ABSTRACT
At the close of the Second World War there was a high level of concern with Nazi human experiments. Survivors set out to document and testify, and Allied scientific intelligence officers flagged up the criminality of medical research under National Socialism. Allied occupation authorities were concerned about the holding of victim body parts and required their documentation and removal, whereas many anatomists clung onto their corpses – many headless from the Nazi guillotine or with broken spines from hanging. The new research on eugenics and racial policies provided the evidence basis for compensation for victims of sterilisation, for "euthanasia" victim families, and for persecuted Sinti and Roma, and from the mid-1990s for forced labourers. The way forward for both commemoration and historical understanding is identifying victims of Nazi killings, and reconstructing the fate of their brains and body parts. It was assumed that if an institute was destroyed in the war that its post-war collections were free from Nazi victims.
