29 Facts About Hermann Stieve

Hermann Philipp Rudolf Stieve was a German physician, anatomist and histologist.

Hermann Stieve taught medicine at the University of Berlin, and was Director of the Berlin Institute of Anatomy at the Charite teaching hospital in the later years of his life.

Hermann Stieve did not join the party himself, but as an ardent German nationalist supported Adolf Hitler in the hope of restoring national pride.

Hermann Stieve worked in anatomical research for a year before the First World War began in 1914.

Hermann Stieve returned to the Army, where he both tended to patients at the front and taught at the military medical school in Munich.

Hermann Stieve took a chair as a lecturer and researcher in anatomy and anthropology at the University of Leipzig.

Hermann Stieve joined the German National People's Party shortly after taking his position at Leipzig, and later the local Freikorps.

Hermann Stieve joined the Orgesch, a paramilitary organization that was ordered disbanded by the Allies in 1921 as a violation of the provisions of Treaty of Versailles that limited German rearmament.

Later that year Hermann Stieve supported the Kapp Putsch, a failed military coup that briefly forced the republic's civilian government to flee Berlin.

Hermann Stieve was made director of the university's anatomical institute, making Stieve, then 35, the youngest doctor ever to chair a medical department at a German university.

Over that time, the militarist elements of the German body politic with which Hermann Stieve was involved became stronger, and more openly antidemocratic.

Hermann Stieve did become a member of a party organization passively, when the remaining Stahlhelm were merged into the SA reserve in 1934.

Hermann Stieve was particularly interested in how stress affected fertility.

Hermann Stieve was able to get some donated uteruses and ovaries from the bodies of accident victims, or from surgeons who had removed them.

Hermann Stieve, who had accepted a professorship at what is Humboldt University of Berlin as well as the directorship of its anatomical institute, reached an agreement with administrators at Plotzensee Prison outside the city to accept all bodies of those shot, hanged or beheaded, many of them political prisoners.

Hermann Stieve got histories that included information about how the women had reacted to their death sentences, how well they had adjusted to prison life, and the timing of their menstrual cycles.

Hermann Stieve then studied the effects of the psychic trauma on the doomed woman's menstrual pattern.

Hermann Stieve published reports based on these studies without hesitation or apology.

Hermann Stieve wrote 230 papers on the effect of stress on the female reproductive system.

In 1942 they changed schedules so that executions took place at night; Hermann Stieve was able to persuade them to return to mornings so that he could process the bodies and tissue the same day.

Nor, contrary to another report, did Hermann Stieve make soap from the remains of the bodies after they had been dissected.

Hermann Stieve is the only one of Stieve's students or assistants known to have left the program for moral reasons.

Hermann Stieve himself claimed to have refused the bodies of some of the assassination plotters but reportedly had no problem dissecting the body of Walter Arndt, a longtime friend who was executed in 1944.

The identities of those Hermann Stieve did his research on only became known almost 70 years after the war when a list he had compiled in 1946 for a Protestant minister trying to help some of the relatives of Plotzensee inmates find their remains.

Hermann Stieve continued to manage his university's Institute of Anatomy and only his death broke his work in 1952.

The hospital erected a bust of Hermann Stieve and named a lecture hall after him.

Hermann Stieve died from a stroke in 1952 while serving as the institute's director.

Hermann Stieve had wanted to leave his own body to science, but after his wife objected he was buried.

Hermann Stieve's work continues to be both scientifically important and controversial, as its full circumstances become known.