Teenage victim: Liane Berkowitz was pregnant when she was imprisoned by the Nazi regime
- According to medical historian Paul Weindling, almost 25,000 victims of Nazi scientific experiments have now been identified.
- Dr Weindling says there were different "phases" to the Nazis' experiments. The first was linked to eugenics and forced sterilisation.
- The second phase coincided with the start of the war. "Doctors began experimenting on patients in psychiatric hospitals," Prof Weindling writes in a BBC report. "Sporadic experiments were made in concentration camps like Sachsenhausen near Berlin, and anthropological observations at Dachau."
- The third phase began in 1942, when the SS and German military took greater control of the experiments. There was a surge in the numbers of experiments, with lethal diseases including malaria and louse-borne typhus administered to thousands of victims.
- During a fourth phase in 1944-45, explains Dr Weindling, "scientists knew the war was lost but they continued their experiments".
Pernkopf's Atlas: A textbook tainted by Nazi association
- Eduard Pernkopf, chairman of anatomy at the University of Vienna between 1933 and 1945, was a member of the Nazi party whose sourcing of executed prisoners for dissections is on permanent record in his now infamous anatomical atlas.
- The detailed illustrations in anatomical atlas that Pernkopf produced made it famous among anatomy students.
- Pernkopf worked 18-hour days dissecting corpses while a team of artists created the images; he worked for over two decades on the book.
- AS Sabine Hildebrandt revealed in a 2006 paper in the journal Clinical anatomy, as well as confirming Pernkopf's strong affiliation to the Nazi party, this project "revealed the delivery of at least 1,377 bodies of executed persons to the Anatomical Institute of Vienna" during the Third Reich. "The possible use of these bodies as models cannot be excluded for up to half of the approximately 800 plates in the atlas."