The
Jewish skull collection was an attempt by the Nazis to create an anthropological display to showcase the alleged racial inferiority of the "Jewish race" and to emphasize the status of Jews as
Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), in contrast to the Germanic
Übermenschen ("super-humans") Aryan race which the Nazis considered to be the "
Herrenvolk" (master race). The people who were to serve as best examples of the "Jewish race" were selected from people at the
Auschwitz camp, then brought to Natzweiler-Struthof both to eat well and then to be murdered by gas, and their corpses brought to the Anatomy Institute of at the Reich
University of Strasbourg (
Reichsuniversität Straßburg) in the annexed region of Alsace, a project of great scope. Some initial study of the corpses was performed, but the progress of the war stalled completion of the collection. The collection was sanctioned by Reichsführer of the SS
Heinrich Himmler, and under the direction of
August Hirt with
Rudolf Brandt and
Wolfram Sievers who was responsible for procuring and preparing the corpses as part of his management of the
Ahnenerbe (the
National Socialist scientific institute that researched the archaeological and cultural history of the hypothesized
Aryan race). In a 2013 documentary by Sonia Rolley and others, two historians remark that "Hirt is one of the most absolutely criminal of National Socialist ideology," adds the historian
Yves Ternon. "The project itself, continues Professor
Johann Chapoutot, is an example of this investment of politics by science, or science by politics that is Nazism."
Josef Kramer, acting commandant of Natzweiler-Struthof (who was a Lagerführer at Auschwitz and the last commandant of
Bergen Belsen) personally carried out the gassing of 80 of the 86 victims at Natzweiler-Struthof. , former commandant of Natzweiler-Struthof, in
leg irons at Belsen before being removed to the POW cage at Celle, 17 April 1945 The next part of the process for this "collection" was to bring the corpses to the Reichs University, where Hirt's plan was to make anatomical casts of the bodies. Photos of the corpses as found by the Allies who saw them in the Reichs University make the totality of the strange project quite real. The next step after making the casts was to have been reducing them to skeletons. Neither of those steps, making the casts nor reducing the corpses to skeletons, was carried out. In 1944, with the approach of the Allies, there was concern over the possibility that the corpses could be discovered. In September 1944, Sievers telegrammed Brandt: "The collection can be defleshed and rendered unrecognizable. This, however, would mean that the whole work had been done for nothing – at least in part – and that this singular collection would be lost to science, since it would be impossible to make plaster casts afterwards." And so it was left, as the camp was evacuated in September 1944, and the human remains were left at a room in the Reichs University of Strasbourg. August Hirt, who conceived the project, was sentenced to death in absentia at the Military War Crimes Trial at Metz on 23 December 1953. For many years only a single victim,
Menachem Taffel (prisoner no. 107969), a
Polish-born Jew who had been living in
Berlin, was positively identified through the efforts of
Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. In 2003,
Hans-Joachim Lang, a German professor at the
University of Tübingen succeeded in identifying all the victims, by comparing a list of inmate numbers of the 86 corpses at the Reichs University in Strasbourg, surreptitiously recorded by Hirt's French assistant Henri Henrypierre, with a list of numbers of inmates vaccinated at Auschwitz. The names and biographical information of the victims were published in the book
Die Namen der Nummern (
The Names of the Numbers). Rachel Gordon and Joachim Zepelin translated the introduction to the book to English, at the web site where the whole book, including the biographies of the 86 people, is posted in German. Lang recounts in detail the story of how he determined the identities of the 86 victims gassed for Hirt's project of the Jewish skull collection. Forty-six of these individuals were originally from
Thessaloniki, Greece. The 86 were from eight countries in German-occupied Europe: Austria, Netherlands, France, Germany, Greece, Norway, Belgium and Poland. The biographies of all 86 people are described in English on a web site set up by Lang. In 1951, the remains of the 86 victims were reinterred in one location in the Cronenbourg-Strasbourg Jewish Cemetery. On 11 December 2005, memorial stones engraved with the names of the 86 victims were placed at the cemetery. One is at the site of the mass grave, the other along the wall of the cemetery. Another plaque honoring the victims was placed outside the Anatomy Institute at Strasbourg's University Hospital. In 2022, the gas chamber was reopened to the public, but the European Center for Deported Resistance Fighters (CERD), led by
Guillaume d'Andlau, indicated that it did not want to: "celebrate the inauguration of this morbid place", having " nothing to do with those intended for mass murder", specifying that "it is a symbolic place for the camp and its activities in connection with the Reichsuniversität Straßburg" which is perceived as a lack of sensitivity towards mourners. ==Post-war criminal trials==