---
title: "Eduard Pernkopf"
chunk: 4/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Pernkopf"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:24:03.438676+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Controversial legacy and debate over continued use ==
In 1995, Pernkopf and his atlas became the focus of a controversy in scientific ethics, following the publication of a paper by German researcher Edzard Ernst, who had recently been chair of rehabilitative medicine at the University of Vienna, which outlined the Nazi takeover of the university and highlighted the human experimentation that followed, including the role of Pernkopf himself. The medical school at the university, which had formerly had difficulty finding cadavers for dissection, received a regular supply after 1933. In 1996, Howard Israel, an oral surgeon at Columbia University, revealed that the subject bodies may have in some cases been those of executed political prisoners, LGBT men and women, Roma, and Jews. Sabine Hildebrandt, a Michigan anatomy professor and German native who has researched Pernkopf and other Nazi-era anatomists, has suggested that 26% of the bodies supplied to the university were execution victims. Looking at older copies in the archives, Israel discovered various Nazi symbols in the artists' signatures, which had been removed from more widely circulated later versions. Since then, physicians have discussed whether it is ethical to use the atlas, as it resulted from Nazi medical research.
With the help of other parties, Israel directed a request to the University of Vienna to investigate the issue. This resulted in the 1997 establishment of the Senatorial Project of the University of Vienna titled "Studies in Anatomical Science in Vienna from 1938 to 1945". The project confirmed that at least 1,377 bodies of executed persons were delivered to the university during the Nazi era and that their use cannot be excluded from at least 800 images in the atlas. As a result, the atlas' publisher directed that an insert noting this possibility be mailed to all libraries holding the book, and stopped printing new copies.
Some readers have wondered if the bodies shown in cutaway may have been Jewish inmates at concentration camps, since they appear gaunt and have shaved heads or close-cropped haircuts. Israel asked the Simon Wiesenthal Center if this might have been the case. Wiesenthal himself answered that it was unlikely, since during the Third Reich, the Vienna Landsgericht, or district court, passed death sentences solely on "non-Jewish Austrian patriots, communists and other enemies of the Nazis". Further, it has long been standard practice to shave the heads of cadavers prior to dissection.
Scientists and bioethicists have debated whether it is acceptable to continue to use the atlas for instructional purposes in light of its possible provenance. Opponents have asserted that any use of the atlas makes the user complicit in Nazi crimes and that modern technology, such as the Visible Human Project (based on the tomographic dissection of a man executed in the United States), will make the atlas redundant, if it has not done so already. Proponents have countered that the knowledge gained from the atlas can be ethically separated from its origins and that in some cases, it cannot easily be replaced by modern technology or other atlases. "[Pernkopf's] atlas is still one of the very best in terms of accuracy, showing levels of detail concerning fascia and neurovascular structures that are of direct relevance for the actual dissection process," says Hildebrandt.
Further, proponents have said that paintings in the atlas 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.
Some of the scientists who were involved in bringing the activities of Pernkopf and other Nazi-era anatomists to light have advocated 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. "[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."
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. "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. 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.

== See also ==
Ernest April
August Hirt
Hermann Stieve
Josef Mengele

== References ==

== Further reading ==
Holubar, Karl, "The Pernkopf Story: The Austrian Perspective of 1998, 60 Years after It All Began", Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - Volume 43, Number 3, Spring 2000, pp. 382–388, doi:10.1353/pbm.2000.0020

== External links ==
The Pernkopf Project