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Prosecutors can seldom choose their key witnesses - they have to use the ones available.
On December 18, 1946, an Alsatian named Henri Henripierre took the stand against 20 seriously incriminated Nazi medics and three other defendants in the Nuremberg doctors' trial.
Before the US military court, the 41-year-old showed a great need for communication.
Without being asked, he explained to the presiding judge Walter B. Beals and his assessors that he had come to Nuremberg "solely inspired by the desire to fulfill my duties and obligations and to serve justice".
And he added, "I owe this to the 86 victims we received in August 1943."
In the course of the interrogations, Henripierre repeatedly referred to the 86 victims, leaving the prosecutor no other choice to question him about them.
The key witness stated that the aim was to set up a “racial anthropological” museum in Strasbourg.
In order to build up its collection, the 86 victims were murdered in the gas chamber of the Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace.
The fence of the Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace
Source: Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
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According to Henripierre, who has been director of the Anatomical Institute of the "Reich University of Strasbourg" since 1941, the driving force behind this horrific crime was a doctor named August Hirt.
However, he was not among the defendants at the Nuremberg Trial, because he had committed suicide in the summer of 1945.
Henripierre had been brought to Strasbourg from a concentration camp to work in the anatomical institute.
In this form, Henripierre's story went down in the collective memory.
In France in particular, the murder of 86 people for the “Strasbourg skull collection” is one of the most notorious Nazi crimes.
The murder of 86 times was actually committed - just one of countless Nazi crimes.
But almost everything else about Henripierre's statement was wrong: he was neither a victim of the Nazi occupation of France, nor was August Hirt the driving force of the crime (albeit in numerous other, at least as heinous crimes).
And the crime had nothing to do with a museum planned for Strasbourg.
A lot can be learned from Josef Mengele's skull
Forensics students in Sao Paulo, Brazil, are given very special visual aids: the skull of the concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele.
It has some very special features.
Source: The World
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This is what the historian Julien Reitzenstein has now set out in his book "The SS-Ahnenerbe and the 'Strasbourg skull collection'". Henripierre, born in 1905 in Alsace, Germany, then bore at least three different names over the course of his life. Reitzenstein found the certificate with the corresponding updates in the mayor's office of the home community. The illegitimate child was initially registered as Heinrich Sigrist. Then the presumably biological father Heinrich Henrypierre confessed to his son, who from then on was also called Heinrich. Variants in name forms alone, then as now, do not yet make anyone implausible.
In contrast to another name change.
Henripierre, who had been a French citizen since 1918 with the first name "Henri" instead of "Heinrich" and had lived in Paris since 1928, wanted to return to his homeland in 1941.
But Alsace was again annexed by Germany, as it was from 1871 to 1918.
That is why he had to submit an application to the "Immigration Center", a facility of the widely ramified SS apparatus.
In writing, "Heinrich" Henripierre again acknowledged the "German nationality".
Extract from the birth certificate of Henri Henrypierre, on which his renaming to Heinrich Heinzpeter is noted
Source: public domain
In Strasbourg he applied for his surname to be changed to "Heinzpeter", which was approved on December 21, 1942.
From now on he was called "Heinrich Heinzpeter", and under this name the SS-Ahnenerbe employed him as an assistant in the Institute for Anatomy - for the scarce monthly salary of 50 Reichsmarks.
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When Strasbourg was liberated at the end of November 1944, Henripierre and a colleague were taken prisoner in the US.
When this became known in Berlin, the SS-Ahnenerbe noted in a letter dated February 19, 1945 that no salary was to be paid to "Messrs Otto Bong and Heinrich Heinzpeter".
If the US prosecutors at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial had known that their key witness had worked for the SS, that he had applied for German citizenship as a Frenchman and that he had professed "German nationality": They would probably have waived his testimony and had him arrested instead .
Why the whole thing?
Why did Henri alias Heinrich Henripierre alias Heinzpeter thrust himself into the limelight?
Julien Reitzenstein offers an answer based on newly found answers that sounds understandable, but which surprisingly made him the target of wild reviews on the Internet.
This is not the first time that this has happened to him;
Even after the publication of his book on the “SS Ahnenerbe”, established scientists tried to silence him with malicious, sometimes factually false reviews.
Wolfram Sievers was one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial
Source: Getty Images / Hulton Archive / Keystone;
US Army / National Archives & Records Administration / Wikimedia Commons / public domain
Henripierre was probably concerned with relieving the SS-Ahnenerbe and its managing director Wolfram Sievers by shifting responsibility for the specifically verifiable murder of 86 concentration camp prisoners to August Hirt, who was already dead.
Sievers was one of the defendants in the Nuremberg doctors' trial - and he confirmed Henripierre's statement that Hirt was the client.
In reality, however, as Reitzenstein's results suggest, there was never a plan for a museum in Strasbourg. Rather, the 86-fold, probably even 115-fold murder was about creating a skull collection for the Ahnenerbe employee Bruno Beger. And not from murdered Jews, because institutes in the Third Reich were able to order their skulls for 25 Reichsmarks by mail from the Reich University in Posen. Rather, Beger was interested in the skulls of Asians, which he had already measured on a Himalayan expedition of the "Ahnenerbe" in 1939. But he couldn't find them, so he chose other victims quite arbitrarily.
Sievers was the sponsor of this project and at the same time Beger's superior.
And the Nazi collaborator Heinrich Heinzpeter alias Henri Henripierre acted as an accomplice - he was supposed to prepare the victims murdered in Natzweiler in the Strasbourg anatomy for Beger's use.
This never happened, which is why there are no photos of the alleged “Strasbourg skull collection”.
Bruno Beger (r.) With his lawyer in court, 1974
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
Sievers was sentenced to death in Nuremberg for other offenses and was executed on June 2, 1948.
Beger, on the other hand, only received the minimum sentence of three years in 1974 for aiding and abetting 86-fold murder - the dead August Hirt was considered to be the main culprit.
Henripierre's false testimony, which he repeated as a witness in the trial against Beger, saved the accused a quarter of a century later from the judgment for murder that should have been passed against him as the actual commissioner of the crime.
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Henripierre lived in Strasbourg until his death in 1982.
He repeatedly appeared as a witness and repeated his stories of lies.
On the other hand, of course, he never confessed that he himself was on the SS payroll.
The example shows that critical history should also question the statements of key witnesses who have been reliable for decades.
This is not a relativization, but on the contrary serves to come to terms with it.
Julien Reitzenstein: “The SS-Ahnenerbe and the 'Strasbourg skull collection'. Fritz Bauer's last case ”. (Duncker & Humblot, Berlin. 495 p., 62.90 euros)
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This article was first published in December 2018.