Eduard Pernkopf (1888–1955)

Pernkopf was appointed Professor of Anatomy in 1933, dean of the Medical Faculty in 1938 and, in 1943, rector of the University of Vienna. He was therefore ultimately responsible for the university obtaining the corpses of (at least 1,377) executed people in order to carry out scientific research on them.

As a prominent Nazi, Pernkopf was dismissed in 1945. But he was able to continue his work on an important publication, his Anatomical Atlas. To do so, he continued to rely on anatomical specimens at the university, meaning that he was still working with the body parts of the murdered victims of Nazism, as a commission set up by the University of Vienna ruled in 1998. His standard reference work in anatomy made his name famous and is still used widely around the world today. 

Further links:

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49294861

Academic literature:

Herwig Czech, Erich Brenner, Nazi victims on the dissection table - The Anatomical Institute in Innsbruck. Ann Anat. 2019, 84–95. doi: 10.1016/j.aanat.2019.03.007 

Müller, Markus, Herwig Czech, Christiane Druml, Commentary: The Medical University of Vienna and the historic legacy of Pernkopf’s atlas. In: Surgery 165.5 (2019), 871-872. 

Hildebrandt, Sabine, and Claudia Krebs, From body to image—Pernkopf's anatomical gaze and eyewitness accounts on the process of creating images from Nazi victims' bodies., in: Anatomical Sciences Education 18.3 (2025): 277–288.