Nazi era | Database commemorates victims of human experiments

Ruth Borisch was allowed to slowly starve to death before science took hold of her. The 13-year-old, critically ill girl, unable to stand or feed herself from birth, endured an odyssey through nursing homes before arriving at the Brandenburg-Görden State Institution in June 1938. There, like many other patients, she was systematically neglected, lost increasing amounts of weight, and finally died in March 1940. Subsequently, specimens of her brain were made and placed in a scientific collection at the Institute for Brain Research of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Berlin-Buch, headed by Julius Hallervorden.

Eighty-five years after her death, Ruth Borisch's name appears in a database that lists 30,246 other victims of forced medical research during the Nazi era. These include concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war, forced laborers, and Polish Jews who were subjected to human experiments or whose bodies were used for research after their murder. According to Herwig Czech of the Medical University of Vienna, at least 1,350 of those named fell victim to the Nazis' euthanasia program, cynically referred to as "euthanasia." The systematic killings in sanatoriums and nursing homes were ordered by the Reich Ministry of the Interior on August 18, 1939.

Exactly 86 years later, scientists from the Max Planck Society and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina presented the database. It is the result of an international collaborative project running since 2017 and, according to Leopoldina President Bettina Rockenbach, is intended to serve as both a "memorial" for the victims and a virtual place for reflection and a warning: Science must not "again become an accomplice to injustice."

The database sheds light on scientific institutions such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society's Institutes for Brain Research and Human Genetics . These exemplify the "entanglement of medicine, bioscientific research, and National Socialist racial ideology," says Rockenbach. When the institutes were taken over by the Max Planck Society, founded in 1948, after the Nazi era, there was no fresh start. Rather, there was "great personnel continuity," and the activities during the Nazi era were "covered up and kept quiet," says Czech.

"This is an exemplary illustration of the entanglement of medicine, bioscientific research, and National Socialist racial ideology."

Bettina Rockenbach President Leopoldina

Justus Hallervorden's collection of brain specimens was also used well into the 1980s. Only then did research reveal that many came from victims of the Nazi "euthanasia" program. A commission investigated similar cases nationwide. In 1990, corresponding specimens were "buried with dignity" in Munich's Waldfriedhof Cemetery, says Heinz Wässle, former director of the Institute for Brain Research, now based in Frankfurt am Main.

The database now clearly illustrates the magnitude of the crimes. In addition to the more than 30,000 names of the victims, it also lists the places where they suffered and the names of the scientists involved. There was "feverish research activity" during the Nazi years, partly to advance the war, partly for career reasons, says Paul Weindling of the University of Oxford. His more than two decades of meticulous research contributed significantly to the creation of the database. At its presentation, Weindling also recounted how difficult his undertaking had been right up until the very end. For example, the Federal Archives in Koblenz "rather hindered" his research and temporarily withdrew his permission to take photographs. Research in Germany and Austria is often stalled by citing the EU Data Protection Regulation; exemptions have to be laboriously negotiated.

Weinding's persistence is also to thank for the fact that the database has now been activated. Two volumes containing the project's scientific findings and two memorial books are also scheduled to be published in 2026. In 2028, the memorial site at Munich's Waldfriedhof Cemetery is to be redesigned and supplemented with the now-known names of the victims. Wässle says the aim is to keep the memory of the victims "alive and alive so that something similar never happens again."