'I thought he was resting in peace and now it feels he isn’t'
Professor Sue Black wants justice for the British PoWs whose organs were removed by the Nazis
Ian Dodds
- Kate Battersby
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In her study at Oxford University, Professor Sue Black is pondering the long shadow of war that has defined her career. “I’ve spent a lifetime working with the dead,” says the globally recognised forensic anthropologist, whose work for the Government and United Nations has helped identify victims of conficts in Kosovo and Iraq, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 228,000 people. She is such an authority in her field that she has more awards than can be listed, including a life peerage as Baroness Black of Strome.
“You may never have known a forebear but they are part of you,” she goes on to say. “Events may be in the past, but the ripples in the pond go on for ever.”
Such inter-generational trauma is apparent in her remarkable programme for Radio 4. Shadow of War: a Tainted Anatomy investigates how five British soldiers who died in German prisoner-of-war camps in 1941 had their brains removed during autopsy, by order of the Nazis – a distressing fact of which their families were unaware until as recently as last year.
Professor Sue Black. Alamy
Some must now live with the knowledge that there is no record of what happened to their relations’ human tissue; others have learnt that their forebears’ brains became part of a gigantic archive in Munich for many decades.
“I don’t know how to express how angry I am,” says Tracy Wilson. Her great-uncle Joseph Elston died from dysentery, and his grave is among the 3,595 at the Berlin Commonwealth War Cemetery. But it was only in recent months that she learnt his brain was removed during autopsy, and that there is no information on what was done with it. “It’s criminal,” she says. “I thought he was resting in peace and now it feels that he isn’t.”
Professor Black explains that these unauthorised autopsies were the medical norm in 1941. “Consent is a relatively recent concept, especially around the retention of human tissue,” she says. “In the 1940s there wasn’t the same sentiment towards the whole of the body being kept together. It was their professional right to take samples, and either retain them or dispose of them as clinical waste.”
British laws were only passed in 2004 as a result of the Alder Hey scandal, in which whole organs had been secretly removed from children who had died at the Liverpool hospital. But in the case of the British PoWs, the 1990 reunification of Germany Listen prompted ethical decisions regarding the giant archive of human tissue about which Professor Black is scathing.
“With the reunification approaching, there was a rush from the authorities to solve the problem and move on. What they did reeked of a lack of respect – cramming thousands of name-labelled glass slides into metal boxes and then burying them en masse without ceremony. No one in my world would have allowed that to happen. “Explaining to families and giving them the decision would have given them closure. Concealment will always cause the loss of faith and trust. It was no surprise that another box of slides was found later, and we can’t be certain there aren’t more somewhere.”
Telling victims' families allow them to grieve
The PoWs’ families only came to be informed as the result of an international project (in which Professor Black herself is not involved) examining records of thousands of brains stockpiled at the Max Planck Society (formerly the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute) in Munich.
“Telling victims’ families the truth allows the processing of grief and, in the horrible American word, closure,” she says. “But the families were unaware they were not already at the point of closure. The last thing you want is to cause pain but we don’t have the right to suppress information.”
Yet amid so much trauma, there is another story. Medical research postmortem is a powerful tool for good. In the UK, around 1,300 people donate their body to science each year. Would she encourage more? “I absolutely believe in it. My own bequeathal form has been signed, this is what I want and my family knows it. Without that, it wouldn’t happen.
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“I want every little bit of me to be dissected by science students. We call the cadavers our silent teachers. If I can transfer knowledge of my anatomy to these young people, they are the ones who will go on to cure things and make the world a better place.”
Authors
Kate Battersby
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