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Soon after Hans-Joachim was born, it was clear that something was terri- bly wrong. The infant boy suffered from partial paralysis and spastic diplegia, a form of cerebral palsy. In 1934, when he was 5 years old,
his parents admitted him to an asylum
in Potsdam, Germany, where clinical records described Hans-Joachim as a “
strikingly friendly and cheerful” child. But his
condition did not improve. He
spent a few years at a clinic in
Brandenburg-Görden, Germany,
and then, on an early spring day
in 1941, he was “transfered to another asylum at the instigation
of the commissar for defense of
the Reich”—code words meaning that Hans-Joachim, then 12,
was gassed at a Nazi “
euthanasia” center. His brain was sent
to a leading neuropathologist.
During World War II, as
part of its racial hygiene program, the Nazi regime systematically killed at least 200,000
people it classified as mentally
ill or disabled, historians say.
Stories like Hans-Joachim’s
have largely been lost to history. Now, a new initiative is
seeking to reconstruct the biographies of victims used in brain
research. Starting this month,
the Max Planck Society (MPG),
Germany’s top basic research
organization, will open its doors
to four independent researchers
who will scour its archives and
tissue sample collections for material related to the euthanasia program.
The project’s impetus is MPG’s desire
to take moral responsibility for unethical
research that its forerunner, the Kaiser
Wilhelm Society (KWG), conducted on eu-
thanasia victims and their remains. “We
want to find out who the victims were,
uncover their biographies and their fates,
and as such give them part of their hu-
man dignity back and find an appropriate
way of remembrance,” says Heinz Wässle,
an emeritus director of the neuroanatomy
department at the Max Planck Institute
for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany,
Despite numerous accounts of ghastly
experiments and high-profile prosecutions
of doctors during the Nuremberg trials
after World War II, historians involved in
MPG’s new investigation say they still don’t
understand the full extent of research that
top institutes conducted in cooperation
with killing programs. “Historians of eu-
thanasia generally took their research to
the point of death of the victims,” says Paul
Weindling of Oxford Brookes University
in the United Kingdom. “What was not
reconstructed was that a proportion of
victims”—he estimates 5%—“had their
brains withheld for research.”
In the 1980s, journalist Götz Aly corre-
lated brain tissue slides collected by Julius
Hallervorden, the World War II–era direc-
tor of the neuropathology department at
KWG’s Institute for Brain Research here,
with a group of 38 children who were mur-
dered by the euthanasia program one day
in October 1940. In response, MPG’s Insti-
tute for Brain Research decided that out
of respect for the victims, it would destroy
all the brain sections it could find—about
100,000 slides—that dated to the Nazi era,
from 1933 to 1945. Germany’s other major
neuropathology center, the Max Planck In-
stitute of Psychiatry in Munich, also purged
its World War II brain slides. Many, includ-
ing those from Hans-Joachim’s brain, were
ceremonially buried in 1990 at the Munich
Waldfriedhof cemetery.
In the years that followed, historians
dug up evidence that KWG scientists had
strong ties to the Nazi agenda. Still, MPG
did not initiate a more comprehensive accounting of its
wartime history until the late
1990s. The results of that examination prompted MPG in
2001 to issue a historic apology to victims of Nazi experiments. That investigation “was
a very important project, but it
was not complete,” says Volker
Roelcke, a historian and psychiatrist at the University of
Giessen in Germany and one
of the four experts on the euthanasia program tapped for
the independent review. (The
others are Weindling, Patricia
Heberer-Rice of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C., and Gerrit
Hohendorf of the Technical
University of Munich.) They
hope to reconstruct in greater
detail the networks that allowed KWG scientists to exploit
the Nazi euthanasia program.
They will also strive to identify
individual victims whose brains
were used for research—in
some cases, long after the war ended—and
track what happened to tissue slides and
other specimens.
Hallervorden remains a focus. He accepted hundreds of brains of euthanasia
victims, a U.S. intelligence officer testified
at the so-called Nazi doctors’ trial in Nuremberg, but was never prosecuted. Instead, he
retained his KWG post after the war and
continued to study the “wonderful material”
from the killing centers, as he described it
when debriefed by the intelligence officer.
In 1953, Hallervorden published a chapter
in a neurology book featuring two micrographs of Hans-Joachim’s brain used to illus-
RESEARCH ETHICS
By Megan Gannon, in Berlin
A survivor at the Hadamar Institute in Germany in 1945. In 1941, more than
10,000 disabled adults were gassed and cremated at the killing center.
Germany to probe Nazi-era medical science
Overlooked brain tissue slides prompt another look at “euthanasia” victims
