Officials from the University of Vienna have apologised for failing to investigate the university's involvement with Nazism. They have also promised to research archives in Germany and the United States to determine the origin of the cadavers used for illustrations in an anatomy textbook by Eduard Pernkopf.
Picture (right): Eduard Pernkopf (second from right) wrote Nazi anatomy textbook
Dr Pernkopf was head of the university's medical faculty after the Anschluss in 1938, and rector during 1943-5. Last year two doctors alleged in a letter to JAMA that the cadavers in Dr Pernkopf's textbook Topographische Anatomie des Menschen were the victims of political terror (7 December 1996, p 1422).
"As a human being and as a representative of the University of Vienna, I am ashamed by the university's culpable involvement in the horrors of Nazism," said the current university rector, Alfred Ebenbauer, at a press conference last week.
The university, the Jewish community, and a group representing Austrians who resisted Nazism will conduct the new inquiry, which is expected to take about a year. The results will be published, and the university will try to ensure that a foreword is attached to the Pernkopf textbook.
Although victims of the concentration camps are thought not to be among those depicted in the book, the university's anatomy department is known regularly to have received the corpses of people executed by the Nazis. Wolfgang Neugebauer, a historian who heads the archive documenting Austrian resistance to the Nazis, said that his organisation knows of at least two Austrians killed by the Nazis whose bodies or body parts were used by the department.
The university's dean of the medical faculty, Wolfgang Schuetz, apologised for not having conducted any research into the events of the Nazi era, "which were largely repressed and forgotten, like much else in an era linked also with a unique and tragic exodus of faculty members" - the Jews expelled from the university by Dr Pernkopf under the Nazi Nuremberg race laws.
Dr Howard Israel, an oral surgeon at Columbia University, New York, and coauthor of the letter to JAMA, said that the University of Vienna's apology and investigation was "a very significant development ... Furthermore, this is a historic initiative when viewed in the context of Austria's post world war II period."
