Kriteken, he knew everything.
He himself took out brains.
He was lying in my face.
The different areas of the brain, they are like an orchestra, but
without a conductor.
The story begins with this man.
A brilliant scientist, a scholar of brains.
The setting, 2015.
An archive in a basement in Berlin.
It starts with the discovery of a cardboard box.
[MUSIC
I suddenly saw a box about that size.
A box filled with human brains encased in glass.
I became suspicious because several of the sections were from the time between 19
39 and 1945.
And then, a revelation.
Two of the patients are actually euthanasia victims.
Victims of the Nazi crimes.
So this shocked me, yeah.
These people were killed in the Nazi
euthanasia program, and their brains were found at a branch of the Society,
one of the largest scientific research organizations in the world.
In June, the Society launched an independent investigation.
Three years, $1.8 million to determine just how the brains
ended up in that box, on those shelves, in those archives.
We were of course nervous about these findings because we
all thought that suspicious had been >> That is Dr.
he directs another institute in Munich.
And he heard word of the findings in Berlin.
So we asked also independent experts to come and
investigate our archives and within a few hours they found
several highly suspicious specimen and we were horrified.
Suspicious specimens means suspicious brains.
maybe brains stolen from murder victims.
I should say upfront, officials wouldn't let me bring a camera into the archives.
They felt that the victims have been exploited enough.
We now know that, probably thousands of slides still here.
We got the impression that there was a lot of
white washing on the institutes History.
And by whitewashing, we mean a coverup about who these brains belong to and why.
And when do you think the whitewashing ended?
Well the whitewashing ended, we thought it ended in the late 80s.
So there was deliberate white washing you would say until
until these slides were found last year.
It will be investigated if there was deliberate white washing.
this is where we go back in time.
Before he begin his genocide against Jewish people,
Adolf Hitler went after the disabled.
At first, children born with disabilities or mental illness.
In 1939, the Nazis bought 6 centralized killing centers One of them was Hadamar,
near the city of Visboten, where more than 10,000 people were killed.
First, patients were brought in from nearby clinics and
so-called mental asylums and gathered in a bus shelter.
>> These are the orignal windows and
you can see no one passing by would have been able to see inside.
>> Then through a windowless hallway >> Down narrow stairs,
into a basement, stripped naked, told it was time to take a shower.
We all know this story.
The patients were gassed to death, their bodies burned in an oven down the hallway.
But some bodies took an alternative route.
And in a small number of cases, their brains were removed, then examined.
Many brains ended up at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society,
which, after the war, became the Max Planck Society.
There was a massive appetite >> For
the brains of the persons who were being killed.
In Nazi Germany you had great opportunities for research.
You had partly research being carried out in concentration camps.
Once institute director searched all over Germany for
patients with hereditary diseases who might have interesting brains.
They justified the murders as >> Act of medical salvation.
So how did that box we mentioned earlier end up in that basement for
all those years?
Well after the war, things went quiet.
Those insiders who had this kind of knowledge,
they did everything to suppress it.
This was just a topic not to be touched.
The doctors and
scientists who had been involved in the murders, they kept their heads down.
A lot of perpetrators just got away with very low sentences or no sentences at all.
Medical circles until not so
long ago was also considered okay to, to work on this material.
Something good could still come of it by using it for research.
And I think this is how many people Justified to themselves.
When new scientists joined Max Planck as late as the 70s and
80s they were not encouraged to ask questions.
Kruger, he was the director of the Max Planck Institute for
brain research in Frankfurt.
When I asked him what are these >> All these sections.
And he said, just forget about them.
They are just routine cases.
Basically, you can it, you can get rid of them.
He was lying in my face.
He knew everything.
He himself took out brains.
Well in 1989, 1990, the society
That she tried to come clean.
At least 100,000 suspicious
slides from the wartime were buried in a cemetary in Munich in a mass grave.
This over here.
They built a small inconspicuous monument to the victims but
now we know there were brains that were missed.
Besides from Berlin they came from a famous scientist, Julien Hallerforden,
a prolific brain collector who stole specimens from hundreds of patients
Patients.
One of those patients was a little boy named Hans.
He couldn't talk or speak and his parents were poor.
They were forced to give him away.
He was transferred from one asylum to another one.
On the 7th of April in 1941, he was then transferred to a.
Killing center and gas on the same day.
[INAUDIBLE] him spraying was investigated by [INAUDIBLE] and he used
sections of the brain, as late as 1953,
to illustrate, Early childhood brain damage.
Here's that article published on after the war.
Brain turning a new generation of scientists.
Do you think there was even after the 80s any kind of hesitation and
institutes like the to Fully be open about this kind of history?
The main Russian the 80s and before was damage control.
And what that implied changed over time.
In private phone conversations with me.
Some people involved in the investigation were more specific.
They told me at least one former archivist in Munich has been removed from his
position and is under investigation.
Was he neglect, indifferent, did he do it on purpose?
Or maybe he didn't know The experience of doing these interviews has been
really frustrating.
It seems like officials and historians are far more willing to discuss decades' old
cover-ups than they are to give straight answers about modern day failings.
What do we do with unethical research that is still good research,
I mean that is still useful scientifically?
What do we do with it?
You just neglect it.
It's not possible.
It's unethical to use even if they present you insights into the medicine.
I think no.
What to do?
Do you retire from, I mean, withdraw it from circulation, bring it?
It's a difficult one.
It should be continued to use in teaching.
But I would say to minimalistic students or
doctors they should not be allowed to avoid knowing of where this comes from.
Do you believe that there're anymore slides that you haven't found?
We do not know, but that is why the experts are here.
They will find them.