Eduard Pernkopf

Eduard Pernkopf (November 24, 1888 – April 17, 1955) was an Austrian professor of

Pernkopf was born in 1888 in the Lower Austria village of Rappottenstein. The youngest of three sons, he seemed to be considering a career in music upon his completion of the Gymnasium in Horn. However, the death of his father, the village's doctor, in 1903 led him to pursue medicine instead, as his father's death caused the family considerable hardship that a career as a physician was more likely to reverse.^[2]

He began his studies at the University of Vienna's medical school in 1907. During his time there he became a member of the Student Academic Fraternity of Germany, a student group with a strong German nationalist persuasion. As a student he had worked under Ferdinand Hochstetter, director of the university's anatomy institute. Hochstetter became his mentor and one of his strongest influences.^[3] In 1912 he received his medical degree.^[2]

For the next eight years he taught anatomy at various institutions in Austria. He served in the military as a physician for a year during World War I. In 1920 he returned to Vienna to work as one of Hochstetter's assistants, lecturing to first- and second-year students about the cardiovascular and peripheral nervous systems.^[2]

Career and political activity

Two early examples of Pernkopf's work, from 1923

Back in Vienna he rose quickly in the academic ranks. In 1926 he earned the title of associate professor, with a promotion to full professor two years later. Five years after that, in 1933, he formally succeeded his teacher Ferdinand Hochstetter as the anatomical institute's director. At the ceremony installing him in that position, he acknowledged Hochstetter's tutelage by dropping to his knees in front of the older man and kissing him on the hand.^[2]

Also in 1933, he joined the

In his new position, in a supportive political environment, Pernkopf put his Nazi beliefs into action. He required medical faculty to declare their ethnic lineage as either

To him who is the proclaimer of National Socialist thought and the new way of looking at the world and in whom the legend of history has blossomed and has awakened and who has the heroic spirit within him, the greatest son of our homeland, we wish to give our gratitude and also to say that we doctors with our whole life and our whole soul gladly wish to serve him. So may our call express only what each of us feels from the bottom of his heart; Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil!, Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil![3]

Atlas

At the time he was first hired as Hochstetter's assistant, he began putting together an informal dissection manual for students. He kept expanding it, and it became popular with the rest of the university instructors and the Austrian medical community. As he attained his full professorship he was offered a contract to expand it into a publishable book, and he eagerly accepted.^[3] He was to deliver three volumes.^[2]

Pernkopf began his atlas in 1933. He worked 18-hour days dissecting corpses, teaching classes and discharging his administrative responsibilities while a team of artists created the images that would eventually be in the atlas.^[6] His days began at 5 a.m., when he left notes in shorthand for his wife to type. These became the descriptive text that accompanied the images.^[2]

At the beginning four artists—Erich Lepier, Ludwig Schrott, Karl Endtresser and Franz Batke—worked with Pernkopf. Lepier, Pernkopf's first hire, had largely learned on his own after having to cut short his architectural studies at what is now

From the atlas

A plate from the atlas depicting the lungs and their blood vessels

Erich Lepier's signature, with added swastika

Pernkopf instructed them to paint the organs they saw in as much detail as possible, to make them look like living tissue in print. This was enabled by a special treatment of the paper used for

The first volume of the atlas was published in 1937. It was large enough that it required two books, one devoted to anatomy in general and the other covering more specifically the chest and pectoral limbs. Four years later, in 1941, the second volume, likewise requiring two books, came out. It covered the abdomen, pelvis and pelvic limbs.^[2]

That year the war intervened. With the exception of Lepier, ineligible for service because of his severe

A two-volume edition of the Atlas was published in five languages. The first American edition was published in 1963. A European scientific publisher, Elsevier, holds the copyright, but discontinued printing the Atlas on moral grounds. The volumes can still be obtained on eBay and Amazon, and are found in private collections.^[8]

Later life

In 1943, Pernkopf reached the pinnacle of the academic career ladder when he was named the University of Vienna's

He was held at the Allied prisoner of war (POW) camp in Glasenbach for three years. Although he was ultimately never charged with any crimes, he was required to do regular hard labor throughout his imprisonment. The experience left him drained and exhausted when he returned to Vienna after his release, hoping to continue his work on the atlas.^[2]

His former facilities at the university were unavailable to him since the anatomical institute had been bombed during the war. Hans Hoff, a Jewish physician who had left the Vienna faculty in 1938, gave him two rooms at the school's neurological institute.^[3] Pernkopf was reunited with his original artists, some of whom had also been held in POW camps, as well as some new ones, and resumed his earlier demanding schedule. They continued working in the small space Hoff gave them. There was some tension among them as the three who had served felt Lepier, with whom they had never been close personally to begin with, had had a much easier time of it during the war than they had, a bitterness aggravated by the Third Reich's defeat by the Allies. He worked by himself while Pernkopf resumed his prewar schedule despite the privations he had endured.^[2]

They were joined by two new painters. Wilhelm Dietz, older than the others, contributed paintings of the neck and pharynx during his two years on the project. Elfie von Siber painted facial muscles. The third volume, covering the head and neck, was released in 1952.^[2]

At the time of his death, Pernkopf was hard at work on the fourth volume. Two of his former colleagues, Alexander Pickler and Werner Platzer, completed it for its 1960 publication. A few years later, the publisher brought out a condensed two-volume set with all the color plates, removing most of Pernkopf's explanatory text (and, later, airbrushing out the Nazi symbols Lepier and the others added to their signatures). Since little translation was necessary, this was the version of the atlas which medical students and physicians elsewhere in the world came to know and revere.^[3]

Controversial legacy and debate over continued use

In 1995 Pernkopf and his atlas came into the focus of a controversy in

With the help of other parties, Dr. Israel directed a request to the University of Vienna to investigate the issue. This resulted in the establishment of the Senatorial Project of the University of Vienna "Studies in Anatomical Science in Vienna from 1938 to 1945" [14] in 1997. The project confirmed that at least 1,377 bodies of executed persons were delivered to the University during the Nazi times and its usage cannot be excluded from at least 800 images of the atlas. As a result, the atlas' publisher directed that an insert noting this possibility be mailed to all libraries holding the atlas, and stopped printing new copies.^[15]

Some readers have wondered if the bodies shown in cutaway may have been Jewish inmates at

Further, they say, its paintings are artistic masterpieces regardless of the politics of the artists. Finally, forcing it out of circulation would be no less an act of censorship than that perpetrated by Hitler's regime when it publicly burned books shortly after assuming power.^[18]

Some of the scientists who were involved in bringing the activities of Pernkopf and other Nazi-era anatomists to light advocate for the atlas' continued use. "[They] can remind us of suffering not only in the past but in the present, that we may be more compassionate physicians, more compassionate citizens of the world," says Garrett Riggs, a Florida neurologist and medical historian.^[19] "[A] ban could not atone the great evil committed by human beings on other human beings," Hildebrandt argues. "Rather, it is up to a new human generation to glean good from this murky history by continuing to use Pernkopf's atlas in a rational, historically conscious manner."^[17]

On the other hand, "There can be no doubt that Pernkopf, as head of the Anatomy Institute, was instrumental in the procurement of the bodies of the victims of Nazi terror for dissection, and ultimately, for the creation of his Atlas," argues Pieter Carstens, a professor of public law at the University of Pretoria.^[20] "In this sense he was an indirect perpetrator in the execution of the victims, but a direct perpetrator in the subsequent processing and pillaging of the bodies." Following the theories of bioethicist Charles A. Foster, he sees the anatomist's fundamental crime as a violation of his subjects' dignity.^[21] He concludes:

How can something so beautiful at the same time be so utterly despicable? Herein lies the paradox of the Pernkopf Atlas, as a legacy of the Third Reich: the fact that Pernkopf and his illustrators, by embracing Nazi ideology and benefiting from the atrocities committed, created a Nazi anatomy atlas in which irreconcilable opposites were forcibly reconciled. Beautiful anatomical drawings were created, but this was only made possible by the unethical and unlawful procurement of the anatomical remains of murdered victims of an evil Nazi regime–thus beauty and evil were fused. This fusion not only perverts and diminishes the status and content of the Pernkopf Atlas, but also explains why it should be rejected.

[It] should be permitted to show its duplicitous face only rarely and then for very good reason in the teaching of history, medical ethics and medical law so that its lessons will be learned and its history never repeated.^[22]

See also

• Ernest April
• August Hirt
• Hermann Stieve
• Josef Mengele

References