School Denies Holocaust Tie

The University of Vienna Medical Faculty dismissed claims Thursday that a Nazi-era anatomy textbook, still in use, was researched using Holocaust victims.

Two American physicians said in a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association that drawings in the book, first published in the 1930s by Eduard Pernkopf of the Vienna University, might depict Holocaust concentration camp victims because the author was a leading Nazi.

Pernkopf, dean of the medical school after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, “led the purge against the Jewish faculty in Vienna,” wrote Howard Israel and William Seidelman.

Helmut Gruber, the school’s deputy dean, acknowledged that Pernkopf was a “prominent member” of the Nazi party.

However, Gruber said it was 99 percent certain that Pernkopf’s anatomy atlas “did not contain any drawings of Jews or other victims from concentration camps” because their emaciated bodies would not have made good models.