16 JULY 2010 VOL 329

SCIENCE

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In 1938, senior anatomists at the Universityof Vienna began an unusual arrangement:They worked closely with local Nazi officialsto obtain corpses for teaching and research,receiving the bodies of prisoners shot in theGestapo rifle range or guillotined in Vien-na’s assize court building. So many corpseswere transferred that Viennese authoritiesran a special streetcar, dubbed the “DeathTransport,” between the court and the medi-cal school in the early morning. If the medicalschool morgue was full, court officials post- poned the executions. Viennese physicianssecured at least 1337 bodies of Nazi victimsthis way, according to a report issued by theUniversity of Vienna in 1998.The Viennese tram is just one example of the systemic relationship that arose betweenmedical schools and executioners across Nazi-controlled Europe. Although other aspects of Nazi science have been explored previously, such as the role of psychiatrists inselecting mentally ill patients for euthanasia,anatomists’ broad complicity in Nazi injus-tices has emerged mostly in papers published in the past year or so.These studies document the grim symbio-sis that arose between anatomists who wanted human bodies for teaching and research and acriminal regime that wanted to dispose quietlyof the corpses of large numbers of executed prisoners. Medical schools were assigned par-ticular prisons from which to receive corpsesand accepted extra bodies for incineration.One leading Berlin anatomist manipulated thetiming of executions and used the terror thatfemale prisoners experienced as they waited to die as a scientific variable in a study, accord-ing to research published in

Clinical Anatomy

last year. “The picture is one of a very gradualslippage in moral values among anatomists,”says Christoph Redies, a professor of anatomyat the Jena University Hospital in Germany,“to clear outrages and injustices.”The research is prompting German anat-omists to acknowledge publicly for the firsttime the extent of their field’s involvement in Nazi abuses. And it raises ethical questionsabout the continuing use of research and illus-trations based on dissections of Nazi victims(see sidebar). Spurred by the new findings,Germany’s Anatomical Society is holding itsfirst symposium on “Anatomy in the Third Reich” on 29 September at the University of Würzburg. “We hope that this will contributeto a global debate on ethical standards for theuse of human cadavers in research and teach-ing,” says Andreas Winkelmann, an anatomistat Charité Medical University in Berlin.The symposium is likely to spark intensediscussion, for anatomists continue to grap- ple with the ethics of using bodies fromstate-sanctioned executions. In 2008, NewYork state’s Attorney General AndrewCuomo investigated allegations that a tour-ing museum show of plastinated bodies puton by Premier Exhibitions Inc. had displayed the bodies of executed Chinese prisonerswho may not have consented to the display.Cuomo could not confirm the allegations,although the company admitted that someremains came from the Chinese Bureau of Police. The company’s current show displaysonly “individuals known to have died of nat-ural causes,” says the chief medical director of the show, Roy Glover.The abundance of new historical data fromthe Third Reich is bound to fuel a fresh round of debate on such issues. A series of three stud-ies published last fall in

Clinical Anatomy

byanatomist Sabine Hildebrandt of the Univer-sity of Michigan, Ann Arbor, traces the evolu-tion of practices of German anatomists beforeand during the Third Reich.Before the Third Reich, German anato-mists used unclaimed corpses from hospitals, psychiatric facilities, and prisons, but the lat-ter was a minor source because Germany exe-cuted fewer than 20 civilians a year between1907 and 1932. After 1933, notes Hildeb-randt, the Nazi government meted out deathsentences for even minor infractions, suchas telling political jokes. So between 1933and 1945, German prisons executed at least16,000 civilians. (Only a few of these were

Confronting Anatomy’s Nazi Past

Studies uncover a symbiosis between the Nazi regime, which needed to dispose ofexecuted prisoners, and anatomical institutes, which sought bodies for study

ANATOMY

The Dilemma of Pernkopf’s Atlas

For more than 2 decades beginning in 1933,University of Vienna anatomist EduardPernkopf labored on his anatomical atlas,which he published as the

Topographical Anatomy of Man

. He put in 18-hour days dis-secting human bodies and supervising a teamof artists who painted what he revealed inintricate detail. The resulting four-volumeanatomical atlas was described by

The New England Journal of Medicine

in 1990 as “anoutstanding book of great value to anato-mists and surgeons,” and its anatomical illus-trations remain unsurpassed even today.But Pernkopf and several of his artists wereavid Nazis, as revealed in a 1988 study by DavidWilliams of Purdue University in West Lafayette,Indiana. A University of Vienna investigationdetermined in 1998 that Pernkopf’s anatomydepartment received bodies of executed pris-oners from the Gestapo and from Vienna’s assizecourt (see main text). “Some of these bodies werecertainly used for Pernkopf’s atlas,” says Williams.What should anatomists in 2010 do with anatlas that is both scientiﬁcally valuable and mor-ally tainted? Researchers remain deeply divided.

Published by AAAS