I wouldn't fancy their chances. "The Nazis murdered about 300,000 people with mental illnesses. Some of the victims' brains were handed over for research, and some are still held at German institutes. It's time to identify the victims. Brain slides like this one are widespread in German research labs, but some have a dark past They are kept deep in the archive of the Max Planck Society in Munich - human brain specimens, elaborately prepared and neatly labeled. Some of the brain specimens belong to Nazi victims. They were murdered because they were mentally ill or disabled and considered "unworthy of life," according to Hitler. About 300,000 people including children were killed in the Nazi's so-called "euthanasia program, T4." But the victims' brains were preserved. "These Nazi crimes [committed during] the euthanasia program were a good opportunity for scientists to get their hands on brain tissues and examine rare neurological diseases," says Herwig Czech, a historian at the University of Vienna. Doctors could even order the brain of a certain patient - a patient they found interesting for research. A major part of the brains of Nazi victims, though, were preserved in formalin and kept for later. It was thought research would improve after the war. Even until the 1970s, researchers experimented on those brain parts to find out more about the origins of diseases and conditions, including Down syndrome. "They thought this research was ethically unproblematic," Gerrit Hohendorf, a historian at the Technical University of Munich told DW. "They thought that if these people were dead anyway at least their brains could serve medical research." In scientific publications, Hohendorfer adds, the origin of the samples was often omitted." German research organization to identify Nazi victims that ended up as brain slides | Science | DW.COM | 02.05.2017
