On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. The Nazi regime aimed to lead the German “master race” to victory in a racial struggle against those it deemed inferior, especially Jews. The German medical profession played a central role in shaping and implementing Nazi policies, and many doctors became involved in the regime’s crimes.
Some German physicians welcomed the Nazi regime because it supported their beliefs about racial hygiene. Others joined to advance their careers. Among them were about 200 German doctors who, from 1942, conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent.
One such doctor was August Hirt, a fanatical Nazi and a world-renowned professor of anatomy. Hirt was born on April 28, 1898, in Mannheim, then part of the German Empire. Although he was the son of a Swiss businessman and held Swiss citizenship, he volunteered to fight on the German side during World War I. In October 1916, he was wounded in the upper jaw by a bullet and received the Iron Cross, Second Class.
After the war ended in November 1918, Hirt studied medicine at Heidelberg University. In 1921, he gained German citizenship, and the following year he obtained his doctorate in medicine. He worked at the Anatomical Institute in Heidelberg and became a professor there in 1930.
In September 1932, Hirt joined the Militant League for German Culture, a nationalistic and anti-Semitic political society. In April 1933, he became a member of the SS. Four years later, in May 1937, he joined the Nazi Party. He married, and the marriage produced a son and a daughter.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. By that time, Hirt had become an SS medical chief. After the German invasion of France and other Western countries in May 1940, he became the director of the new Institute of Anatomy at the Reich University in Strasbourg.
Hirt despised Jews and Communists. He aimed to create a collection of skulls from what he called “Judeo-Bolsheviks” for his racial research. He believed the Jewish population was on the verge of extinction and wanted to compile a collection of their skulls while it was still possible.
He proposed this project to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. Hirt argued that there were comprehensive collections of skulls from nearly all races and peoples except the Jews. He claimed the war in the East provided an opportunity to address this gap by obtaining the skulls of Jewish Bolsheviks, whom he described as the “disgusting but characteristic subhumans.”
Hirt’s plan went beyond skulls. He aimed to gather complete Jewish skeletons. Himmler approved the project, allowing Hirt to begin his so-called medical experiments.
Working with colleagues, Hirt selected individuals from among the Auschwitz inmates to create an anatomical specimen collection. He proposed using a small-scale gas chamber to murder the selected individuals, keeping their corpses intact, and shipping them immediately to the Anatomy Institute in Strasbourg for casts and skeletons.
For this purpose, Hirt chose Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. It was the only concentration camp established by the Germans in the territory of pre-war France, located about 50 kilometers southwest of Strasbourg. Prisoners worked in nearby granite quarries and on construction projects. By the fall of 1944, there were about 7,000 prisoners in the main camp and more than 20,000 in sub-camps.
Natzweiler-Struthof was a labor camp, a transit camp, and, as the war went on, a place of execution. Many prisoners died from the exertions of their labor and malnutrition. An estimated 22,000 deaths occurred there.
Hirt directed that 115 persons be selected for measurements: 79 Jewish men, 30 Jewish women, two Poles, and four Asians. They were selected from among the inmates in August 1943 and quarantined to protect them from a typhus epidemic. Of those initially selected, 86 inmates were transported to Natzweiler-Struthof from Auschwitz. Forty-six of these individuals were originally from Thessaloniki, Greece.
To improve their appearance for the body casts, the victims were fed reasonably well. One male victim was shot as he fought to keep from being gassed. Eighty-six prisoners, 57 men and 29 women, were divided into four groups and gassed on August 11, 13, 17, and 19, 1943.
The gas chamber was built under the command of Josef Kramer, then the commandant of Natzweiler-Struthof. Kramer directed the murder operation and watched the victims’ death throes through a window.
The inmates’ bodies were returned to Hirt at the anatomical laboratory of the Reich University in Strasbourg. There, they were prepared as an anthropological display, including taking body casts and preparing skeletons. The project was meant to prove the alleged racial inferiority of the so-called Jewish race and to emphasize that Jews were subhumans and Germans were superhumans.
The project was never completed. On June 6, 1944, under the code name Operation Overlord, Allied troops crossed the English Channel and landed on the beaches of Normandy. This operation, known as D-Day, was the largest amphibious invasion in history. More than 160,000 Allied troops, 50,000 vehicles, about 5,000 naval craft, and more than 11,500 aircraft supported the initial invasion.
By the end of June 1944, more than 850,000 troops had come ashore in Normandy. In September 1944, the rapid approach of the Allies led to the abandonment of Hirt’s project. Himmler ordered the destruction of all traces of the compromising collection.
That order was not completed. The corpses had not been removed, and the skeletons had not been prepared. The bodies, some of which were beheaded, were preserved in formalin and hidden in the basement of the Anatomy Institute, where they were later discovered.
At Natzweiler-Struthof, Hirt also performed other experiments. In 1943, he exposed camp prisoners to mustard gas to test possible antidotes. A former Dutch inmate testified during the Nuremberg doctors’ trial that between April and May 1943, a blistering substance had been smeared on the forearms of 15 inmates. The substance inflicted terrible festering wounds that spread to the whole body and caused some inmates to go blind. Three inmates died in horrible pain within a couple of days.
During an Allied bombing raid on Strasbourg in September 1944, Hirt’s wife and son were killed. After the liberation of Strasbourg by the U.S. 7th Army in November 1944, Hirt fled with his daughter to the south of Germany. He stayed there until the occupation of the region by the Allies.
Following the liberation of Strasbourg, the French Military Tribunal began an investigation. After unsuccessful attempts to identify the victims, the French military, which controlled Strasbourg, buried the bodies in a mass grave at the local Jewish cemetery.
August Hirt was never tried for his crimes. He was 47 years old when he committed suicide on June 2, 1945, in the Black Forest. He was tried in absentia for his crimes at a military war crimes trial in Metz on December 23, 1953. His suicide was not known in Switzerland, and the search for Hirt continued until the late 1950s.
His death was finally confirmed in the mid-1960s when the Israeli intelligence service Mossad had his body exhumed, and an Israeli pathologist conclusively identified the bones.
The names of the victims remained unknown for decades. In the 1990s, however, Dr. Hans-Joachim Lang, who studied the war crimes committed by Hirt, attempted to determine the identities of the victims in the Jewish skeletal collection. He found archives at the Reich University in Strasbourg, located at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, including a handwritten copy of the numbers recorded by Hirt’s assistant, Henri Pierre.
At the Nuremberg doctors’ trial in 1946, Pierre testified that he noted the numbers tattooed on the corpses brought to the Institute and kept a secret record of them hidden in the apartment of a romantic interest. Together with archives at Auschwitz concentration camp and Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, Lang was able to identify all 86 victims, including their names, occupations, and places of origin.
In December 2005, a memorial was erected at the Jewish cemetery in Strasbourg with the names of the 86 victims. A memorial plaque listing the names of the victims was placed outside the Anatomy Institute at Strasbourg’s University Hospital in 2015. Additional remains of Hirt’s victims were found at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Strasbourg. They were buried alongside the other victims in the Jewish cemetery in Strasbourg.