TOP STORY: MEDICINE AND ETHICS: Physicians’ classic anatomy work used victims of Nazi murders

c. 1996 The Jerusalem Report (RNS)-One day in April 1993, Dr. Howard Israel, an oral surgeon at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, prepared for an operation by doing what he always did beforehand: Reviewing the terrain in his trusted copy of”Pernkopf’s Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy,”considered a classic reference work for surgeons, […]

c. 1996 The Jerusalem Report

(RNS)-One day in April 1993, Dr. Howard Israel, an oral surgeon at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, prepared for an operation by doing what he always did beforehand: Reviewing the terrain in his trusted copy of”Pernkopf’s Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy,”considered a classic reference work for surgeons, specialists and anatomists.

While the doctor studied the book’s detailed anatomical paintings, a colleague dropped by the office and casually observed:”Did you know that those cadavers you’re looking at may have been victims of Nazi murder?” It was a remark that would transform Israel’s life, turning him into a detective, and ultimately leading him to evidence of a monstrous medical legacy from the Holocaust.


It appears that corpses depicted in Dr. Eduard Pernkopf’s book, which was fist published in Germany and Austria in 1937 and is still in print in four languages today, include Jewish Holocaust victims. And pieces of those bodies-preserved in formaldehyde for more than 50 years-are still in use as specimens at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

The evidence has been painstakingly pieced together over the past three years by Dr. Israel and Dr. William Seidelman, a Toronto physician and Holocaust researcher. It has been presented to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, which is now pressing Austrian authorities to look into it.”Who were these people, and how and when did they die? That’s the question that we want the Austrians to answer,”Israel, 43, told The Jerusalem Report in an interview.

The Pernkopf guide, also published in numerous Spanish and French editions, is highly regarded in the United States, where it sells for $175 a copy. The New England Journal of Medicine, reviewing the 1990 edition, called it”outstanding … in a class of its own.”The Journal of the American Medical Association described it as”a classic among atlases of anatomy.” The doctor says he became intrigued when his colleague peered at his 1963 English-language edition of the atlas, pointed to the artists’ signatures on the painting, and explained that he had come across a 1943 edition of the book, in which the same signatures appeared with additional adornment-swastikas and SS emblems.

The colleague than pointed out that many of the corpses had coarsely shaven heads, suggesting they might have been prisoners. And he drew Dr. Israel’s attention to the fact that a number of the male corpses depicted were circumcised.

Israel immediately went to the Columbia University medical library to look at earlier editions of Pernkopf’s book, and found his colleague’s observations to be true. There, in the 1943 and 1944 editions, were the swastikas after the artists’ signatures. One artist, named Endtresse cleverly used the twin-lightning bolt symbol of the SS in place of the two”s”letter in his or her name. In Israel’s edition, the Nazi symbols had been airbrushed out.”I was stunned,”Israel recalled. Suddenly he faced a terrible ethical dilemma.”Thanks to Pernkopf, I could perform operations in my mind and on paper the night before, knowing every nerve and blood vessel I would encounter the next day,”he said.”Yet had I benefited all these years by studying the pictures of Nazi victims? Was Pernkopf a Nazi? I had to know.” Through colleagues, Israel contacted Seidelman, who caused an uproar in West Germany several years ago when he released evidence that several of that country’s most prestigious medical schools were using brains and other remains from Nazi victims as anatomical specimens.

Together, Israel and Seidelman began probing Eduard Pernkopf’s background. Delving into historical papers, they discovered that four days after Hitler’s troops marched into Austria in March 1938, Pernkopf was appointed dean of the medical school at the University of Vienna. They uncovered photographs of Pernkopf in Nazi uniform, addressing a large audience of university staff. And they found one of his speeches, in which Pernkopf summarized the role of doctors in the Nazi state:”To practise (sic) your profession, not only in furthering the propagation of the fit, but also in eliminating the unfit and defective … by sterilization and other means.” Other records showed that Pernkopf served as dean until 1943, during which time he published the first two volumes of his anatomical atlas. He then was promoted to president of the university, a position he held until the end of the war. After the war, he was detained by Allied authorities but released without charges. He continued working on the atlas, publishing one more volume in 1952 before he died three years later.

But where did the bodies come from which Pernkopf used for the drawings in his book? Israel and Seidelman found a scholarly paper on the history of the University of Vienna medical school during the war years, published last year by Dr. Edward Ernst, a former medical professor at the university. Ernst wrote that some of the specimens came from children put to death in a Vienna hospital because they were considered by Nazi doctors to be genetically inferior. Pernkopf”also used the corpses of executed persons,”Ernst wrote. He added that many of these specimens still exist, but he didn’t specify where.


Digging deeper, Israel and Seidelman found that Pernkopf made a written request in 1941 for the corpses of some of those executed in Gestapo prisons in Poland. He was refused. But according to a 1990 dissertation by M. Lehner, then a Vienna doctoral student, Pernkopf received an ample supply of cadavers from prisons in the Austrian city of Linz, and Prague and Munich, as well as from nearby slave labor camps and the Gestapo prison in Vienna, where the preferred method of executing political prisoners was beheading.

Quoting a draftsman who worked for the university in 1942, Lehner wrote:”The Institute accumulated hundreds of heads in storage rooms … The corpses of the executed were arranged like pieces of lumber, one on top of the other … The two-to-three meter-high mountains of body parts were pulled down and dispatched with coal forks.” Dr. Israel also received more evidence from Dr. David Williams, director of medical illustration at Purdue University School of Medicine. A great admirer of Pernkopf’s art, Williams also had heard that the corpses of Nazi victims may have served as Pernkopf’s models and went to Austria in 1980 to learn the truth.

Williams spent four months studying at the University of Innsbruck with Franz Batke, the last living medical artist who had worked with Pernkopf. Batke denied working for Pernkopf during the war, even though the atlas contains drawings signed by Batke in 1943 and 1944, with an SS symbol after his name. Israel says that when Williams asked Batke directly where the corpses came from,”Batke became enraged and denied the cadavers were victims of concentration camps.” The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles says Batke was probably right; There is little evidence that concentration camp victims were later used for medical dissections. But Williams’s most shocking assertion, contained in a 1988 paper he wrote about Pernkopf’s atlas, appeared to clarify the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of Pernkopf’s specimens today: Williams states that many of these specimens”may be seen in the University of Innsbruck’s Institute of anatomy.” Yad Vashem sent all the evidence to Austria last year, seeking official answers as to who the corpses were and how they died, for any existing anatomical specimens from the Nazi era to be given a proper burial, and for the Pernkopf publishers to dedicate future editions to those who died.

In reply, Dr. Werner Platzer, the new editor of the Pernkopf atlas, insists all the corpses used during the war were”voluntary estates”-freely donated for scientific use. As to whether any were Jews, he says there were so many specimens, no one bothered to check, and that since the university’s records were destroyed during an Allied bombing, there was no way to check official wartime death certificates. There has been no reply from the University of Innsbruck.

Caroline Donohue, president of Waverly International, a Baltimore company that bought out Pernkopf’s original publisher in 1990, said that Israel and Seidelman’s evidence”does not prove that victims were used and does not warrant our withdrawing the book.”She said Waverly would not add an explanatory forward or dedication in future editions.”We’re not satisfied,”responded Yad Vashem’s director Yochanan Bein.

Dr. Israel no longer consults Pernkopf’s anatomical atlas before surgery. But he admits he misses it professionally, and he’s still ethically tormented.”As good as the book is, if it comes from such evil, how can you justify using it?”he says.”Yet there are times when I feel, if it can save a life or make me perform more skillfully, it honors those who sacrificed their lives. There are no easy answers for this one.”


MJP END BRODER

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