The database also includes the victims of brain research by two Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (KWI), today the Max Planck Institutes for Brain Research and Psychiatry. What role did brain research play in coerced research?
Paul Weindling: Brain research was a fixed element of coerced research under National Socialism but had previously been overlooked. While the victims of euthanasia were visible, the military victims and the victims of German occupation were not, as they only became research victims after death.
You have identified victims of these groups. From whom did the brain tissue samples come from?
Weindling: They were prisoners of war, primarily from France, Belgium, the UK, Poland, and the Soviet Union. And brains were taken under German occupation. For example, in 1940/1941 typhus research was intensified in the occupied Polish territories. And Julius Hallervorden at the KWI for Brain Research in Berlin was greatly interested in the effects of typhus on the brain and therefore needed brains for this. The victims were predominantly Polish Jews.
How was it possible to access brains under National Socialism?
Weindling: There was a network of voluntary supporters. Military pathologists selected brains after an autopsy and sent them to medical military academies in Berlin. These then forwarded the brains to the KWI for Brain Research. The KWI for Psychiatry in Munich also developed contact to neuropathologists, for example in Hildburghausen in Thuringia. Both institutes found this very well organised.
Up to 2017, it was assumed that the victims of brain research were the victims of Nazi euthanasia. Now we have a more differentiated, wider view. In my area of the project on brain origins we connected the death information of victims with around 50,000 autopsies in the Federal Military Archive. We were able to identify people and clarify the circumstances of their death.
People became victims more than once?
Weindling: Yes, there was the TBC vaccine research in Kaufbeuren for example. The group at the Technical University of Munich discovered brain samples from three research victims. They were children from South Tirol that were abused for vaccine research and after their death their brains were sent to the prosector in Eglfing-Haar. This link between where the experiments took place and where the corpse parts were processed for further research are also visible in the database.
So it provides a comprehensive picture of Nazi coerced research?
Weindling: Previously the number of research victims was often speculative and their identity was not clarified. We tried to gather all victims, reconstruct their biographies – and now almost 32,000 people from different victim groups are in the database. But data on the people responsible and institutions of coerced research are also there. Thus for the first time there is an empirical foundation and a systematic representation of Nazi coerced research and the suffering this caused.
For this project you worked with the Leopoldina for years …
Weindling: I am very grateful to the Leopoldina. The necessity of my research was recognised here, it was a wonderful cooperation and the database was excellently implemented in a user-friendly way. I am happy that the data will be maintained in the long term and that the data is available to the families and for further research.
The interview was conducted by Christine Werner.