They buried in Germany the remains of victims executed and subjected to experiments by the Nazis

Seven decades after the end of the Second World War, more than 300 tiny fragments of human tissue of political prisoners executed by the Nazis They were buried on Monday afternoon at the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin.

The fruit of three years of research, this atypical ceremony, initiated by a large hospital in the German capital, Charité, was held in the presence of a rabbi and members of the Protestant Church. at Dorotheenstadt, where there are several victims of the Third Reich.

"With the burial of microscopic samples" extracted at that time from the bodies, "we want to give some dignity to the victims," ​​said the hospital director. Karl Marx Einhäupl.

For Saskia von Brockdorff, whose mother, Erika von Brockdorff, was murdered in the Berlin prison of Ploetzensee, it is "to end this story".

"Now I know where I can cry my mother, executed May 13, 1943 in prison (Ploetzensee), I'm happy to come here," said the old woman at the agency AFP.

The initiative is an example of the hospital's recent efforts. to face the past, highlights the memorial of the German resistance, co-organizer of this ceremony.

"Many of his doctors who held leadership positions transformed, during the National Socialist period, their clinics and institutes into in which racial medicine and the destruction of the Nazis were practiced ", he added.

Among the opponents of the Nazi regime who were buried, there were only 300 tissues left on lab slides that the descendants of the anatomist doctor who was conducting experiments at that time, Hermann Stievethey found in a small box.

Remains, barely visible, a few square centimeters and hundredths of a millimeter thick, were delivered in 2016 to the teacher Andreas Winkelmann to try to identify the owners.

"In general, one would not consider that such tiny tissues deserve to be buried […] but in this case, the story is special because they come from people who were deliberately refused the burial, so that their loved ones do not know where they were ", explained Winkelmann at the AFP.

Although he could not know exactly who these samples belonged to, Winkelmann was able to work from twenty names and encrypted clues establishing a clear link with Plötzensee Prison, where some 2,800 people were hanged or beheaded by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

At the request of families, there was no public identification of which victims the buried remains belonged to. But we know that most were women.

And this, because Stieve, who headed the Berlin University Institute of Anatomy from 1935 until his death, in 1952, He specialized in studying the effects of stress and fear on the female reproductive system.

To advance your research, this renowned scientist studied bad tissue extracted from women executed by the Nazi regime.

Between his subjects they were 13 of the 18 resistant members of the Berlin group "The Red Orchestra", to which belonged the American Mildred Fish Harnack, slaughtered in 1943 at the express request of Hitler.

Unlike what happened with other scientists more known for their cruelty, such as Josef Mengele ("The Angel of Death" of Auschwitz), Hermann Stieve did not belong to the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) and He did not experiment with living people. But he knew perfectly well that his dead guinea pigs had been tortured.

"It shows how cold it was. I saw these people as mere objects ", Stressed Andreas Winkelmann.

The doctor "cooperated with the Nazi judicial system to [avanzar en] your investigations "he maintained. The bodies were probably thrown into mbad graves.

Yet after the war, Hermann Stieve was not the subject of a judicial investigation or prosecution and continued his career, as did many other scientists who worked with and for the Nazis.

At present, its results, despite the conditions of its research, continue to be considered important for modern gynecology. He remains a "posthumous honorary member" of the German Society of Gynecology and Obstetrics.