To the Editor: Last year was the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. We would like to draw your attention to an anatomy textbook, Atlas of topographical and applied human anatomy, authored by a Nazi physician, Eduard Pernkopf, and the alarming evidence which has emerged about the source of subjects used for the illustrations of this book.

The context of raising this issue is that this text is listed as available for loan in a general collection on the catalogue of several university libraries around Australia, including the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales, the University of Adelaide, the University of South Australia, La Trobe University, the University of Western Australia, the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Tasmania, often with multiple copies, which suggests that it may be held as teaching material.

Evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the Pernkopf anatomical atlas contains pictures of victims of the Nazi regime. An investigation into this issue by the University of Vienna in the mid 1990s revealed that at least 1377 bodies of murdered victims, including children, were accepted by the Institute of Anatomy.1 The bodies of the victims were used, without the victims’ or their families’ consent, for research and teaching, including by Pernkopf for his atlas.1,2

Pernkopf, an enthusiastic Nazi, took over as Dean of the Vienna Medical School after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, and led the expulsion of the then majority Jewish faculty, including several Nobel laureates.3 He is known to have willingly accepted specimens from murdered children and adults. Original editions, even as recently as 15 years ago, contained swastikas painted at the bottom of the pictures. These have been airbrushed out in more recent editions.4,5

Internationally, there have been a number of different approaches to managing this item within library collections. Some have asked their libraries to remove this book from their general collections. For example, a US physician, upon finding the book in his centre’s library, convinced them to expunge it from their collection. He also resigned from editorial responsibilities to the publisher of the atlas, and cancelled his subscriptions to their journals.1 Another approach has been placing a summary of the report from the University of Vienna’s investigation inside the front cover of the book, so that library patrons are given the context for the drawings and can make an informed choice.1

While acknowledging the need to preserve freedom of access to information, the unethical use of executed victims for this atlas leads us to believe that it has no place as a general anatomy text in an academic setting. The atlas may have a role as a reminder of the atrocities committed in the name of medical science during the Nazi era, and could remain available for researchers examining abuse of human rights, medical ethics and history. We have contacted our library (the University of Sydney library) about this atlas and asked them to take appropriate action. They have elected to move copies held in high usage collections to special collections. We urge others whose institutions hold this text to do the same.