Dissected parts of the bodies of executed prisoners of the Nazi regime have been kept since the war as anatomical specimens at the University of Vienna medical faculty, according to a report today in the Lancet medical journal. The body parts may also have featured in the paintings that make up the famous anatomical atlas by the enthusiastic Nazi sympathiser Eduard Pernkopf, once rector of the university, the report says.
The report is written by Daniella Angetter, a member of the commission that began investigating the origins of the specimens in a number of Viennese institutions in 1997 after disquiet was expressed by American medical professors and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority.
The commission found that bodies had routinely been used for anatomical study since 1404. "Hence Nazi anatomical practices were easily 'legalised', and based on a decree of February 18, 1939, all bodies of executed prisoners were sent to the department of anatomy of the nearest university, for research and teaching purposes.
"These bodies were used in dissection courses for students, as well as for the preparation of specimens for lectures, anatomical collections and the illustrations for Pernkopf's anatomical atlas."
The incomplete records obtained by the commission show that 1,377 bodies of citizens executed in the Nazi period, including eight of Jewish origin, were passed to the anatomy department. Much of the faculty's anatomical collection was destroyed in the bombing, but several departments acknowledged having specimens that had been or might have been taken from Nazi victims. "The department of histology and embryology was found to have 98 specimens fixed in formaldehyde, which, according to their labelling, had definitely originated from people executed at the Vienna assize court," says the report.
The department of neurology had specimens given to it by Heinrich Gross, the former Nazi doctor charged with experimenting on brains of child patients and murdering at least nine of them. He was released last month as unfit to stand trial due to dementia.
Gross worked in Am Speigelgrund, the psychiatric hospital where children with mental and physical disabilities suffered "euthanasia" under the Nazis. The commission "discovered wartime connections between the department of anatomy at the University of Vienna and Am Spiegelgrund," says the article. The specimens Gross gave to the neurology department dated back to 1942-44 and were from children murdered at the hospital. They were handed to the judicial authorities.
Other remains found included bones and the skull of Wilheim Zehner, an Austrian general who was either murdered by the Gestapo or killed himself when they came to arrest him in April 1938.
All body parts will be buried in a grave of honour by the City of Vienna, the report says.
The commission could not substantiate the suspicion that some models for illustrations in Pernkopf's work, still widely consulted, were Jewish concentration camp victims.
