Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer
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Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer (1896 - 1969) was a German human biologist primarily concerned with "racial hygiene" and twin research. He was the director of the "Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre, und Eugenik" (KWIfA) ("Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics") in Berlin and the "Institut für Erbbiologie und Rasssenhygiene" ("Institute for Genetic Biology and Racial Hygiene").
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Involvement in Nazi human experimentation
He received Heinrich Himmler's permission to work in Auschwitz from 1944 on. One of Verschuer's most well-known assistants was Josef Mengele, who later on became known as Auschwitz' "Angel of Death" as the chief SS physician at the death camp.
Verschuer was never tried for war crimes despite many indications that he not only was fully cognisant of Mengele's work at Auschwitz, but even encouraged and collaborated with Mengele in some of his most grisly research. In a report to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) ("German Research Council") from 1944, Vershuer talked about Mengele's assistance in supplying the KWIfA with some "scientific materials" from Auschwitz:
- My assistant, Dr. Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) has joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employs as Hauptsturmfuehrer and camp physician in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Anthropological investigations on the most diverse racial groups of this concentration camp are being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsfuehrer [Himmler]; the blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for analysis.
Verschuer also noted in the report that the war conditions had made it difficult for the KWIfA to procure "twin materials" for study, and that Mengele's unique position at Auschwitz offered a special opportunity in this respect. In the summer of 1944, Mengele and his Jewish slave assistant Dr. Miklos Nyiszli sent other "scientific materials" to the KWIfA, including the bodies of murdered Gypsies, internal organs of dead children, skeletons of two murdered Jews, and blood samples of twins infected by Mengele with typhus.
However solid evidence of Verschuer's willing collaboration could not be established, much to the disappointment of his principle post-war Allied investigator, Leo Alexander, assigned to his case. In a letter to his wife from 1946, Alexander wrote:
- It sometimes seems as if the Nazis had taken special pains in making practically every nightmare come true. Some new evidence has come in where two doctors in Berlin, one a man and the other a woman, collected eyes of different colour. It seems that the concentration camps were combed for people whose one eye had a slightly different color than the other. Who ever [sic] was unlucky enough to possess such a pair of slightly unequal eyes had them cut out and was killed, the eyes being sent to Berlin. This is the carrying out into reality of an old gruesome German fairy tale which is included in the Tales of Hoffman, where Dr Coppelius posing as a sandman comes at night and cuts out children's eyes when they are tired. The grim part of the story is that Doctors von Verschuer and Magnussen in Berlin did prefer children and particularly twins. There is no end to this nightmare, at least 23 are being tried now and, I trust, the others will follow later.
Alexander initiated investigations into the location of the incriminating collection but could not locate it -- it had been sent to an unknown destination in Berlin and from there vanished out of sight; Alexander ruefully concluded that Verschuer had destroyed it.
Later investigators had difficulty getting hard evidence of the gruesome position they felt Verschuer had in the Holocaust. In his denazification hearing, he was eventually judged as a Nazi collaborator (Mitlaeufer) (a relatively mild categorization), fined 600 marks, and released from custody.
As the war was drawing to a close in 1945, Verschuer had moved the files of the KWIfA into the Western part of Germany, hoping for a more favorable response from the advancing Allied armies than from the advancing Soviet Army. In late 1945 or early 1946 he petitioned the mayor of Frankfurt to allow him to reestablish the KWIfA. However the commission in charge of rebuilding the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft decreed that "Verschuer should be considered not a collaborator, but one of the most dangerous Nazi activists of the Third Reich." The KWIfA was not reestablished.
In 1951, Verschuer was awarded the prestigious professorship of human genetics at the University of Muenster, where he established one of the largest centers of genetics research in West Germany. Like many "racial hygiensts" of the Nazi period, and many American eugenicists, Verschuer was successful in redefining himself as a genetics researcher after the war, and avoid the taint of his work on Nazi eugenics. Many of his wartime students were similarly appointed to top positions in universities of Erlangen, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, and Münster.
When Verschuer died in 1969 (in an automobile accident), obituaries in German scientific journals made no mention of his Nazi involvement.
Notes
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References
- Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
- Paul Weindling, "'Tales from Nuremberg': The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Allied medical war crimes policy," in Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus: Bestandaufnahme und Perspektiven der Forschung, ed. Doris Kaufmann, v.2 (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2000), 635-652.
- Nature article about KWI scientists' wartime atrocities, with images of Verschuer (http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/embor/journal/v2/n10/full/embor304.html)de:Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer