Munich

The Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin, Germany's largest biomedical research centre, is to erect a memorial to the victims of the Nazis' ‘euthanasia’ programme, using DM1.5 million (US$750,000) from the country's national lottery.

The MDC has planned a memorial for several years. It occupies the campus that once housed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Brain Research. Before the Second World War, the institute was one of the world's leading neuroscience research facilities — only recently has its involvement in Nazi experiments become public knowledge.

Detlev Ganten, the director of the MDC, says that the memorial, which depicts a handicapped child, will bear an inscription referring to this history and reminding readers of the ethics of clinical research. “A patient becomes a research object, and this difficult situation can very easily become abused,” he explains.

The KWI's director during the Third Reich, Hugo Spatz, and his younger scientific collaborator, Julius Hallervorden, did research using brains from victims of the ‘Aktion T4’ — one part of the Nazi programme to exterminate lebensunwertes Leben (life not deemed worthy of living).

After the war, a US army officer interrogated Hallervorden. He admitted that when he learnt of the exterminations, he asked for brains to be removed and preserved so that “good use could be made of the material”.

But he was never charged with any crime. Both Hallevorden and Spatz continued their careers and became respected members of Germany's scientific community. Hallervorden died in 1965, and his activities during the Nazi era only resurfaced in 1983, when his collection of brain sections — including material from children killed in the Aktion T4 — was rediscovered in the cellars of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt (see Nature 339, 493; 1989).

Correspondence between personnel at the Dachau concentration camp and SS leader Heinrich Himmler shows that Spatz both knew about and participated in the use of victims of the Nazis in research. It also reveals that he used brains from prisoners killed in Dachau in his research.

In the light of this information, there was a move three years ago to rename Hallervorden–Spatz disease — a rare childhood hereditary neurodegenerative disorder — although this has not yet happened. But last year the name of the Hugo Spatz prize, awarded by the German Neurological Society, was discreetly changed to the Adolf Wallenberg prize, after the eminent Jewish–German neurologist who was forced to emigrate in 1938.

The plans for the memorial coincide with renewed efforts by Germany's science organizations to come to terms with their activities under the Nazis (see Nature 403, 474–475; 2000). A meeting on this theme will be held in May at the Bundesarchiv (federal archives) in Berlin.