Remains of victims of Nazi experiments found in France

Raphael Toledano, a researcher from Strasbourg who has spent more than a decade delving into the eastern French city’s Nazi past, stumbled upon the 1952 letter from Camille Simonin, the director of the forensic science school at the University of Strasbourg, detailing the storage of tissue samples taken from some of the 86 Jews gassed for the experiments of August Hirt, a notorious Nazi anatomy researcher.

The Board of Deputies says “serious questions” need to be asked.

Local authorities are reportedly planning to return the remains to the Jewish community of Strasbourg where they will be buried at the cemetery of Cronenbourg. She had alluded to body parts in jars from WWII.

‘We would expect a prompt and full investigation in to these matters, and the remains of these victims to be accorded a respectful burial in accordance with Jewish law as soon as possible.’. The jar contained skin fragments from a victim of the gas chambers.

Some of the bodies were cut into pieces, or burned, while all were destined to be used in experiments by scientists working for the so-called “Master Race”.

Test tubes containing the intestine and stomach of a victim were also found.

The 86 bodies, some intact and others dismembered, were preserved in alcohol in the infamous institute as part of Hirt’s SS-backed “racial anatomy” studies. They were taken during the autopsies of the collection as the medic was establishing the cause of the victim’s deaths for the military administration.

The Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz were sent to the gas chambers in June 1943 – and their bodies were transferred to what was then known as the Reichsuniversitat Strassburg, as part of the program of August Hirt, the famous Nazi anatomist, according to the University of Strasbourg and officials with the Struthof concentration camp museum.

Their bodies were returned to Hirt at the anatomical laboratory of the Reich University in Strasbourg for preparation as an anthropological display, where they were re-discovered after the liberation.

Hirt committed suicide in July 1945 before he could be tried for war crimes.

Up to 4,000 French Alsatian Jews were systematically murdered during the wartime Holocaust.