For decades, students at the prestigious University of Strasbourg exchanged rumors that there were remains of Nazi victims, kept for anatomical or pathological purposes, scattered across the campus.
There was reason for suspicion: when Germany annexed the French region of Alsace in 1940, it invested money and resources to transform it into a model Nazi institution: the Reichsuniversität Strassburg.
Between 1941 and 1944, professors of medicine who worked there forced at least 250 people removed from concentration camps to undergo experiments, some even involving chemical weapons, such as mustard gas, or fatal diseases such as typhus. Eighty-six Jews were taken from Auschwitz and murdered in a nearby camp to satisfy a pre-planned skeleton collection.
However, it is very difficult to obtain a complete account of what was committed during this period. “The medical school says it has nothing to do with this story. Generally speaking, the idea is that ‘the walls are innocent’ regardless of what the Nazis did inside them,” explains Christian Bonah, a medical historian at university.
But now this refusal to face the past is being challenged: in May, the university released a 500-page report in which it completely reshapes its view of itself and explicitly affirms what until then had only been said in whispers: the people of Alsace also worked at the Reichsuniversität; the medical crimes committed by the teachers were many; and the college worked in partnership with a concentration camp.
The document was commissioned by the entity itself in 2016, motivated by the stir caused by the discovery of the remains of a victim of the Nazis in a closet in the anatomy section.
“It was a genuine effort to raise awareness of our history. It was a watershed moment. Several ex-employees came to me after the disclosure, shocked, claiming that the Reichsuniversität was not our university, but they changed their attitude as soon as they read everything. it was a black and white record as many thought,” says Michel Deneken, dean of the university.
A team of scholars, most specializing in the history of medicine or Nazism, worked tirelessly over the course of more than five years. He unearthed boxes of documents and remains from the anatomy and pathology collections that, purposefully or not, were left in basements, attics and campus warehouses — and even a low ceiling.
They found nearly 10,000 medical records, analyzed nearly 300 dissertations, more than 150,000 pages of files, and created a collaborative database. “We have tried to reconstruct in every detail how the medical school of a highly ‘Nazified’ university works, with large numbers of students, a robust injection of research funding and access to cadavers,” says Paul Weindling, committee member and professor of research at Oxford Brookes University.
The committee found that the university had closer ties than previously thought to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, 40 kilometers southwest of Strasbourg, where inmates and transferees from other locations such as Auschwitz were the subject of experiments.
Over the course of the war, 52,000 people were detained there; 20 thousand died. It was the only German camp on French soil. “It is necessary to clarify what happened and where it happened, within the Nazi context. Today the university accepts this willingly”, comments Weindling.
But it was not always so. In 2015, when a book denounced the existence of Jewish remains in the anatomy section, officials in the medical chair, furious, vehemently denied it. In the same year, however, Raphael Toledano, a Jewish doctor from Strasbourg who was researching the Nazi period, found a letter written by Camille Simonin, professor of medicine and coroner.
He was responsible for the autopsy of 86 Jews murdered in the Natzweiler-Struthof gas chamber in 1943, at the request of August Hirt, a university anatomist, to create a collection of skeletons that exemplified Nazi ideology regarding the hierarchy of races.
The bodies were found in tanks installed in the basement of the anatomy department when Strasbourg was liberated in 1944. In the letter, Simonin explained that he had preserved some of the corpses as evidence to help the prosecution in post-war trials. In July 2015, Toledano found them in a locked room, used as a storage room for the university’s forensic medicine institute.
Due to the controversy that the discovery caused, the commission was set up, from which Toledano withdrew in 2018, after internal disagreements, as he thought the research could be further developed. Even so, he praises the report. “There was a lot of resistance; it was literally something that had been hidden in the back of the closet for a long time, but now they’ve managed to clean the air.”
In 1939, aware of the threat across the border in Germany, university students and staff went to Clermont-Ferrand, 480 kilometers to the southwest. The administration admits that it was easier to focus on the heroism of the years spent there, when the French created a network of resistance disrupted by the Gestapo.
The medal won because of her remains prominently displayed in Deneken’s office. “The university hid behind this glory to avoid curiosity about what had happened in Strasbourg, drawing a parallel between the ancient belief that resistance had been widespread and that the true French heart was in London, with Charles de Gaulle never in Vichy, with Philippe Pétain. But that wasn’t true”, he emphasizes.
The commission received a sum of €750,000 — 8% of its annual research budget — an amount that came almost entirely from the university itself. Its members were asked to expand on the history of the Reichsuniversität and determine if there were still remains on the campus used in other experiments.
They found more than 1,000 Hirt microscope slides, as well as a pathology collection that included 134 macroscopic preparations kept in jars — such as tissue or organ samples — but found no evidence that these objects were linked to the criminal experiments. They also confirmed Toledano’s identification of more than 230 Russians who died in the camps and whose bodies were used for anatomical research.
The report also reveals the crimes committed by three professors at the Reichsuniversität faculty of medicine who used the field as a source for their experiments: Hirt, Eugen Haagen and Otto Bickenbach.
Four Sinti (Gypsy) detainees were already known to have died after Bickenbach used them as guinea pigs for phosgene, a fighting gas used in World War I, but the committee identified another 36 victims. And seven more of the gas tests shown by Hirt, plus 196 deaths from Haagen’s typhus vaccine study.
Experts were keen to point out that these Nazi researchers followed scientific methods to the extreme, without any ethical guidelines, but they were not pseudoscientists — so much so that the US Environmental Protection Agency used Bickenbach’s tests as a reference until 1988.
“Medicine’s potential for doing good is infinite, but we often ignore that the same is true for evil. This is especially true for doctors who operate in a political system that allows, supports, and even rewards ethical transgressions. That’s why we need to keep our eyes on history all the time,” reflects Sabine Hildebrandt, a Boston physician and Harvard University anatomy professor who was a member of the commission and has devoted herself extensively to the issue of anatomy in the Third Reich.
A small metal plaque affixed near a little-used entrance to the anatomy building is the only remembrance and celebration of the 86 Jews killed under Hirt’s supervision in 1943, only it includes only the names of those who discovered the bodies in 2005. that of the victims.
The commission recommended that the university create public spaces to recognize crimes and clearly identify the dead, display and explain the human remains that remain part of the collections, ensure that students learn what happened during the period, and sponsor more historical and file.
The institution agreed. “We are facing our history, and now we have a responsibility to future generations”, concludes Mathieu Schneider, vice-rector responsible for implementing the changes.
