They resisted Hitler. They were executed. At last, they lie at rest

The microscopic remains of prisoners who were executed for resister Adolf Hitler have been laid to rest. Photo / Getty Images

The microscopic remains of dozens of prisoners, most of them women, who were executed for resisting Adolf Hitler and whose bodies were used for research by Nazi doctors, were buried in a simple wooden box at a Berlin cemetery Monday.

A plaque that tells of the victims' fate will be placed over the grave, in Dorotheenstadt cemetery, where other victims of the Nazis are also buried. The cemetery is several blocks behind the Charité, Berlin's main research hospital.

The fragments of the prisoners' remains were given to the hospital two years ago by the descendants of Hermann Stieve, a doctor who made a deal with the Nazis to obtain the remains of the prisoners for research. They had been killed at the Plötzensee prison, which is in western Berlin.

The fragments were contained on 300 glass microscopes slides, each only a hundredth of a millimetre thick and roughly a square inch in size.

"With this, we can give back some of their dignity to those who were murdered," said Dr. Karl Max Einhäupl, head of the Charité, at a solemn interfaith ceremony that was followed by the burial.

After receiving the slides, the hospital turned to the German Resistance Memorial Center for help researching and identifying the remains. It soon realised they belonged to victims of the Nazis, many of them in the political resistance.

"Only very few victims from Plötzensee have graves," Johannes Tuchel, the research centre's director said at the ceremony, which was attended by descendants of the victims and others whose family members fought in the resistance against the Nazis.

Of the more than 2,800 prisoners who were put to the guillotine or hanged at Plötzensee from 1933 to 1945, only 140 have known graves, Tuchel said. The Nazis did not want the prisoners to be buried, for fear their graves could become rallying sites for political resistance, he said.

"These were people who sought to push back against the Nazi dictatorship," Tuchel said. "They were people who tried to remain human in a time of inhumanity."

Stieve, a professor of anatomy at the university hospital, received the bodies shortly after the prisoners were executed. He was particularly interested in the physical effect that stress and fear had on women's reproductive systems.

Drawing from the meticulous records kept by the prison guards, he was able to find details about the final months of the lives of victims that particularly interested him, such as how they reacted to their death sentences and to facing execution.

After the war, Stieve continued his research and " never saw himself as guilty," Einhäupl said. He died in 1952.

About 20 of the victims have been identified from their remains.

One was Erika von Brockdorff, a member of a resistance group the Gestapo called the Red Orchestra movement. It was a network of artists, intellectuals and students who disseminated pamphlets and posters calling for civil disobedience. They also gathered information to send to foreign governments in an effort to undermine the Nazis in the early 1940s.

Von Brockdorff was arrested in September 1942, and sentenced to 10 years in detention that December. But the Nazis, angry that anyone had dared to defy their power, demanded a tougher sentence. She, along with a dozen men, was killed on May 13, 1943, at age 32.

For Stieve, she became sample No. 103.

For her daughter, 81-year-old Saskia von Brockdorff, the burial ceremony Monday brought a small measure of peace and justice. For years, she felt she had nowhere to go to mourn her mother, other than a memorial marking the Plötzensee prison.

"When I lived outside of Berlin, I used to avoid going there," she said of the memorial. "It was always horrible."

After a Protestant minister led the mourners in the Lord's Prayer and a rabbi said Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, Saskia von Brockdorff threw a white rose into the open grave where the box had been lowered.

"Finally," she said. "I have a place where I can come and remember my mother."

Written by: Melissa Eddy

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