Eduard Pernkopf

Eduard Pernkopf (24 November 1888 – 17 April 1955) was an Austrian professor of anatomy who later served as rector of the University of Vienna, his . He is best known for his seven-volume anatomical atlas, (translated as Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy; often colloquially known as the Pernkopf Atlas or just Pernkopf), prepared by Pernkopf and four artists over a 20-year period. While it is considered a scientific and artistic masterpiece, with many of its color plates reprinted in other publications and textbooks, it has been in recent years found that Pernkopf and the artists working for him, all of them ardent Nazis, used executed political prisoners as their subjects.

Early life Pernkopf was born in 1888 in the Lower Austria village of Rappottenstein. The youngest of three sons, he seemed to be considering a career in music upon his completion of the Gymnasium in Horn. However, the death of his father, the village's doctor, in 1903 led him to pursue medicine instead, as his father's death caused the family considerable hardship that a career as a physician was more likely to reverse. In 1912 he received his medical degree. All of the Jewish faculty were removed this way,

Four days after becoming dean, he gave a speech to the medical faculty advocating Nazi racial hygiene theories and policies and urging his fellow physicians to implement them in their teaching and practice. They should those whose heredity is more valuable and whose biological constitution due to heredity gives the promise of healthy offspring [and prevent] offspring to those who are racially inferior and of those who do not belong." More specifically, he said, the latter could be accomplished by "the exclusion of those who are racially inferior from the propagation of their offspring by means of sterilization and other means," language that has been seen as anticipating both the Nazi euthanasia programs and the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of European Jews and Roma. As he had begun his speech with "Heil Hitler!" and a Nazi salute, praising Hitler as "a son of Austria who had to leave Austria in order to bring it back into the family of German-speaking nations", he returned to that theme in his conclusion:

To him who is the proclaimer of National Socialist thought and the new way of looking at the world and in whom the legend of history has blossomed and has awakened and who has the heroic spirit within him, the greatest son of our homeland, we wish to give our gratitude and also to say that we doctors with our whole life and our whole soul gladly wish to serve him. So may our call express only what each of us feels from the bottom of his heart; Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil!, Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! His days began at 5 a.m., when he left notes in shorthand for his wife to type. These became the descriptive text that accompanied the images.

The first volume of the atlas was published in 1937. It was large enough that it required two books, one devoted to anatomy in general and the other covering more specifically the chest and pectoral limbs. Four years later, in 1941, the second volume, likewise requiring two books, came out. It covered the abdomen, pelvis and pelvic limbs.

Later life In 1943, Pernkopf reached the pinnacle of the academic career ladder when he was named the University of Vienna's rector, its highest official. He continued to serve in those positions until World War II ended two years later, with the surrender of Germany, including Austria. His fortunes changed radically as a result. which outlined the Nazi takeover of the university and highlighted the human experimentation that followed, including the role of Pernkopf himself. The medical school at the university, which had formerly had difficulty finding cadavers for dissection, received a regular supply after 1933. In 1996, Howard Israel, an oral surgeon at Columbia University, revealed that the subject bodies may have in some cases been those of executed political prisoners, LGBT men and women, Roma, and Jews. Sabine Hildebrandt, a Michigan anatomy professor and German native who has researched Pernkopf and other Nazi-era anatomists, has suggested that 26% of the bodies supplied to the university were execution victims.

With the help of other parties, Israel directed a request to the University of Vienna to investigate the issue. This resulted in the 1997 establishment of the Senatorial Project of the University of Vienna titled "Studies in Anatomical Science in Vienna from 1938 to 1945". The project confirmed that at least 1,377 bodies of executed persons were delivered to the university during the Nazi era and that their use cannot be excluded from at least 800 images in the atlas. As a result, the atlas' publisher directed that an insert noting this possibility be mailed to all libraries holding the book, and stopped printing new copies.

Some readers have wondered if the bodies shown in cutaway may have been Jewish inmates at concentration camps, since they appear gaunt and have shaved heads or close-cropped haircuts.

Further, proponents have said that paintings in the atlas are artistic masterpieces regardless of the politics of the artists. Finally, forcing it out of circulation would be no less an act of censorship than that perpetrated by Hitler's regime when it publicly burned books shortly after assuming power.

Some of the scientists who were involved in bringing the activities of Pernkopf and other Nazi-era anatomists to light have advocated for the atlas' continued use. can remind us of suffering not only in the past but in the present, that we may be more compassionate physicians, more compassionate citizens of the world," says Garrett Riggs, a Florida neurologist and medical historian. ban could not atone the great evil committed by human beings on other human beings," Hildebrandt argues. "Rather, it is up to a new human generation to glean good from this murky history by continuing to use Pernkopf's atlas in a rational, historically conscious manner." "In this sense he was an indirect perpetrator in the execution of the victims, but a direct perpetrator in the subsequent processing and pillaging of the bodies." Following the theories of bioethicist Charles A. Foster, he sees the anatomist's fundamental crime as a violation of his subjects' dignity. He concludes: