Double standards : The Medical Student Kurt Gerstein and the History of Anatomical Body Procurement in Germany

Abstract

This article presents ahitherto unknown memorandum authored by Kurt Gerstein, the Confessing Church's resistance fighter and witness to the Holocaust. In this memorandum, submitted to the Reich Ministry of the Interior in April 1938, Gerstein deals extensively with the contemporary system of anatomical body procurement, its roots and predicaments. Putting the memorandum into the wider context of his discordant life allows agap to be closed in Gerstein's biography, whereby his relationship with medicine presented ameans of moral reorientation between aChristian requirement and the National Socialist reality. Moreover, the positions Gerstein explicates in the memorandum, his criticism of the system of anatomical body procurement and his proposals for reform, make it possible to retrace the history of anatomy in Germany. In particular, the memorandum's inconsistency, which on the one hand, calls for acomprehensive respect for the dead, but on the other hand, excludes acertain group - executed prisoners - from this deference, reveals the basic conflict of how anatomy deals with the human body. It also illustrates Gerstein's inner conflict with regard to his moral positioning under National Socialist conditions.