Historical project on victim research
Brain research at institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the context of the injustices committed under National Socialism
Since 2017, a major historical research project has been analysing thousands of brain specimens from the collections of the Max Planck Institutes for Brain Research and Psychiatry. These microscopic samples were taken from victims of the Nazi regime. The project aims to identify the victims and – once complete – to ensure their remains, which were misused for research, are buried with dignity, in consultation with their families and victims’ associations. The existing memorial at the Waldfriedhof Cemetery in Munich, established in 1990, will be expanded and redesigned. From 2026, a database, academic publications and commemorative books will provide detailed information and help preserve the memory of the victims and their stories.
Historical background
The emergence of brain research as a modern scientific discipline in the late 19th century led to an increasing number of brain specimens and slices being produced and collected from both animals and humans. These became key methodological tools for describing and analysing the brain’s structure, function, development and pathological changes. Brain slices are still used today in pathology, neuroscience and psychiatry. However, digital imaging techniques now offer a far more comprehensive means of analysing the brain and its structure.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin and the Institute of Psychiatry in Munich – both of which became Max Planck Institutes in 1948 – had been collecting brain specimens for research purposes since the 1920s. At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, this work was primarily carried out by the neuropathology department under Julius Hallervorden, during the directorship of Hugo Spatz. At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry, it was the brain pathology department led by Willibald Scholz, under the direction of Ernst Rüdin.
Under National Socialism, both Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes became ruthless profiteers of a regime that murdered millions of people for racist and eugenic reasons. Between 1939 and 1945, both institutes received a large number of brains from victims of the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme: the systematic murder of institutionalized patients in psychiatric hospitals and other care facilities. In the so-called ‘paediatric euthanasia’ programme, around 5,000 children were murdered by means of drug overdoses. As part of ‘Aktion T4’, more than 70,000 psychiatric patients were deported to killing centres between 1940 and 1941. Researchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Brain Research and Psychiatry were not only accomplices and beneficiaries of these crimes – they also contributed to their scientific legitimisation through their histopathological research.
Suppression of the Nazi past
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Julius Hallervorden’s involvement in the so-called ‘euthanasia’ murders was discussed during the Nuremberg Trials, but attracted little public attention in post-war Germany. The Max Planck Society likewise preferred concealment and suppression, and the researchers implicated from the two Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, along with the institutes themselves, were quietly absorbed into the Max Planck Society.
In 1984, the historian and journalist Götz Aly was able to prove that the collections of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt contained brain specimens from ‘euthanasia’ victims. In early 1989, Aly reported on Hallervorden’s collection and the Max Planck Society’s opposition to his research in an article published in Die Zeit. Shortly beforehand, the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the German federal states had decided, in response to international pressure, to remove all specimens of potential Nazi victims from the collections of German universities. Following this, the Max Planck Society resolved to bury the specimens.
Burial of the brain specimens in 1990 and the beginning of processing the past
In 1989, the Directors of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Wolf Singer and Heinz Wässle, decided to have all specimens from Hallervorden’s collections dating from 1933 to 1945 buried. However, this was done without clarifying the origins of the specimens or identifying the possible victims. The related medical records were transferred to the Archives of the Max Planck Society for future historical examination.
At the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, the Director at the time, Georg W. Kreutzberg, instructed his colleague Elisabeth Rothemund to remove all specimens suspected to be from victims within the extensive Munich brain specimen collection, with the intention of burying them. Thus, while in Frankfurt the slate was wiped clean – at least from the perspective of that time – the approach in Munich was more selective. However, there too the origins of the brain specimens and the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the patients from whom they came were not investigated.
In 1990, around 150,000 brain specimens, believed to originate from approximately 4,000 individuals, were buried at Munich’s Waldfriedhof Cemetery. Since then, a memorial stone has stood in commemoration of the victims. In his speech at the memorial service on 25 May 1990, the then President of the Max Planck Society, Heinz Staab, called for a ‘self-imposed limitation on research’.
The Memorial to the Victims of Brain Research in Berlin-Buch was erected in 2000 by the Max Planck Society, the Max Delbrück Center and the German Research Foundation. In 1997, his successor, Hubert Markl, initiated a comprehensive campaign to confront the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. As part of this effort, the histories of the bioscientific institutes and their complicity in Nazi crimes were also thoroughly investigated, including those of the two Max Planck Institutes for Brain Research and Psychiatry. In 2000, the Max Planck Society, together with the Max Delbrück Center and the German Research Foundation, erected a memorial at the former site of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch to honour the victims of the ‘euthanasia’ campaigns whose remains had been misused in brain research.
New discoveries in 2015 and overall review
In 2015, Heinz Wässle, Director Emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, was conducting research in the Archives of the Max Planck Society in Berlin when he came across a hundred brain specimens dating from the period 1938 to 1967. He quickly identified them as part of the collection of Julius Hallervorden and the former Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research. The specimens had only entered the Archives in 2001, when they were donated by the Neurological Institute of the University Hospital in Frankfurt (Edinger Institute). It soon became clear that these were previously unknown brain slices taken from victims of the ‘euthanasia’ programme.
In response to this discovery, the then President of the Max Planck Society, Martin Stratmann, established a commission to investigate all Max Planck Institutes to determine whether any other specimens from possible Nazi victims were still being held. In addition to the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry also came under scrutiny. An inspection in 2016 confirmed suspicions that brains and brain specimens from Nazi victims were still stored there. These had already been identified as suspect cases in the 1990s and should therefore have been buried.
The wider review found no evidence of specimens from Nazi victims at other Max Planck Institutes.
The victim research project
To thoroughly clarify the provenance of all brain specimens held in the Max Planck Society’s collections, the Presidential Committee proposed in spring 2016 that a group of independent experts be commissioned to conduct a comprehensive research project. As a result, the project Brain Research at Institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the Context of National Socialist Crimes: Brain Specimens at Institutes of the Max Planck Society and the Identification of Victims was established.
Since 2017, the project has been led by Herwig Czech of the Medical University of Vienna and Paul J. Weindling of the Department of History, Philosophy and Religion at Oxford Brookes University. Gerrit Hohendorf, from the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine at the Technical University of Munich, was also involved from the outset until his death in 2021. He was succeeded as project leader by Philipp Rauh, also from the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine at the Technical University of Munich. Patricia Heberer-Rice of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. and Volker Roelcke of the Institute for the History of Medicine at the University of Giessen are serving as advisers to the project.
The Max Planck Society has provided €5 million in funding for the project since 2017. According to the interim report published in 2023, the research team has already succeeded in identifying the majority of the specimens examined. The final results are expected to be published in summer 2026. In 2025, the first major outcome was the launch of the Victims of Medical Research under National Socialism database, which documents about 2,000 victims by name and provides a foundation for further research into their fates
Restoring the victims’ names
This achievement marked progress toward one of the project’s central goals: clarifying the origins of brain specimens that came into the possession of institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm and Max Planck Societies during the Nazi era as well as identifying the victims and reconstructing their individual biographies. The misuse of brain specimens for research purposes – believed to have continued into the 1970s – is likewise being investigated. Another key objective is to reconstruct the research networks, both before and after 1945, that enabled such unethical practices. All of this information is now accessible through the victim database.
The project places the victims and their fates at its centre. Its aim is to restore their identities and, in doing so, return a measure of their dignity. This goal aligns with the Max Planck Society’s revised approach to addressing its institutional past. A central element of this approach is the dignified burial of the brain specimens at the Waldfriedhof Cemetery in Munich. In the coming years, the existing burial site, established in 1990, will be redesigned for this purpose. The intention is to create a place of remembrance that also provides historical context and encourages reflection on ethical issues in science.
A place of learning and remembrance will also be established at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, to continue historical research beyond the current project and to support educational work on the history of medicine and scientific ethics.
Since 1990, a memorial stone at the Waldfriedhof Cemetery in Munich has commemorated the victims of unethical research.