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human being, but the ‘‘body of the people’’ was the

object of NS medical ethics, and human beings were

not seen as individuals, but exclusively in their func-

tion as parts of the ‘‘body of the people.’’ So if this

part of the body did not ‘‘ﬁt’’ the general concept of

a racially and mentally healthy ‘‘body of the people,’’

it had to be either stopped from reproducing or be

removed. The question then was no longer whether

racial hygienic measures were compatible with the

human dignity of the individual, but whether these

measures were scientiﬁcally up to date and scientiﬁ-

cally justiﬁed to aid the well-being of the Volk (Wein-

gart et al., 1988, p 320). Individual human beings

were stripped of human rights and their bodies, in

life and death, became objects of these redeﬁned

medical practices (Hommel and Thom, 1989; Thom

1989).

Why were physicians, and in this context: anato-

mists, so ready to follow the pseudoscientiﬁc prem-

ises of NS ideology and to give up their traditional

ethics? Alexander Mitscherlich suggested that the

problem is inherent in any medicine that is exclu-

sively founded in the natural sciences and not also in

psychology, and thus might lead over time to a

moral dulling of the practitioner of this kind of medi-

cine. He thought that all modern medicine is in dan-

ger of drifting into inhumanity by an inevitable pro-

cess of moral decline inherent in an unchecked

purely scientiﬁc understanding of medicine (Mit-

scherlich and Mielke, 1947; p 11/12; Beushausen

et al., 1998; p 255/256; Aly, 2005; p 92/93). Like-

wise, Shevell and Evans state that the dilemma may

lie ‘‘in the necessary objectivity of the scientiﬁc

method itself: The need to distance oneself from the

experimental subject: Professional distancing begins

early in medical training’’ (quoted from Peiffer,

1997; p 54). Kater referred to this phenomenon,

when he called parts of NS medicine an ‘‘overex-

tended natural science’’ representing a ‘‘rationality

pushed to questionable extremes’’ (Kater, 1989;

p 242).

This rationality of the natural sciences is

compounded by the physicians’ need to distance

themselves from their patients to be an objective

observer, diagnostician, and healer. This process

was called a ‘‘necessary inhumanity’’ by William

Hunter in the 18th century (Richardson, 1987; p 30)

and later referred to as clinical detachment. In

humane and ethical medicine, clinical detachment is

always balanced by empathy (Montross, 2007). In

NS medicine, an overreaching clinical detachment

combined with a lack of empathy upset this balance,

which ultimately lead to monstrosity (a term bor-

rowed from Barker, 1995). Benigna von Scho¨nhagen

suggested that anatomists are especially prone to

this imbalance, as they may be in greater need of

clinical detachment than most other medical disci-

plines because of the daily necessity of seeing the

dead bodies of human beings as ‘‘material’’ and

‘‘things’’ (Scho¨nhagen, 1992). Indeed, this attitude

is particularly apparent in Stieve’s frequent referen-

ces to his special ‘‘material,’’ tissues from the bodies

of young women (e.g., Marx, 2003; p 156; Winkel-

mann and Schagen, 2009). Peiffer postulates the

same inclination to exaggerated clinical detachment

for the discipline of psychiatry–neuropathology, in

which the practitioner needs a great measure of

emotional detachment as self-protection against the

mentally diseased patient (Peiffer, 1997). There is a

potentially inhuman rationality immanent in a medi-

cine exclusively based on natural sciences and

untempered by an ethic that stays focused on the

individual patient.

However, it appears that this imbalance is but

one factor in the story of medicine and anatomy in

the Third Reich. The second factor is the inﬂuence

and opportunities given by a criminal regime. Proc-

tor stated that ‘‘it took a powerful state to unleash

the destructive forces within German medicine’’

(Proctor, 1992). This applies to the science of anat-

omy, in that the NS regime gave anatomists license

to use the new opportunities to their fullest beneﬁt.

It also applies to individual anatomists, who were

allowed to commit crimes, like Hirt and Kremer

(Ho¨ss, 1984; p 29), or at least let their own de-

structive fantasies free reign, as in the example of

Hermann Voss (Aly, 1987, 1994). NS policies pro-

vided the scientiﬁcally interested colleagues ‘‘mate-

rial’’ in previously unknown quantity and quality,

while it offered new opportunities for such politically

‘‘adaptable’’ academics, who might have had little

chance for advancement under other political condi-

tions due to their professional character (Peiffer,

1997).

German Anatomy After the War

After the defeat of NS Germany in May 1945, the

occupational forces of the United States, Great Brit-

ain, France, and the Soviet Union initiated a denaziﬁ-

cation process for most of the German population.

Every adult German was classiﬁed according to his

or her involvement in NS political activities as either

a ‘‘major offender,’’ ‘‘offender,’’ ‘‘lesser offender,’’

‘‘follower,’’ or ‘‘exonerated person.’’ This process

included the faculties of all universities. Of the 37

anatomical faculty members who were actively

involved in NS politics (see Part 1), two stand out as

‘‘major offenders’’ or ‘‘offenders,’’ the war criminals

and SS ofﬁcials August Hirt and Johann Paul Kremer.

While Hirt escaped the Nuremberg physician trials by

suicide in 1945, Kremer was convicted for murder by

the Polish and German governments and spent 10

years in Polish prisons (Landgericht Mu

nster, 1960;

Vieten, 1982). Of the remaining 35 NS active anato-

mists, none are known to have been involved in

murder and most of them fell into the categories of

‘‘lesser offenders’’ and ‘‘followers.’’ Generally, they

were former active SS and SA members and had

been vocal in their support of NS politics. Robert

Wetzel of Tu

¨bingen

and Ernst Theodor Nauck of Frei-

burg had spied on their colleagues for the SS secu-

rity service (Klee, 2003; Seidler and Leven, 2007; p

482). They lost their appointments after the war, a

fate shared by Werner Blume of Go¨ttingen, Eduard

Pernkopf of Vienna, Max Clara of Munich, Enno Free-

rksen of Kiel, and Ju

rg Mathis and Walter Ma¨rk of

Innsbruck. Others continued in their academic posi-

909Anatomy in the Third Reich: Part 3

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