“Restoring the humanity of these objects”
Tim Simon Goldmann grapples with the difficult question of how to handle anatomical specimens from the Nazi period
Not only did the Nazi judicial system withhold the farewell letters of many execution victims, it also denied families the opportunity to bury their loved ones. Instead, their human remains were handed over to the institutes of anatomy at the universities of Munich, Innsbruck, Würzburg, or Erlangen, where they were used for teaching purposes. This was common practice at the time, explains Tim Simon Goldmann in the interview. While conducting research for his doctoral thesis in medical history, he discovered the human remains of several execution victims in the anatomical collection in Erlangen. He is now working with the Arolsen Archives to locate any surviving relatives.
Tim, how and why did you come across these human remains from the Nazi era?
In 2018, the Institute of Anatomy in Erlangen began to catalog its collection systematically. I was involved in this work as a research assistant during my medical studies. It sparked my interest in provenance research, and I decided to write my doctoral thesis on the “Fetensammlung” (foetus collection) here.
When you do provenance research, you need to look at the whole history of the anatomy department in Erlangen, because context provides useful clues. That’s how I came to find specimens from both colonial and Nazi contexts. Then, earlier this year, I sat myself down, made an inventory of all the materials that were collected during the Nazi era, and re-examined them. That’s when the microscopic specimens from Munich Stadelheim came to my attention.
What kind of specimens are we talking about?
They’re microscopic specimens – histological slides for examination under a microscope, not macroscopic specimens like whole body parts. We can’t find evidence linking macroscopic specimens to anyone who died during the Nazi era. However, some of the microscopic specimens have people’s names on them, and others include dates of execution, the age of the person concerned, and their gender. Using the Stadelheim execution files and other documents, I was able to reconstruct the identities of a number of people. Charlotte Schulz is one of them. She was arrested in Nuremberg for multiple thefts aged 19, sentenced to death, and executed at the age of 20.
Tim Goldmann conducting his research
There’s also a farewell letter written by Charlotte Schulz that was never sent…
Charlotte Schulz wrote several letters, most were addressed to her mother. These letters are preserved in the Munich State Archives and the Federal Archives in Berlin. Munich even holds an original. The information that she may have been pregnant was completely new to us. In her letters, she mentions that she had abdominal pain and that her period had stopped. That makes the whole situation even more tragic. The files note that it seemed unlikely that she was pregnant. It’s impossible to know whether this was properly investigated – in one of her letters, she mentions that she had been denied a visit to the doctor. How could they have proved she wasn’t pregnant? There were no pregnancy tests in those days.
So today, we don’t know whether she was actually pregnant at the time of her execution – but the anatomists here in Erlangen probably did. However, no records have survived. Was research conducted on her unborn child? Is the embryo still in storage somewhere? All we have is this one slide with a section of her glands. We don’t know what happened to the rest of her body. But we do know that Charlotte Schulz wasn’t given an official burial. Could there be any other specimens that just weren’t labeled? Because of the uncertainty surrounding their provenance, we must treat all the specimens from this period extremely sensitively. It’s quite possible that we will discover further specimens from Stadelheim.
Were you surprised by what you found? Had you suspected that specimens taken from victims of Nazi executions could be stored in the anatomical collection in Erlangen?
Immediately after the Second World War, the Allies made efforts to identify the corpses of foreign nationals in anatomical institutes. However, the director of the anatomical institute in Erlangen reported that the body register for the years 1933 to 1945 had been ruined by water damage. Strangely, the books covering the period from 1896 to 1933 were not affected, and are still preserved today. This raises the possibility that water damage may have been given as an excuse for destroying the register.
In the 1980s, a Germany-wide campaign was launched to address this difficult history. The government issued a formal request to all anatomical institutes, asking them to search for specimens from contexts of injustice. According to a letter, a search was indeed made for specimens from the Nazi era in Erlangen, but everything that was found was destroyed immediately – without further documentation, without making any accurate record of what was found or even recording whether anything was found. That makes things extremely difficult for us today. There simply wasn’t the same awareness we have now. The priority back then was to make sure that specimens from contexts of historical injustice were no longer used for research and teaching and to do so as quickly as possible.
Why were these collections created in the first place?
Specimens have been around for as long as the study of anatomy. In Europe, they’ve certainly been in use since the foundation of the first universities, possible for longer. They helped people to better understand the human body, and they made it possible to pass on this knowledge in a teaching context. Specimens are still used for this purpose today. Almost every student studying medicine in Germany is required to complete a dissection course. Today these specimens are taken from body donors who give their consent, while still alive, for their bodies to be used for teaching and research after their death.
But consent was not given by victims of executions?
No. Body donations on a larger scale have only existed since the late 1960s. Before then, so-called social corpses were used. These were the bodies of people who had either been executed or had no money for a funeral and died in poorhouses, sanatoriums, nursing homes, or prisons. These people were not asked for consent in advance. This was already happening before the Nazi era – there’s a clear continuity. What changed, however – especially from 1938/39 on – was the massive increase in the number of executions. A note in the files states that in 1943 Erlangen stopped taking corpses from Regensburg. This was probably because there were simply too many coming in from Munich Stadelheim.
How many of these individual’s human remains are still stored at the anatomical institute? What do you know about what happened to them?
We have evidence allowing us to clearly identify five people executed in Stadelheim who were buried. Their names can be found in the church records and burial registers of the city of Erlangen. So we know that some of their remains were buried at the Central Cemetery in Erlangen.
If I understand correctly, this research and critical reappraisal isn’t part of your doctoral thesis. Why are you continuing with this work? What’s your personal motivation for carrying on?
Personally, I think it’s essential to address such injustices. Restoring the humanity of these objects is hugely important. And it needs to come from those of us who’ve worked with the specimens. As anatomists, we must expose the injustice for what it was and acknowledge what happened. Even though the anatomical institutes didn’t murder these people, we benefited from their deaths. There’s a sensibility for that aspect now. We’re addressing this problematic past – with respect and with an awareness of the fact that these people were and still are human beings. Even if they can’t react, even if their tissues are under a microscope as teaching material, they’re still human. Nowadays, this aspect is emphasized in dissection courses for medical students.
What are you hoping to achieve? What’s your goal?
We want to find the relatives of the people concerned because we want to know what they would like to be done with the remains. As I see it, it would be an added injustice if we just left them here or, in the worst case, if we continued using them for teaching or research. I’d like them to receive a proper burial, but it’s up to the relatives. That’s why it’s so important to find them. If no next of kin can be found, or if the relatives prefer it, there is also the option of burying the remains in the anatomical institute’s memorial plot.
Is the #lostwords project helping you search for relatives?
Absolutely! I’d already started searching for relatives using church records and other archives. But the Arolsen Archives are the real experts when it comes to tracing. They have a huge archive, an amazingly valuable trove of information on the fates of victims of Nazi persecution – that’s really helpful. I expect that this collaboration will also enable us to reconstruct the identities of other people whose remains ended up in the anatomical collection: forced laborers, for example, or patients whose bodies were brought to the anatomy institute in connection with the systematic murders in nursing homes.
Has any new information come to light about Charlotte Schulz’s relatives?
Yes, she had a brother who lived in Berlin and died there during the Nazi era under unexplained circumstances. But he left a wife and a daughter, and we’re looking for them now.
Thank you for talking with us!