Dora Kahlich-Könner (1905–1970)

Kahlich-Könner joined the Nazi Party and became a member of staff at the Anthropological Institute of the University of Vienna in 1932. Starting in 1938, she took part in pseudo-scientific, racist studies of Jewish people in a Viennese nursing and retirement home. She worked as an expert witness in paternity cases and in preparing Nazi “racial assessments”. From 1942 onwards she was involved in “racial science”, measuring Jewish people in the Nazi ghetto of Tarnów in Poland. Almost all the people examined as part of this study were subsequently murdered. 

Dora Kahlich-Könner was dismissed from the university in 1945 but continued to work as a forensic expert witness in paternity cases. In 1959 she joined the Institute for Blood Group Research at the University of Vienna as an assistant to the forensic pathologist Leopold Breitenecker. He had likewise pursued a career under Nazi rule and, after 1945, rose to occupy senior positions within the university.