• The University of Strasbourg has just revealed that “medical war crimes” were carried out during the Nazi occupation.

  • "We have decided to do a work of truth, like a spotlight on the painful and dark past", underlines Michel Deneken, the president of the university.

  • The Vorbruck-Schirmeck labor camp and the Struthof concentration camp, located in Alsace, served as "sources of supply of human beings for at least three" German professors of medicine, "in the context of human experiments" , according to the researchers.

A painful past.

The University of Strasbourg on Tuesday released a 500-page report that sifts through the links between its medical faculty in Nazi-occupied Alsace and the “medical war crimes” they had committed.

Trigger of this vast investigation, conducted by about fifteen researchers: the discovery in 2015 in the premises of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Strasbourg of the remains of a Jewish victim, murdered in 1943 at the Struthof concentration camp in Natzweiler (Bas -Rhine).

Kept as evidence in the trials of Nazi doctors, these remains were then forgotten.

"We have decided to do a work of truth, like a spotlight on the painful and dark past", underlines Michel Deneken, the president of the university, in the introduction to the report.

"This light reveals what for 70 years was hidden from the Reichsuniversität (Reich University), but it is a moral duty", he underlines.

For five years, the authors of the report, doctors and historians, plunged into more than 150,000 pages of German and French archives, but also American, Russian or Polish.

The Reichsuniversität had taken over from the University of Strasbourg, evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand in 1939, with German teachers and students in its ranks, but also 96 doctors and 12% of medical students from Alsace-Moselle.

The Vorbruck-Schirmeck labor camp and the Struthof concentration camp, located in Alsace, served as "sources of supply of human beings for at least three" German professors of medicine, "in the context of human experiments" , according to the researchers.

Experiments were carried out with mustard gas or phosgene, a poison gas, and on tests of vaccines against typhus, causing several deaths, some of whom were identified for the first time by the report.

Preserved human organs

The researchers also discovered in the university archives, collections of histological slides, intended to be observed under the microscope, and preserved human organs, dating from the years 1941-1944.

But “no link” between these collections and “criminal experiments could not be established”, they specify.

At the end of its work (which can be consulted online on the Wiki rus-med.unistra.fr), the commission makes several recommendations to maintain the memory of these events, in particular the creation of places of commemoration within the faculty of medicine.

"We feel strongly committed to the continuation of this work", declared Michel Deneken, who envisages a future "Centre for information and research".

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  • Great East

  • Nazism

  • Second World War

  • Torture

  • Strasbourg