Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer
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[[Image:Otmar von Verschuer.jpg|250px|thumb|Otmar von Verschuer (''right'') measures two [[twin]] girls as part of an [[anthropometry|anthropometric]] study of [[heredity]].]]
'''Otmar [[Freiherr]] von Verschuer''' ([[16 July]] [[1896]] – [[8 August]] [[1969]]) was a [[Germany|German]] human [[biologist]] and [[Eugenics|eugenicist]] primarily concerned with "[[racial hygiene]]" and [[twin]] research. He was the director of the [[Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics|"''Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre, und Eugenik''" (KWIfA) ("Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics")]] in [[Berlin]] and the [[Institute for Genetic Biology and Racial Hygiene|"''Institut für Erbbiologie und Rassenhygiene''" ("Institute for Genetic Biology and Racial Hygiene")]].
== Involvement in [[Nazi human experimentation]] ==
He received [[Heinrich Himmler]]'s permission to work in [[Auschwitz]] from [[1944]] on. One of Verschuer's most well-known assistants was [[Josef Mengele]], who, as the chief [[Schutzstaffel|SS]] physician at the Auschwitz death camp, later became known as the "Angel of Death".
Verschuer was never tried for war crimes despite many indications that he was not only fully cognisant of Mengele's work at Auschwitz, but even encouraged and collaborated with Mengele in some of his most grisly research. In a report to the ''Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft'' (DFG) ("German Research Council") from 1944, Vershuer talked about Mengele's assistance in supplying the KWIfA with some "scientific materials" from Auschwitz:
:My assistant, Dr. Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) has joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer and camp physician in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Anthropological investigations on the most diverse racial groups of this concentration camp are being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsführer [Himmler]; the blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for analysis.
Verschuer also noted in the report that the war conditions had made it difficult for the KWIfA to procure "twin materials" for study, and that Mengele's unique position at Auschwitz offered a special opportunity in this respect. In the summer of 1944, Mengele and his Jewish slave assistant Dr. Miklos Nyiszli sent other "scientific materials" to the KWIfA, including the bodies of murdered [[Roma people|Gypsies]], internal organs of dead children, skeletons of two murdered Jews, and blood samples of twins infected by Mengele with typhus.
However solid evidence of Verschuer's willing collaboration could not be established, much to the disappointment of the principal post-war Allied investigator, [[Leo Alexander]], assigned to his case. In a letter to his wife from 1946, Alexander wrote:
:It sometimes seems as if the Nazis had taken special pains in making practically every nightmare come true. Some new evidence has come in where two doctors in Berlin, one a man and the other a woman, collected eyes of different colour. It seems that the concentration camps were combed for people whose one eye had a slightly different color than the other. Who ever [sic] was unlucky enough to possess such a pair of slightly unequal eyes had them cut out and was killed, the eyes being sent to Berlin. This is the carrying out into reality of an old gruesome German fairy tale which is included in the [[E.T.A. Hoffmann|Tales of Hoffmann]], where Dr Coppelius posing as a sandman comes at night and cuts out children's eyes when they are tired. The grim part of the story is that Doctors von Verschuer and Magnussen in Berlin did prefer children and particularly twins. There is no end to this nightmare, at least 23 are being tried now and, I trust, the others will follow later.
Alexander initiated investigations into the location of the incriminating collection but could not locate it -- it had been sent to an unknown destination in [[Berlin]] and from there vanished out of sight; Alexander ruefully concluded that Verschuer had destroyed it.
Later investigators had difficulty getting hard evidence of the gruesome position they felt Verschuer had in the [[Holocaust]]. In his [[denazification]] hearing, he was eventually judged as a Nazi fellow traveler (''[[Mitläufer]]'') (a relatively mild categorization), fined 600 marks, and released from custody.
As the war was drawing to a close in 1945, Verschuer moved the files of the KWIfA into the Western part of [[Germany]], hoping for a more favorable response from the advancing Allied armies than from the advancing [[Soviet Union|Soviet]] Army. In late 1945 or early 1946 he petitioned the mayor of Frankfurt to allow him to reestablish the KWIfA. However the commission in charge of rebuilding the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft decreed that "Verschuer should be considered not as a collaborator, but one of the most dangerous Nazi activists of the Third Reich." The KWIfA was not reestablished.
In [[1951]], Verschuer was awarded the prestigious professorship of human genetics at the [[University of Münster]], where he established one of the largest centers of [[genetics]] research in [[West Germany]]. Like many "racial hygienists" of the Nazi period, and many American [[eugenics|eugenicists]], Verschuer was successful in redefining himself as a genetics researcher after the war, and avoided the taint of his work on Nazi eugenics. Many of his wartime students were similarly appointed to top positions in universities of [[Erlangen]], [[Frankfurt]], [[Düsseldorf]], and [[Münster]].
When Verschuer died in [[1969]] (in an automobile accident), obituaries in German scientific journals made no mention of his Nazi involvement.
==Notes==
{{German title Freiherr}}
== References ==
* Robert N. Proctor, ''Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis'', Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
* Paul Weindling, "'Tales from Nuremberg': The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Allied medical war crimes policy," in ''Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus: Bestandaufnahme und Perspektiven der Forschung'', ed. Doris Kaufmann, v.2 (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2000), 635-652.
* Katrin Weigmann: "In the name of science. The role of biologists in Nazi atrocities: lessons for today's scientists" in ''EMBO Reports'' v.2 #10 (2001), 871–875.
* Eric Ehrenreich, "Otmar von Verschuer and the 'Scientific' Legitimization of Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy," ''Holocaust and Genocide Studies'' 2007 21(1):55-72
== See also ==
*[[ex-Nazi]]s
== External links ==
* [http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/embor/journal/v2/n10/full/embor304.html "In the name of science"] ''[[EMBO Journal|EMBO reports]]'' article about KWI scientists' wartime atrocities, with images of Verschuer
* [http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1587766,00.html "Skeletons in the Closet of German Science"] ''[[Deutsche Welle]]'' article on Verschuer's research connection to Mengele
{{BD|1896|1969|Verschuer, Otmar Freiherr von}}
[[Category:German eugenicists]]
[[Category:German military personnel of World War I]]
[[Category:German nobility]]
[[Category:Nazi physicians]]
[[Category:People from Hesse-Nassau]]
[[Category:University of Marburg alumni]]
[[Category:University of Frankfurt faculty]]
[[Category:University of Münster faculty]]
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