New French film raises ghosts of Nazi medical horrors

A documentary about the scale of Nazi medical experiments has reopened old wounds in France as one of the country's leading universities investigates whether its stores still contain the remains of some Jewish victims.

Dr Michel Cymes, the star of a French television medical advice programme, believes that the remains of some of the 86 Jews tortured and mutilated by SS doctor August Hirt may still be in the anatomy collection of the University of Strasbourg. He first raised the theory in his 2015 bestseller, “Hippocrates in Hell”, and repeated the claim in a new film of the same name shown on French TV.

The documentary raised questions about how part of the “Jewish skeleton collection” Hirt assembled at the university during the war may have survived in its stores. The remains of Jews on which Hirt tested mustard gas at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp near the Alastian city were supposed to have been buried after it was liberated in 1944. But after Cymes' claims, the university is now conducting an inquiry using outside experts into the contents of 20 boxes found in its collection which bear Hirt's name. He was convinced that the Jewish race was on the point of extinction and wanted to study the skulls of “Judeo-Bolsheviks”.

Cymes, both of whose Polish-born grandfathers perished at Auschwitz, said he had little idea how extensive Nazi medical experiments had been until he started his own investigation.