An illustration from Eduard Pernkopf's Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy. Historians believe there is a great likelihood that the drawings depict victims of the Nazis. The book is still in use.
The Nazi Anatomists
How the corpses of Hitler's victims are still haunting modern science—and American abortion politics.
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 asmall 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 Postasked 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.
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