institute after the war. So he wrote in his diary, on September 30th, 1941. Today, I had a very interesting discussion with the chief prosecutor, Doctor Heiser, about obtaining corpses for the Anatomical Institute. So many people are executed here that they are enough for all three of our institutes. There were two other universities close by. Then on October 30th, he writes, Tomorrow, the anatomical Institute will get its first bodies. 11 poles are being executed, and I will take 5 of them. The others will be cremated. So he had more than enough for anatomical education. Months later, he writes about his success. The dissection of the organs of the executed persons were the loveliest that I have ever seen in a dissecting room. He considered them lovely because they came from young, healthy persons. These bodies were also used for other purposes. They were sold for anatomical collections. There was a production and sale of skeletons, skulls, and plaster cast masks going on in uh Posen. Uh, they came from these executed prisoners who were Polish resistance fighters, and they came also from some concentration camp inmates. Uh, this was supervised by Foss and carried out by the technician, Gustav von Hillscheid. Uh, this history has been researched by, uh, Goetz Ali and by my uh colleague, uh, the curator of the anthropology. Uh, department at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna, Margaret Berner. She let me take a photo of the body register, um, uh, from 22nd of June 1942. In translation, you read here, skulls and plaster casts of Jews and Poles executed in 1941 to 1942, acquired from the Anatomical Institute of the Rice University in Posen on the 22nd of June 1942 from Chief Technician von Hillscheid. And under the headline, Jews, you read here, one cranium male born 15th August 198, uh for the price of 25 Reichsmark. So and uh the bodies of these uh Polish resistance fighters were used for anatomical education and they were also used for anatomical collections. In addition, bodies of executed persons were used. Sorry, to a great, uh, amount in, uh, anatomical studies and research studies at the time. We know this, uh, because German anatomists explicitly mentioned bodies of the executed in their method section in publications from this Nazi period. Uh, these were open publications that were right around the world. For me, the question aro arose, uh, firstly, whether this was an, uh, exclusively German practice. And secondly, whether this was a practice. That was only known during the Nazi period. To investigate this question, I, um, studied, uh, publications and anatomical journals published between 1924 and 1951 and looked for the explicit mention of the use of bodies of the executed. There were about 7500 German language papers that were published during that time. In these journals that I looked at, not quite 5000 English language papers at the time. Among the German language papers were 183 that explicitly mentioned material from the executed. These came mostly from Germany, but also from countries that worked in the German tradition like Sweden and Hungary and Japan. And then there were two papers in the English language, uh, uh, literature. One was from South Africa and one from the US. Now, that doesn't mean necessarily that English language anatomists didn't use these bodies. Uh, however, they didn't have the same, um, value for the English language anatomists as they had for the German anatomists. When you read into these papers, you very soon realize that in German anatomical tradition, the use of these tissues that were quote unquote harvested sometimes minutes after death from healthy persons had become something of a gold standard for high-quality histological work, especially in the nervous system. So among uh anatomists who worked in the, uh, uh, German tradition, these tissues of the uh of the executed had become a, a badge of honor for high-quality work. And this had happened even before 1933 at a time when executions were rare, as you can see here in this, uh, timeline, uh, you see, uh, 1% of the papers, uh, using bodies of the executed before 1933. The anatomists helped each other out with blocks of tissues. Uh, and as soon as the Nazis executing in higher numbers, we see that the anatomists avidly used these bodies. We see a doubling in the first half of the Third Reich, and then we have a 7-fold increase during the war years. These, um, uh, numbers also hold true in absolute numbers, not just in relative numbers. Even after the war, German anatomists use their, uh, wartime collections. Among the most avid users of these bodies was Max Clara. He, uh, and you, he may be familiar, uh, to you through the eponym of the Clara cell in the, uh, bronchiolar system. Um, he was chair of anatomy in Leipzig and in Munich, and he used these bodies of the executed in high numbers, sometimes 20, 30s of bodies of executed during the war years. Uh, however, in 1942, he actually took it, uh, this, his research one step further, and this was first pointed out by my colleague Swinkelmann in NOAC. In 1942, Clara published a paper on the vitamin C distribution in human tissues at the time, an innovative field of research. And here he wrote, and this is my translation, the material evaluated in the current study stems from 15 apparently healthy adult individuals of different ages who, without exception, all died of a sudden death after varying periods of imprisonment. A 33 3/4 year old male individual received 1 pill of CB and that's a vitamin C product by Merck, 4 times daily for the last 5 deaths, days before his death. What had happened here? Clava had realized that he had access to these prisoners before their deaths, secretly had vitamin C administered to their tissues. He had realized he could manipulate these tissues before the death of the prisoners. He made their death part of his research design and then quote unquote harvested the tissues. Uh, I think we see here that Clava crossed the boundary of the traditional paradigm, uh, in anatomy that is knowledge gained to work with the dead to a new paradigm, work with what I call the future dead, that is human experimentation. We see this transition to a new paradigm in Nazi anatomy more clearly in the work of Johann Paul Krimer, who was a professor of anatomy who worked at the University of Munster and was an SS officer detailed to Auschwitz in the fall of 1942. Up to then, he had performed research on, uh, animals on the effects of hunger. And when he entered Auschwitz, He found that among his duties there was not only being present at the selections of prisoners at the train ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but that he also had to perform selections of, uh, uh, uh, patients on the sick wards. He had realized that on the, on the sick wards that he now had the perfect situation where he could study his, uh, research interest in the quote-unquote human system. He selected prisoners he was specifically interested in and, uh, asked to be present at the executions. In the execution chamber, he took their medical history, awaited their death, uh, by, um, uh, an intracardiac phenol injection. It is unclear whether he performed these injections himself. And then he harvested the tissues he was interested in. Now, we know this in such detail because he left a diary, um, that was found after, and you see a copy of this diary here, uh one page of it. Um, he left this in his apartment where it was found after the war by the British military. This diary became indeed the first document that proved that physicians had taken part in medical experimentation in the concentration camps. He was put on trial in Poland and um as, as, uh, and uh sentenced for murder there and later also uh received a sentence in Germany. Now, Kremer had entered the concentration camp without a specific research design, but as my colleague Hans Joachim Lang in Germany has pointed out, there was another anatomist who became the mastermind of working in this new paradigm of working with what I call the future dead, and that was August Hilt. He had been a conventional anatomist who had actually done uh quite good research and co-invented the fluorescence microscope in the 1920s. Um, however, he had also joined the SS early on and in 1941 was made chair of anatomy in Strasbourg in the Alsace, as you can see here, uh, in this very small map. Uh, close to Strasbourg was the concentration camp Stutterfnutsweiler, and there he performed human experiments supported by the Arnen Abe, the SS organization that studied race. These were experiments on camp inmates with poison gas that caused great suffering and death in many of these inmates. He also designed a large experiment, the so-called Jewish skeleton Collection. For this, he asked his SS anthropology colleagues, Blo Beger and Hans Fleischaker, uh, to select prisoners in Auschwitz over here in occupied Poland to select prisoners and send them in the summer of 1943 per train from Auschwitz. To Natsweiler, and there, uh Hilt gave the cyanide salts for the murder of these victims to the commander of the concentration camp. 86 persons were murdered in the summer and their bodies were delivered to the anatomical to a nearby Strasbourg anatomical department. Uh, the, they were discovered there. These bodies were discovered there at the liberation of Strasbourg in November of 1944, discovered by the French military. And Tilt was the only anatomist who was named in the Nuremberg doctors' trials and uh was indicted for murder in absentia in Metzine de Alsace in 1953. At the time, it was just becoming known that he had committed suicide in 1945. Now, when we look at the activities of these anatomists, we see very clear stages of an ethical transgression. In the beginning, we have anatomists who felt legally and morally justified and who traditionally never considered the history of the dead they were working with. Then we have changes in the traditional sources of body procurement, gradual changes after 1933 that included increasing numbers of bodies of the Nazi victims. Then, We have many anatomists that actively lobbied for and used great numbers of bodies of the executed and thought this was a very positive development. And finally, we have Steve with his thought experiment in which he cold-bloodedly interpreted the situation of prisoners on death row as the equivalent to the research design in his animal experiments. However, there is no evidence that he had access to the prisoners before their deaths. Then in 1942, we see the escalation with the work of Clara, who recognized the new opportunities and experimented on the future dead but did not contribute to the death of these persons. However, he made them part of the, the death part of his research design. Kramer, on the other hand, chose living prisoners, the future dead for his research without a previous research plan, and in doing so, he condemned these prisoners, uh, uh, to death through his selection. And finally, we have August Hildt, who selected his future dead victims. to a premeditated plan for his skeleton collection and delivered the murder weapon. He also sought to promote, promote this new method of anatomical body procurement among his colleagues at a meeting in Tubingen in uh November of 1942. These anatomists firmly believed that their work was ethical for them. The purity of the method was the prerequisite for the compliance with ethics norms, nothing else. Um, Steve Clara Klemanel saw the situation with the Nazi victims as an opportunity in the methodologically correct sense, but, and so, as Volker Roler says, that means literally without care for the human situation of their research subjects. I believe there are many continuities, legacies, and consequences from this history. First of all, Charlotte Pommer remained indeed the only voluntarily retired anatomist. Few German and Austrian anatomists lost their positions after the war. After a short hiatus, they were put back into their old positions. Publications of research based on tissues from Nazi victims became integrated into the general body of anatomical knowledge. Many books by German anatomists continue to be used. For example, a neurosurgeon currently wants to use Perkoff plates to improve and save human lives, and she makes a very good case for this. Um, bodies of Nazi victims were used for many years longer in teaching and research, and specimens of Nazi origin are still being found and need to be identified to enable dignified burials for purposes of commemoration. And this is just a short list of some of the historical projects that are currently going on in Germany and France. I want to point out just two of them because they led to a recent development that I want to report. Um, there was an incident in the summer of 2014 where during routine excavations, bone fragments were found on the property of the Free University of Berlin. Uh, this, um, uh, property was in the vicinity of the former Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology that you see here. And from 1942 on, the director of this institute had been Otto Freier von Furschur, an internationally respected twin researcher and post-war geneticist. Now, von Furschel was also the mentor of Jossef Mengele, who uh sent specimens from Auschwitz to von Ferschur for future research. This historical connection was overlooked at the time, and these bone fragments were handled routinely and incinerated. Uh, a historical, there was a, uh, public outcry, uh, initiated by historians after that. Uh, and there is a historical commission going on currently. Another incident, um, that had to do with brain sections from euthanasia victims that Heinz Wessler, the former director of the Max Planck Institute of Brain Research in Frankfurt, found in the archives of the Max Planck Institute. Uh, and again, we see these, uh, discoveries coming up again and again. So my colleagues and I, um, uh, felt that we needed a set of guidelines that we could publicize in a manner that these kinds of, uh, situations could be, um, uh, uh, investigated in a systematic fashion. There, there are several sets of guidelines. Of, on what to do with human remains in, in the individual disciplines. However, there is no, uh, interdisciplininary set of guidelines and there is no set of guidelines that includes the voice of the victims. So we came together last year in May in, uh, Jerusalem at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center, um, and, um, I had a special symposium there with, uh, anthropologists, medical historians, um, And, uh, archaeologists, and we came up with a set of recommendations on how to deal with Holocaust-era human remains, and I'm not gonna read all of those here, don't be afraid. Uh, I will just focus on the, uh, most important aspects here. Uh, the focus is really on the identification of the human remains, the burial of these, uh, human remains in a dignified manner, uh, the documentation of what was done, and ultimately an opportunity to commemorate these victims. The recommendations Also include, uh, the so-called Vienna Protocol for when Jewish or possibly Jewish human remains are discovered. This is an official response on that is a legal and medical and ethical opinion, uh, created by Rabbi Joseph Pollack of the Chief Justice of the Rabbinical court here in Massachusetts. Um, And he, uh, in this protocol addresses specifically the question of what to do with these human remains, and he also, uh, addresses the question of what to do with the images of the PRov Atlas. And again, I'm not going to read the full, uh, opinion here, uh, but just focus. On the essence of it. So Rabbi Pollack says that the, uh, images from the Perkov Atlas may be used, uh, if, uh, that would be certainly permitted this use by most authorities if it helps to save human lives following the Jewish principle of Puachnefesh. However, there are certain conditions that need to be met. He says that the use of these images requires making it known to one and all just exactly what these drawings are. And in this way, the dead are accorded at least some of the dignity to which they are entitled. We believe that this, these recommendations and the Vienna Protocol are applicated, applicable, uh, uh, beyond the Jewish context, and we have actually reason to believe that there are parallels to questions about the handling of human remains from other contexts of human rights abuse. And just a couple of weeks ago, we already came across our next, um, exam. You may have seen this New York Times article. Uh, this concerns, uh, the, uh, the tragedy of the vanished orphans of the former mother and baby homes in Tuam in the county of Galway in Ireland. And the survivors of this tragedy are trying to, uh, find out what to do with the children's remains. We contacted the, the, uh, survivor group and they were happy to know. That there is a set of recommendations that they might use in answering the question that are they currently concerned with. I firmly believe that the Nazi history of anatomy also shines a very clear light on current critical questions in anatomy because unethical handling of anatomical bodies still exists worldwide, but also in the US and I have only time here to uh point. Out one of the latest examples, uh, a very recent investigative series published by Reuters on the body trade in the US. This concerns the private four-body body brokers in the US who work with less, less than ethical guidelines in many cases. Now, in conclusion, Anatomists use the bodies of Nazi victims in education and research, committing ethical transgressions that included a paradigm shift from work with the dead to work with the future dead. They buried victims' remains in unmarked graves or lost them in collections without names. Thus, anatomists were complicit in the complete physical annihilation and destruction of the memory of victims of the Nazi regime. Uh, I believe it is not only our duty but also our privilege to restore the biographies and enable the memorialization of the victims. Thus, I will end with the names and faces of some of these victims and with a word by my colleague Hans Joachim Lang, who said, forgetting them would be the victim's final annihilation. Thank you very much. I think we have time for some questions. And thank you for bringing this rather uh chilling tale, not tale, and uh fantasy, but story, uh, to us this morning. I'm sure there may be some comments or questions from the, from the audience, but we appreciate you, all the work that you've done in this area. Are there questions or comments? Dr. Rockoff. Yes, thank you, thank you for an excellent lecture and for the terrific work you've done here. Um, the question I have is how has your work been received in modern day Germany and Austria? Well, um, up to the 1990s, uh, my colleagues who pioneered some of this work in Germany, uh, were discouraged by their anatomy colleagues. Um, but it took a younger generation, basically, and for me, really, the physical distance also, uh, to, um, to be able to pick up this work. And, uh, when, uh, my first research came out, some of the, some of the, um, Uh, overview work. Uh, I was contacted by Bill Seidelmann, whom I mentioned before, who was a pioneer in this area and had had much push, pushback from Germany. Um, and together we found that in Germany with the younger colleagues, we were running into open doors, actually, especially, uh, people like, um, Andreas S Winkelmann and Christoph Riedes from the University of, uh, Jena and the charity in Berlin were very open to this question. And so in 2010, we were already able to, uh, have a first symposium on the subject in Germany. So nowadays, it's, uh, very much open. There's still, as always, some people are interested in history and others are not. But in general, I have, um, uh, an open, uh, an open audience there. So, and last year, actually, I had an opportunity to speak at the Uh, Leopoldina in Germany, which is the, uh, the kind of the science elite organization in Germany, kind of uh, uh, comparable to the National Academy of Sciences here in the US and I was able to give a first lecture on the subject there. And then one follow up question. A few years ago in Boston at the Museum of Science, there was an exhibit. But I was traveling around the world of anatomic specimens, I believe most of the specimens were from China. Um, do you have any comments about that? Yeah, so this is, uh, this is indeed a problem for us as workers in the ethics of anatomy. The question is about the plastinate, the traveling exhibits of so-called plastinated bodies originated, uh, by Gunther von Hagen's, a German organization. There are about 11 to 12 copycats around the world. Uh, the question is, where do these bodies come from? Um, in the case of Gunther von Hagens, by now, he has his own private body donation program which has its own problems in, uh, in my view. Um, and, uh, the others all are, um, uh, sourced from China as far as we know. Now, uh, we have an international body of anatomists, the IFAA. Uh, I'm sitting there on a committee with Andreas Winkelmann and other colleagues, Tom Champney from Miami, um, uh, that is concerned with, uh, ethics, and we have recently formulated an opinion on these uh traveling uh placination exhibit which will be, uh, published, uh, in the next month. Hello, thank you again for your talk. Um, so, uh, in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC they have, um, where you could physically see like experimentations, where they, they put people in cold water or in an air chamber, and I know your focus is more about the anatomy or the anatomist, um, and I don't know if the experiments were done by like scientists or physicians, but I'm assuming some of those experiments probably led to Um, the death of the, um, the victim. So how does that relate? To this. Yeah, thank you for that question. So August Hilt was a part of this group of SS physicians who was mainly responsible. So the SS was headed by Heinrich Himbe, who in 1939 had been approached whether he would make prisoners in the concentration camps available for experiments. And he did. Um, and, uh, so August He was part of that group, right? So there is overlap. He was also informed, for example, about the, the, um, the, uh, the freezing experiments in Dachau that you specifically mentioned. Uh, and, uh, actually, uh, we do know now what happened to some of these bodies that were actually sent, some of these, uh, uh, bodies of Russian prisoners of war that had been Uh, used for these experiments and who, uh, perished in the experiments had been sent to, uh, a pathological department, uh, uh, Department of Pathology in Munich. Uh, and that's actually information that I retrieved from the estate papers of Henry Beecher, which are located here in the Countway Library. Anatomic, uh education has always been, uh, plagued since the time of the grave robbers, uh, in early surgical experiments. Did the, has the group that you've mentioned or any others put together, uh, basic principles now for, for anatomic studies just has been developed for, for human experimentation? I'm Not quite sure I understand that. In other words, is, is that anatomic organization that you mentioned earlier or others. Put together principles or guidelines for anatomic donation and experimentation. Yeah, so, um, so for one, we, uh, have, of course, all the follow-up documents after the Nuremberg Code, Helsinki, and so on. They all are concerned exclusively with, um, medical experimentation, and they do not concern anatomical, uh, bodies. So we have come up with, uh, a set of recommendations for best. Practices in anatomical body donation. That is a document that you can find on the website of the IFAA, the International Federation of the Associations of Anatomists, sounds very much like Garrison Keillor, but that's what it is. IFAA, when you go to their website and look uh on the recommendations and guidelines, um, this is recommendations about body donation, and we have an ongoing Uh, discussion, uh, debate, uh, with some of our colleagues here in the US and worldwide on what is acceptable and what's not acceptable. So these are very much current discussions. This is not a historical subject only. Final question, Doctor Jennings. I have a question about the big elephant in the room, and that's an individual's personal responsibility when a dictator takes control of their country, because I just noted, I mean, you had hundreds of anatomists, many of whom were mediocre and joined the SS or whatever it was, so they could make progress in their careers, stepping over the people who had previously achieved honorably achieved academic progress, and only one of those 100. Said I'm not gonna do it. I mean, I'm, and let's just point out this was a young woman, OK, yeah, so, yeah, so at what point is a person responsible as an individual to stand up against something like The ISS or the the the Nazis, because if you think about it, if, if a dictator comes into power in a country and the entire population stands up, then he's just a crying wolf in the lonely night. But if he can pick out little people like all the anatomists to join him, and then do that across the board, then eventually. He gains power. So what personal responsibility do I have when I'm strongly opposed to the dictator and the government? Well, that's a very current question, wouldn't you say? We, we, um, let me just say I teach these subjects to freshmen at Harvard College. And in 2016, after the election, I was sitting with my 10 freshmen. The black kids were angry. The, uh, the Hispanic kids were scared and crying, and the others were looking on. They asked, what do we do now? And I said, Well, I have no idea. We will find out what we are made of. We will see how we can resist. That's my answer to this question. It's a person, yes, there's no end to personal responsibility, but none of us will ever know what we're capable of. Doctor Hildebrand, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you.