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WAR

‘They were denied a grave’: Microscopic remains of Nazi victims given final resting place

More than 300 tiny pieces of human tissue from political prisoners executed by the Nazis and dissected for research were buried Monday at a Berlin cemetery, more than 70 years after World War II ended.

'They were denied a grave': Microscopic remains of Nazi victims given final resting place
Archive photo from 1997 shows Bundeswehr soldiers laying a wreath for war victims at the Berlin-Plötzensee memorial. Photo: DPA

The samples – each a hundredth of a millimetre thin and about a square centimetre in size – were uncovered on microscopic glass plates by the descendants of the Third Reich anatomy professor Hermann Stieve.

Stieve dissected and researched the bodies of inmates killed at the Berlin Plötzensee jail, including those of executed resistance fighters – in part to examine the physical impact of fear experienced by women.

A ceremony was held, with descendants of the victims expected to attend, before the remains were finally laid to rest at 2pm at the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in central Berlin with a Catholic and a Protestant priest and a rabbi present.

Descendents of the victims attended a multi-religious ceremony, before the remains were finally laid to rest at Berlin's Dorotheenstadt cemetery on Monday afternoon.

Saskia von Brockdorff, whose mother Erika von Brockdorff was murdered at Plötzensee, told AFP the burial provided “good closure”.

“Now I know where I can mourn my mother, because she was executed on May 13th, 1943, and we always went to Plötzensee (to mourn her). But that's not really a good place to remember her, at least not for my soul. I'm now glad I can come here,” said the 81-year-old.

The grave is near an existing memorial to victims of the Nazis. The samples were interred in one small coffin measuring 30cm x 30cm x 40cm.

“With the burial of the microscopic specimens… we want to take a step toward giving the victims back their dignity,” said Karl Max Einhaeupl, the head of Berlin's university hospital Charite.

He said the burial was part of a historical project by the hospital to confront its role in the medical profession's difficult relationship with Nazism.

The burial site had been picked as there are many graves and memorials for the victims of Nazism there, said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial Centre, which is organizing the special event with Charite.

Tuchel said the human tissue samples were among “the last remains of people who were victims of the Nazis' unjust justice system… They were denied a grave at that time, and so today, a burial is a matter of course.”

SEE ALSO: Remains of Nazi prisoners to be buried in Berlin decades after war

Noose and guillotine

More than 2,800 people held at Berlin-Plötzensee prison were put to the guillotine or hanged between 1933 and 1945, and most were then sent for dissection at the Berlin Institute of Anatomy.

Stieve was the institute's director from 1935 to 1952 and carried out controversial research on the female reproductive system.

Hermann Stieve. Photo: Wikicommons

Humiliating the victims

Crucially for the history books, the microscopic remains provided rare concrete proof that prisoners' bodies were sent for dissection.

Winkelmann said the Nazis had sent the bodies to Stieve for dissection “not because they wanted to back Stieve's research, but because it was a way to humiliate the victims once again”.

“First, by sending them to anatomy — something that not everyone wants… and it was also a way to deny the victims a grave,” Winkelmann, a professor at Brandenburg Medical School's Institute of Anatomy, told AFP.

Adolf Hitler's regime sought to dump the remains of executed prisoners in unmarked mass graves because it did not want sites where relatives could mourn the victims, and from where political demonstrations could ensue.

Most of the 300 specimens found in Stieve's estate stemmed from women, adds a plaque to commemorate them, which does however not list the names of individual victims at the request of relatives.

Among those executed at Plötzensee were 42 resistance fighters from the Berlin group Red Orchestra. Stieve is believed to have dissected at least 13 of 18 executed female Red Orchestra fighters.

He was never charged with a crime and continued his medical career after the war like many other scientists who collaborated with the Nazis.

Only the highest-ranking physicians under the Third Reich were prosecuted at Nuremberg in the so-called Doctors' trial for grotesque human experimentation and mass murder under the “euthanasia” programme.

By Hui Min Neo

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NAZIS

German justice contaminated by Nazis in post-war years

Germany's justice system was still filled with former Nazis well into the 1970s, as the Cold War coloured efforts to root out fascists, according a damning official inquiry presented Thursday.

Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report "State Security in the Cold War". Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Uwe Anspach

In the 600-page collection of findings entitled “State Security in the Cold War”, historian Friedrich Kiessling and legal scholar Christoph Safferling focused on the period from the early 1950s until 1974.

Their research found that between 1953 and 1959, around three in four top officials at the federal prosecutor’s office, which commissioned the report, had belonged to the Nazi party.

More than 80 percent had worked in Adolf Hitler’s justice apparatus, and it would take until 1972 before they were no longer in the majority.

“On the face of it they were highly competent lawyers… but that came against the backdrop of the death sentences and race laws in which they were involved,” said Margaretha Sudhof, state secretary at the justice ministry, unveiling the report.

“These are disturbing contradictions to which our country has long remained blind.”

‘Combat mission’

It was not until 1992, two years after Germany’s national reunification, that the last prosecutor with a fascist background left the office.

“There was no break, let alone a conscious break, with the Nazi past” at the federal prosecutor’s office, the authors concluded, stressing “the great and long continuity” of the functions held and “the high number” of officials involved in Hitler’s regime.

Chief federal prosecutor Peter Frank commissioned the study in 2017. The federal prosecutor’s office is one of Germany’s most powerful institutions, handling the most serious national security cases including those involving terrorism and espionage.

With more than 100 prosecutors, it is “the central actor in the fight against terror,” the report authors said, underlining its growing role in the decades since the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States.

The researchers were given unfettered access to hundreds of files labelled classified after the war, and found that rooting out alleged communists was often prioritised over other threats, including from the far right.

“In the 1950s the federal prosecutor’s office had a combat mission – not a legal but a political one: to pursue all the communists in the country,” the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung said in a summary of the report.

‘Recycling’ Nazis

The fact that West Germany widely used former officials from the Nazi regime in its post-war administration had long been known.

For example, Hans Globke served as chief of staff and a trusted confidant to former conservative West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer between 1953 and 1963 and was responsible for recruitment to top posts.

However, Globke had also been a senior civil servant in the Nazi-era interior ministry and was involved in the drafting of the 1935 Nuremberg race laws that imposed the first dramatic restrictions on Jews.

In recent years, systematic digging into the past of key ministries and institutions has unearthed a troubling and previously hidden degree of “recycling” of Third Reich officials in the post-war decades.

A 2016 government report revealed that in 1957, more than a decade after the war ended, around 77 percent of senior officials at the justice ministry had been members of the Nazi party. That study, also carried out by Safferling, revealed that the number of former Nazis at the ministry did not decline after the fall of the regime but actually grew in the 1950s.

Part of the justification was cynical pragmatism: the new republic needed experienced civil servants to establish the West German justice system. Furthermore, the priorities of the Allies who won the war and “liberated” the country from the Nazis were quickly turned upside down in the Cold War context.

After seeking to de-Nazify West Germany after 1945, the aim quickly shifted to building a capitalist bulwark against the communist threat. That approach often meant turning a blind eye to Germans’ previous involvement in the Third Reich.

In recent years, Germany has embarked on a twilight attempt to provide justice for concentration camp victims, placing several former guards in their 90s on trial for wartime crimes.

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