“His skull will be useful to me,” ordered the professor, in a fit of madness.
This was the story of Augustus Ht.’s lost collection. A story that reminds us that human dignity is stronger than barbarity, even if it takes sixty years for the truth to come out. If this story has moved you, if you think it should be heard by as many people as possible, take a simple step. Share this video.
Leave a comment with the name Mashem to honor his memory and that of the other 85. We still have so many stories to tell, so many voices. has freed from oblivion. See you soon. Keep the light on. My name is Henry. I now live two streets away from the Strasbourg Institute of Anatomy .
Every morning, I pass by this red brick building. The students laugh and smoke cigarettes on the sidewalk, eager to go and listen to their medical lecture. They don’t know , they can’t smell it. I can still feel it. The smell of formaldehyde, the smell of cold fear, and that metallic, indefinable smell of humanity that is bottled up.
I am 91 years old. My hands are stained by age, but they are the same as those that held the thickness gauge in 1943. I have been the devil’s scribe. I noted the figures that condemned 86 innocent people to become museum pieces. It all started at Auschwitz Birkeno. I had been there for 6 months. My registration number was 192000.
Before the war, I was a third-year medical student in Lyon. It was that small line in my file that saved me from the immediate gas chamber, only to plunge me into a slower hell. It was a morning in June. The heat was oppressive in the camp. The mud had dried into a grey dust that stuck to the throat.
We were made to line up in the call-up area. But this was no ordinary call. Two men arrived. He was not wearing the black uniform of the SS, nor the grey combat clothes of the Vermarthe. They wore immaculate, pressed white coats. Underneath the blouses were well-cut civilian suits. They looked like university professors who had wandered into a slaughterhouse.
They were the anthropologists Bruno Beger and Hans Fly Shaker. He came from the Anun Herbeux organization, the Nazi racial research institute . The camp doctor, the lagerst, pushed me towards them. “This Jew speaks German and knows anatomy,” he grumbled. Bégardé, as one looks, a useful tool. There was no hatred in his eyes.
Just a chilling indifference. “You will note down the measurements,” he told me, “be precise.” It’s for science. Science. This word, which for me meant to heal, to save, to understand, was about to become an obsessive. Their mission was simple and terrifying. He was not looking for workers. He was not seeking to punish.
He looked for specimens. Professor Auguste Ht in Strasbourg had made a special request to Himler. The Jews were soon to be exterminated, he said, and German science did not have enough skeletons of this inferior race. To study them once she had disappeared, it was necessary to build a collection, a collection of trophies.
We started the selection in block 10. They brought in fifteen prisoners, men and women, but they were mainly interested in the men: Jews of all origins, Poles with high cheekbones, Greeks from Thessaloniki to Trefin, Germans. ” Take off your clothes,” ordered Fly Shaker. The men complied. They were thin, but not yet skeletal.
These were the ones who had survived the initial selections. They still had strength. One of them, a man named Mechem, whispered to me as I was preparing the instruments. What do they want? It’s for a new work team. I saw hope in her eyes. He thought that if they were examined by civilian doctors, it was a good sign.
This meant that they had value, that we wanted to make sure they were suitable. I was unable to answer him. I lowered my eyes to my notebook. Work has begun. It was slow, methodical. Beger used a cephalometer. He pinched Menachem’s temples with the cold metal. “Bomatic width 13 cm,” he dictated. I wrote 13.4, nasal length 5 cm and 2 mm.
I was writing 5.2. He measured everything. the circumference of the skull, the distance between the eyes, the length of the ears, he palpated the muscles, he checked the teeth, he took photos from the front, from the side, from three-quarters. These naked, humiliated men stood at attention for hours.
Bégouchait was like a farmer touching cattle before the slaughterhouse. He was looking for typical traits. He wanted living caricatures to prove his delusional racist theories . “Look at this one,” he said to his colleague, pointing to an old Polish rabbi. A perfect cranial vault for demonstrating the oriental type. Ht will be delighted.
Ht will be delighted, as if he were choosing a birthday present. We worked for h days . 8 days of measurement, days of silence broken only by the numbers. I saw Menechem smile broadly once. He believed that by being cooperative, he was saving his life. “I’m strong, doctor,” he said, “I can work hard.” Beer didn’t even reply.
He just marked a red cross next to Menarchem’s name on his list. By the end of the week, they had chosen 86 men and 295 people in total, the cream of the crop of the race he wanted to extinct. “Prepare them for transport,” Beer said, closing his briefcase. “They must be fed. They must not be damaged. No whipping.
The skin must remain intact. Not damaged. The skin intact.” Those words echoed in my skull. You don’t protect a prisoner for his well-being. You protect merchandise. I was ordered to accompany them not as a prisoner, but as a medical assistant. I was told we were going to France, to Alsace. To the Natsweiler-Struttof camp.
When the train left Poland, the 86 chosen ones were crying tears of joy. He thought he was leaving The hell of Auschwitz for a gentler labor camp, far from the smoking chimneys. He thought they had won the lottery. I looked at their faces, shadowed by the cattle car. I looked at Menachem’s skull, the rabbi’s nose, the Greek’s delicate hands, and I felt a wave of nausea rising, a dark certainty I dared not articulate.
They weren’t leaving to live; they were leaving because someone, somewhere, needed their water. The journey lasted four days. Four days through Germany and then Alsace. When the wagon doors opened, the air was different. It was n’t the ash-laden air of Poland. It was the pure, crisp, resin-scented air of the mountains. We were in the Vauges region of France.
For me, it was heartbreaking. I was back on my native soil, but as a slave. For the 86 men and women in the convoy, it was a miracle. Look, Henri ” Menachem told me as we stepped down onto the Rotau train platform. Mountains, forests, it’s beautiful. You don’t kill people in such a beautiful place.” He was wrong.
The beauty of the landscape was merely a backdrop for the horror. We walked to the camp, Strutof, the only concentration camp on French soil. It was built in terraces clinging to the mountainside. From up there , you could see the valley, the clouds clinging to the fir trees. It was a postcard scene, but the barbed wire was the same, the watchtowers were the same, and the dogs were the same.
Yet, something was wrong. The heads of the 86 weren’t shaved. They weren’t tattooed with numbers on their arms, contrary to custom; they were taken to an isolated barracks, far from the other prisoners who worked to death in the Granitrose quarry. They were given beds with clean straw mattresses and, most importantly, they were given food.
No The thin soup, the hot water with a few rotten turnips we used to swallow. They were served thick soup with chunks of meat, fresh bread, and even a little margarine. I was assigned to the camp infirmary, the overseer. I could watch them. I saw him regaining his color. His hollow cheeks were slowly filling in.
His eyes were losing that glassy veil of starvation. He smiled at me one morning through the wire mesh. “You see, Doctor, he’s preparing us for special work. Maybe precision construction. They need us. A lot.” I wanted to believe it. I wanted to believe that Nazi logic had changed, that they needed skilled labor, but a conversation I overheard in the office of the camp commandant, Joseph Kramer, chilled me to the bone.
Kramer was on the phone with Strasbourg, with the Anatomy Institute. “The equipment has arrived,” he was saying. “The equipment is in good condition.” We are waiting for the specimens to recover from transport. Ht wants perfect bodies, no excessive thinness, the material, the specimens, he fed them like one fattens birds before Christmas.
That was the most cruel phase. He restored their humanity, their physical dignity, just so that their death would be scientifically valid, so that their skeleton would be representative of a healthy race and not of starving prisoners. Weeks passed, July 1943, it was hot. Hundreds of prisoners from the camp died in the quarry.
crushed by stones or shot down by guards. But in the six’s shack, all was calm. They were playing cards they had made out of pieces of cardboard. They were talking about the post-war period. One evening, Menachem called me. He looked worried. “Why doesn’t anyone come looking for us to work?” he asked.
It’s been three weeks, we eat, we sleep. That’s not normal, Henry. The Germans don’t give anything for nothing. I lied. I lied to give him a few more nights of sleep. It’s about forty, Mchem. They are afraid of the tifus. Take advantage of it. He nodded, but he wasn’t convinced. He took a small piece of embroidered fabric out of his pocket.
“It belonged to my daughter,” he whispered. I hid it in my mouth during each search. If I survive, I will tell him that I saw the mountains of France. I couldn’t hold back my tears that night. I knew what was coming. At the bottom of the camp, near the entrance, there was a building that looked like a farm inn, with white walls and a sloping roof. It was picturesque.
But the SS had recently carried out work inside. They had set up a small tiled room without a window, with a heavy, airtight door and a peephole. It was not a large industrial gas chamber like at Birkenao. It was a handcrafted, intimate room, designed to kill a few people at a time cleanly, without damaging the bodies.
On August 1, 1943, the order arrived from Strasbourg. Professor HT was impatient. The start of the academic year is approaching. He wanted his collection. Cram, the commander, summoned me. He had a rough, broad, and expressionless face. “Tonight,” he said, “we’ll start with the women. You’ll prepare the files.
You’ll note the time of death and, above all, you’ll make sure the bodies are still warm when we put them in the truck.” I left his anticubiting office. The sun was setting, flooding the valley with a magnificent golden light. And in that light, I saw the invisible smoke of approaching death. I went to see the barracks of the 86.
He was singing a Yiddish song, a sad and gentle song. They didn’t know it was their last night. They did n’t know they had been fed, cared for, and rested only to become objects on a shelf. The barracks door burst open. The guards entered. The women, out immediately. Silence fell. Absolute silence. Menchem watched the women stand up. He understood.
He saw the guards’ faces. He saw the truck waiting, engine running. He He looked at me through the window. He placed his hand on the glass as if saying goodbye. The trap had closed. Nazi science was demanding its due. The night of August 11, 1943, was clear. A perfect summer night where the stars shone above the dark fir trees of the Vauges.
In the valley, the villagers slept. They didn’t know that a few kilometers away, hell was opening its gates. Commander Cramer came to get the women first. 29 of them. They left the barracks in silence. They were afraid, yes, but they maintained incredible dignity. They were told a disinfection shower before leaving for work.
It was the universal lie of the camps. The word ” shower” was the last word millions of people heard. They walked toward the small building at the bottom of the camp. It wasn’t an industrial concrete bunker. It was a nearly clean tiled room that still smelled of charcoal. Cramer had installed a makeshift system. No granules.
of zyclopredation here. It was more primitive, more direct. I was in the infirmary, the window half-open. I couldn’t see inside, but I could see outside. I saw Cramar, his shirt sleeves rolled up, like a worker preparing for a grueling task. He was holding a black ring and a jerrycan. The women came in.
The heavy door slammed shut . The sound of the bolt echoed through the silent valley. Then Cramar poured a mixture of salt and water through a hose that led inside. Hydrogen sulfide, I waited. I expected screams, but the walls were thick. I only heard dull thuds, bodies falling, fingernails scraping the metal of the door. It lasted two minutes, maybe three.
Then silence fell back over the mountain. An absolute, terrifying silence, heavier than the The roar of the cannons. Cramer looked at his watch. He lit a cigarette. He waited for the gas to dissipate. Then he ordered the door opened. That’s when the horror took on a new face. Usually, in the camps, the bodies taken from the gas chambers were skeletons, emaciated beings, broken by months of starvation.
But here, the SS began to remove the bodies of the 29 women, and they were beautiful. It’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s the truth. They had been fed for weeks. Their bodies were plump, their skin smooth. They looked like sleeping women. They looked like our mothers, our sisters, our wives. It was this untouched humanity that made the scene unbearable.
They weren’t refuse in the eyes of the Nazis; they were choice specimens. They loaded them into a covered van, not like garbage, but with care. Obscene. The merchandise couldn’t be damaged, there couldn’t be any bruises. The truck started up. It took the road to Strasbourg, 50 km, an hour’s drive to deliver fresh flesh to the anatomy institute of the Reich University.
The next day, it was the men’s turn. But Nashem knew when he saw that the women hadn’t returned, when he saw the van come back empty and smelling of disinfectant, he understood. He called to me through the barbed wire. His face was calm, a biblical resignation. Henry, he said softly, they don’t want our work, they want our bodies.
I couldn’t lie this time. I lowered my head. Why? he asked. Why did you treat us? Why did you give us white bread for the institute? And whisper for a collection. He took a step back . The horror of the answer hit him full force. It was n’t hatred. Pure, it was curiosity. They were going to be exhibited. They want to turn us into monkeys in a zoo for eternity.
He closed his eyes. He prayed not for his life, but for his soul. On the evening of August, they came for the men, thirty at a time. But Nashem walked with his head held high. He didn’t cry, he didn’t beg. He entered the small tiled room reciting the Kaddish. The prayer for the dead. Cramer began his ritual again: the black ash, the water, the feces, the sound of bodies falling.
Eighty-six times death passed, eighty-six hearts stopped to satisfy the whim of an anatomy professor who wanted to prove the superiority of his race. Collecting the contemptuous, the last truck left at dawn. The Natsweiler-Strutov camp became silent again. The special barracks was empty. Only a few cardboard playing cards remained on the beds and the smell of bread he hadn’t finished eating.
In Strasbourg, in the university’s basement, Professor Auguste Ht waited. The vats of alcohol were ready. The museum curator, a man named Henry Henri Pierre, was preparing the autopsy tables. They received the still-warm bodies. They undressed them. They immersed them in baths of formaldehyde and alcohol.
They transformed Mahchem, the rabbi, the Greek, the young women into floating objects. They had become part of the collection. But history has a sense of cruel irony. For the Nazis thought they had all the time in the world. They thought their raid would last a year and that students would come to admire these skeletons for centuries.
They were wrong. The Allies were approaching, and the dead, preserved in alcohol, would become the most damning witnesses to their downfall. For a year, silence fell once more upon the Natsweiler camp. We, the We survivors continued to die of hunger and overwork in the quarry. But we hadn’t forgotten Menahem and the others.
Their disappearance was a ghost that haunted our nights. We didn’t know exactly what was happening. Fifty kilometers away, in the beautiful city of Strasbourg, annexed by the Reich, rumors circulated. The SS drivers talked, they talked about vats, they talked about alcohol. At the anatomy institute, Professor Auguste Ht was a busy man.
He had received his raw material. Imagine the scene in the basement of a prestigious university, where generations of doctors had learned to save lives, still-warm corpses piled up, murdered on command. The institute’s French lab assistant, a man named Henri Henri Pierre, a namesake, a strange coincidence, had to receive the bodies.
He later recounted the horror of that night. The bodies were intact. No paralytic wounds, no trace of Disease, just that cherry-red color , typical of sianide poisoning. Ht gave his orders. Preserve them immediately. They plunged the 86 bodies into vats filled with synthetic alcohol and formaldehyde.
Mashem, the rabbi, the young women, they floated there in a macabre suspension. Their eyes open in the amber liquid. Ht was waiting for Germany’s final victory to prepare the skeletons. He was already dreaming of his museum. He could already see the bronze plaques. Specimens of the extinct Jewish race, but time was against him.
November 1944, everything changed. The guns no longer held out in Russia. They held out here in France. General Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division was racing toward Strasbourg. The Americans were approaching. Panic gripped the Nazi administration. Files were burned. People fled to the kidneys to cross into Germany. And suddenly Ht realized his precious collection. His A life’s work.
It was no longer a trophy, it was proof. These were five complete, identifiable bodies that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Nazi Germany had not only killed people in the fury of war, but had planned a scientific, cold, and calculated murder. He sent an urgent telegram to Wolfram Zvers, the director of the Anbe, in Berlin.
The collection was in danger of falling into Allied hands. What to do? Berlin’s response was brutal and immediate. Destroy everything. Easy to say in a telegram. Destroy everything. But how do you dispose of 86 bodies preserved in formaldehyde in a matter of hours when Leclerc’s tanks are at the city gates? They couldn’t burn them.
They didn’t have enough wood or a crematorium oven on site. He couldn’t bury them. The ground was frozen, and he was short on time. So, madness reached its peak. Ht and his assistants tried to dismember them. They They removed the bodies from the vats. They began to cut off heads to make identification impossible.
They tried to scrape off the tattoos on the arms. Those Auschwitz numbers that were their civil status. It was a slaughter, a bloody panic in the basement of science. They managed to decapitate people, but they were too slow. The sound of Sherman tank tracks could be heard in the suburbs of Strasbourg. Ht understood that he was lost. He gave up.
He left the bodies as they were. Some mutilated, others whole. He fled like a thief, leaving behind the most damning crime of the century. On November 23, 1944, Strasbourg was liberated. The tricolor flag flew once again over the cathedral. French soldiers, drunk with joy and exhaustion, flooded into the city.
They secured the public buildings. A unit entered the university. They expected to find empty offices, papers scattered everywhere. They went down to the basement. There was an unbearable stench, a smell of strong alcohol and death. They opened the doors to the cold storage rooms and froze, even for soldiers hardened by four years of war.
What they saw was beyond comprehension: vats, bodies piled high, severed heads laid on tables. He didn’t know who these people were. He didn’t know where they came from. It was a complete enigma. The French commander called in military doctors. They examined the bodies. They saw the tattoos Kirt hadn’t had time to remove. 10796.
That was Méashem’s number. The secret of the formaldehyde was broken, but the mystery remained. Who was he? Why was he there? And above all, who would give them back their names for decades? These bodies would remain unknown, specimens. It would take the painstaking work of another man much later for Méashem to be identified.
no longer just a number, but to become a man again. But for now, in the cold of November 1944, they were there, silent and terrible witnesses, accusing their executioners by their mere presence. Strasbourg, December 4: the bodies were placed in the cold vats. The French military doctors, led by Commander Simona, began the autopsies. They were perplexed.
These dead bodies resembled no other victims of the war. They had not died of starvation. They had not been tortured. They were intact. It was an absolute forensic enigma. Who are they? the reports asked. Why were they preserved? The numbers tattooed on their left forearms were noted: 107969, 106632. Sequences of indelible blue numbers , the only trace of their passage on earth.
But there was a problem, a terrible problem. The Nazis, in their flight, had taken or destroyed the correspondence records. We had the bodies, we had The numbers, but we didn’t have the names. At Auschwitz, number 1079 was just an entry in a large Comte ledger. Without that ledger, Menahem was nobody. He was an administrative ghost.
Professor Ht, on the other hand, had disappeared. It was later learned that he had committed suicide in the Black Forest on June 2, 1945, with a bullet to the head. He fled human justice. He never had to answer for his crime in court. He took his secret to the grave, and what became of the bodies ? This is where the second tragedy begins: the tragedy of oblivion.
After the autopsies, after the photographs for the war crimes commissions , the bodies became a burden. No one knew what to do with them. The university wanted its buildings back. The city wanted to move on . So, they were buried. In October 1945, they were placed in simple coffins and interred in the Jewish cemetery of Chronembourg, in the suburbs of Strasbourg.
No ceremony, no large family gatherings, no funeral procession, just a mass grave with a vague memorial to the martyrdom of Nazi barbarity. No one knew who lay beneath it. The world was too busy rebuilding, judging the major criminals at Nuremberg, forgetting the horror. I, Henry, survived the Natsweiler camp. When I was liberated, I weighed 42 kg.
I returned to Lyon. I finished my studies. I became a doctor. I tried to speak out. I wrote to the authorities. I saw them, I said. I saw them leave Ajuschwitz. I know there was a rabbi. I know there was a Greek. Find their names, but the polite response was: “Sir, the archives are chaotic.” That’s impossible.
Turn the page. Turn the page? How could I turn the page? When I saw Menachem’s face every time I closed my eyes, for decades, silence shrouded the Chronembourg pit like a leaden shroud. Medical students in Strasbourg walked past the anatomy institute unaware that beneath their feet, hell had taken place.
The skeletons had become a mere footnote in the history of the Holocaust. The collection of Jewish skeletons. A macabre curiosity, an abstraction. They had succeeded in the end. HT had succeeded. They had stolen their lives, their deaths, and even their identities. They had become objects, anonymous specimens. The years passed, 50 years, 60 years.
I grew into an old man. I thought I would die without ever knowing who they truly were. I thought evil had won the battle of memory. But one should never underestimate the tenacity of a truth-seeker. In the early 2000s, a German journalist, a A man named Hans Joakim Lang began asking questions. He found a letter, a simple letter, in the archives of the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.
This letter mentioned the numbers, and suddenly the lock popped. Hans Joakim Lang did what no one had done before him. He went to Auschwitz. He searched through the museum’s dusty registers. He looked for the tattooed numbers one by one, and miraculously, the Nazis, in their bureaucratic obsession, had recorded everything. 1079.
Hans Joakim Lang’s finger slid along the line, and next to the number, there was a name. Menachem Tafel, born in Berlin, deported 1062. Alice Lock. They had names, they had birthdates, they had professions, they had parents. In 2004, 60 years after their murder, the 86 ghosts finally ceased to be just numbers.
I was there when the news broke. I cried like a child. Menachem’s name was Menachem Tafel. The little Greek boy’s name was Maurice Venezia. On December 11, 2005, it was cold in Strasbourg, an icy wind blowing across the Jewish cemetery of Chronembourg. I was 91 years old. My legs could barely carry me , but I had to be there. I wasn’t alone.
There were officials, historians, and above all, there were families, children and grandchildren who had come from Israel, the United States, and Greece. They had come to mourn the dead they thought had vanished in smoke at Auschwitz, and whom they found here beneath the soil of Alsace. We gathered around a new headstone, a simple, dignified gray stone.
And for the first time since 1943, their names were spoken aloud. Not numbers, but names. Menem Tafel. I closed my eyes and saw his face again in the barracks at Strutof. I saw his hand resting there again. on the glass. He was no longer specimen 107. He was Menahem Tafel, a dairyman in Berlin, a husband, a father. He loved music; he had a life.
Alice Lock was no longer a measuring girdle. She was a young woman who loved to laugh. Maurice Veneia, the little Greek, was no longer an anthropological curiosity. He was a son of Thessaloniki. Eighty-six times the name echoed in the cold air. Six times we defeated Professor Hirt.
Auguste Hirt wanted to prove that these people were subhuman. He wanted to reduce their existence to EOS and cranial measurements. He wanted future generations to look at them with disgust or pity from behind a museum glass case. He failed miserably. Today, no one remembers Hirt’s racial theories except to despise them. But everyone remembers Menahem.
By trying to dehumanize them completely, the Nazis made them the eternal symbols of our Common humanity. I look at the headstone, I touch the cold stone with my wrinkled hand. I feel an immense peace wash over me. My mission is complete. I have kept my silent promise, made through the barbed wire in August 1943.
I have not forgotten them, but history does not end with my death. It continues with you. Every day. Medical students walk past the anatomy institute in Strasbourg. They are learning to dissect, to treat, to save. It is vital, it is imperative, that they know this in the basements of their university. They must know that science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul, as Rabelais said.
They must know that a doctor who forgets that his patient is a human being becomes a monster, however brilliant he may be. The skeleton museum never opened its doors. The display cases remained empty, and that is the greatest victory of all. In place of the museum of hatred, we have built a sanctuary of memory. I am Henry.
I witnessed the unspeakable, and today I can leave. I know that Menachem no longer sleeps alone in the cold. He has regained his name, and with his name, he has found his place among men.
