“… the cadaver can be placed at your disposition here.” - Legal, administrative basis of the transfer of cadavers in the Third Reich, its traces in archival sources

For more than 15 years, the memorial site “Roter Ochse (Red Ox)” in Halle/Saale, Germany, has studied documents of special and military courts in Mitteldeutschland (central Germany). Hundreds of death sentences have been executed during the last years of the war in the former state prison of Halle. The resulting dead bodies were used in biomedical research and teaching. The number of executions was marginal before 1933 but increased steadily after the Nazis seized power. The judiciary delivered an increasing number of death sentences against political opponents and persons who were to be eradicated from the “Volksgemeinschaft” (national community) according to racist ideology. However, the dead bodies were not distributed evenly to each of the anatomical institutes. The distribution depended on factors such as the distance of the institute to an execution place, the court responsible for the sentence, and whether the state or relatives had the right to dispose of the bodies. At the beginning of the year 1939, the Reichsjustizministerium (department of justice) issued a decree that changed the distribution process of dead bodies. As a rule, after the responsible ministry informed the anatomical institute of a pending execution, the institute confirmed the pick-up day of the body. Details of the actual delivery of bodies can be found in execution protocols, reports by execution overseers, receipts of body deliveries, body registers of the institutes, etc. This paper will review the historical progression of ministerial decisions and demonstrate how administrative documents can be used as a point of departure for current research projects.