Remains belonging to victims of Nazi anatomy professor August Hirt have been found at a forensic medicine institute in eastern France, local authorities said in a statement on Saturday.
Eighty-six Jews had been sent to the gas chambers in 1943 and their bodies brought to the eastern French city of Strasbourg, then under Nazi occupation, where Hirt was assembling a macabre collection of corpses.
The bodies, some intact, others dismembered or burned, were found in November 1944 after the liberation of Strasbourg in bins filled with distilled alcohol. They were then buried in a common grave in 1946 following autopsies.
However, on July 9, historian Raphael Toledano found that some remains were still lying undiscovered at the forensic medicine institute more than 70 years on.
Along with Jean-Sebastien Raul, the current director of the institute, the historian managed to identify several of the body parts, including “a jar containing skin fragments of a gas chamber victim.”
Test tubes containing the intestine and stomach of a victim were also found.
The remains found at the institute had actually been preserved by a forensic professor from Strasbourg’s medicine faculty, Camille Simonin, as part of an investigation into Hirt’s crimes.
Simonin had been tasked by the military authorities with carrying out judicial autopsies in order to “establish the conditions that had led to the death” of the victims.
Toledano was given a clue as to the location of the remains in a letter written by Simonin in 1952, which “mentioned the jars containing the samples taken in the course of judicial autopsies carried out on the Jewish victims of the Struthof gas chamber.”
“The labels identify each piece with precision and mention the register 107969, which matches the number tattooed at the Auschwitz camp on the forearm of Menachem Taffel, one of the 86 victims,” the statement announcing the bodies’ discovery said.
Local authorities plan to return the newly discovered remains to the Jewish community of Strasbourg.
They are to be interred along with the rest of the victims at the cemetery of Cronenbourg to the west of the Alsatian region.
Hirt committed suicide in July 1945, before the Nuremberg trials.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to