Hirnforschung im Zwielicht: Beispiele Verfuhrbarer Wissenschaft aus der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus: Julius Hallervorden, H.-J. Scherer, Berthold Ostertag (review)

Peiffer has written short biographies of three medical scholars who were active in the Third Reich: Julius Hallervorden, H.-J. Scherer, and Berthold Ostertag. Inasmuch as they merely touch on certain aspects of these scholars’ work, these are woefully incomplete biographies. (There is also the question of whether Peiffer should have written about Ostertag at all, because he was his immediate predecessor in the chair of neuropathology at Tübingen University.) What links the three men is their preoccupation with neurology or psychiatry in the Nazi period. What may separate them is the degree to which they became factually involved in Nazi medical abuse and crime, and therefore guilty. These related issues are inadequately addressed in the present volume.

Of the three scholars, Hallervorden is the best known. The received wisdom is that he used the brains of Nazi victims, mostly euthanized, to enrich his potential for research. If heretofore it has been uncertain whether Hallervorden actually encouraged or witnessed killings for his scientific benefit, Peiffer can shed no new light on this question. Even on the basis of what new evidence he has, the consensus must remain that Hallervorden did what he asserted after the war—namely, not cause any killings. Another question, on which the author cannot be the final judge, is whether Hallervorden became guilty through his knowledge that the brains he used for research were those of innocent victims. But Peiffer does correctly observe that Hallervorden’s attempt, and that of some of his postwar colleagues, to compare the brains of these Nazi victims with those of legally executed persons, is unacceptable on ethical grounds. And what was “legal” in the Third Reich?

Scherer acquired a neuropathological laboratory in Breslau in 1942. Peiffer gives the impression (but, in my understanding, never proves) that Scherer may have been a political victim of the regime then. At its beginning he emigrated to Belgium, only to return to the Reich during the war. In re-establishing his position as a medical scientist in the final phase of Nazi Germany and participating in euthanasia on its periphery, Scherer indubitably became guilty—but Peiffer suggests that he may have been under pressure from the Gestapo. Why, exactly? Since Scherer died at the very end of the war during a bombing raid, he never answered for his actions.

Ostertag had spent time in the prefascist Freikorps and became a member of the Nazi paramilitary in April 1933. He later made friends with Max De Crinis, a psychiatrist and rabid Nazi who was in charge of all medical appointments at German universities. Ostertag joined the Nazi party and from Berlin, where he worked in various institutions, began an association with Hohenlychen Clinic, where Himmler’s personal physicians conducted some of the most heinous experiments on concentration camp inmates (as well as curing some party grandees). Among other possible crimes, pathologist Ostertag conducted autopsies of children killed through euthanasia in Berlin-Wittenau. Ostertag, who had never managed to attain a full professorship even in Nazi times, was denazified in 1950; in 1960 he was appointed an associate professor of neuropathology in Tübingen.

Peiffer’s brief sketches whet the appetite of the reader for more, and I wonder about the wisdom of publishing what seem like half-finished studies on three separate Nazi scholars in a mere ninety-seven pages. Peiffer, who is now emeritus, could have gone to the trouble of writing full-scale biographies of these tainted colleagues, thereby answering more fully many of the questions he has justifiedly, but only tentatively, raised. He appears to have many of the original documents in his personal possession, and there are more in German university archives and the former Berlin Document Center (now Bundesarchiv, Aussenstelle Zehlendorf). In the end, the reader’s impression is one of merely partial fulfillment and many open questions, in cases...