Flavine

The science prior to the crime--August Hirt's career before 1941

August Hirt (1898-1945) has achieved macabre renown for atrocities perpetrated during his years as professor of anatomy at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg 1941-1945. Little, however, is known about his preceding scientific career. To fill this gap and to scrutinise whether he really was a mediocre scientist during his early years, as some have purported, we perused relevant historical archives and the available literature. In 1921, after medical school, Hirt started to research and teach at the Institute of Anatomy in Heidelberg, forging a steady career until becoming interim chair in 1935. He then became director of anatomical institutes in Greifswald 1936 and Frankfurt 1938 before going to Straßburg in 1941. Hirt seems to have been well-established in the community of anatomists. Some of his career advancements after 1933 were nevertheless facilitated by Nazi support. His main scientific fields were the autonomic nervous system, in which he produced a relevant contribution to anatomical knowledge, and fluorescence microscopy. His development of a special "luminescence microscope", in cooperation with pharmacologist Ellinger, was an important advancement in the history of microscopic technique. His early research was funded by national and international sponsoring bodies and was neither unethical nor racist. As Hirt did not publish anything after 1940, those who only knew his publications might think of him as a "good" scientist. To simply dismiss Hirt as a "pseudoscientist" would avoid the question-still difficult to answer-of how he could develop from an accepted, successful anatomist to a criminal "in the name of science".