Hermann Stieve (1886–1952) was Director of the Berlin Institute of Anatomy from 1935 to 1952. His research on the female reproductive system is controversial, as some of his scientific insights derived from histological investigations on the genital organs of executed women. These investigations were made possible by the sharp increase in executions during the “Third Reich.” Stieve's research was methodologically accurate and contributed significantly to contemporary scientific debates. Nevertheless, his use of the organs of execution victims, some of them resistance fighters, benefited from the Nazi justice system. He thus indirectly supported this system of injustice. The allegation, however, that Stieve “ordered” the death of prison inmates according to their menstrual cycle, appears to be incorrect. An appraisal of Stieve's research should avoid traditional black‐and‐white classifications of research during Nazi times. In our opinion, Stieve was neither a murderer nor a fervent Nazi. Nevertheless, his research results were flawed by their ethical and political context. Stieve will remain a somber footnote in the biographies of many execution victims. Clin. Anat. 22:163–171, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

The archive of the Nobel Assembly for Physiology or Medicine in Solna, Sweden, is a remarkable repository that contains reports and dossiers of the Nobel Prize nominations of senior and junior physicians from around the world. Although this archive has begun to be used more by scholars, it has been insufficiently examined by historians of surgery. No other German surgeon was nominated as often as Ferdinand Sauerbruch for the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in the first half of the 20th century. This contribution reconstructs why and by whom Sauerbruch was nominated, and discusses the Nobel committee evaluations of his work. Political factors did not play an obvious role in the Nobel committee discussions, in spite of the fact that Adolf Hitler in 1937 had prohibited all German citizens to accept the Nobel Prize. The main reasons why Sauerbruch ultimately was not considered prize- worthy were that Sauerbruch's achievements were marked by scientific priority disputes, and that his work was not seen as original enough.

In 1905 the first German association of Social Medicine was founded. Out of its now 100 years of history two aspects which were of peculiar importance for its development are studied here by the method of historic analysis of the sources and the examination of secondary literature: the noteworthiness of this foundation is characterized by the fact that the society was based from its beginnings on multidisciplinarity and the appliance of different scientific methods. It is showed which fascination had exclusively biological and genetic explanations for the genesis of diseases and human attitude characteristics. In transformation to practical action these ideas led to the extermination of disease causing genetic attributes and often their bearers as well. This aim was followed up even when the genetic causation of specified attitudes was not clearly proved. These biological interpretations of disease phenomenons neglected social causes for the process of the appearance of certain diseases and the emergence of health. They were responsible for medical interventions into the physical integrity of hundreds of thousands of human beings under the political terms and conditions of National Socialism.

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