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August HirtGerman anthropologist and anatomist, SS Sturmbannführer, war criminal.
Date of Birth: 28.04.1898
Country:  Germany |
Content:
Biography of August Hirt
August Hirt was a German anthropologist and anatomist, a high-ranking SS officer, and a war criminal. He was born in 1898 in Mannheim, Germany, to a Swiss entrepreneur family. Hirt attended the Karl-Friedrich Gymnasium in Mannheim. In 1914, while still a student, he volunteered for the army and participated in World War I. In October 1916, he was wounded in the head. Hirt received his medical education at the University of Heidelberg and obtained German citizenship in 1921. He defended his doctoral thesis in 1922 on the topic of "The Sympathetic Trunk in Some Dinosaurs" and his habilitation thesis in 1925 on "The Direction of Nerve Fibers in the Kidney." Hirt worked as a professor of anatomy.
SS Career and War Crimes
On April 1, 1933, Hirt joined the SS and became a member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) on May 1, 1937. He had a personal acquaintance with Heinrich Himmler. In 1939, Hirt was assigned to the Berlin Military Medical Academy, where he conducted research on the therapeutic effects of triphlavin in mustard gas injuries. When World War II broke out in the same year, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and served as a senior military physician. In July 1942, with the establishment of the Institute for Targeted Military Research within the framework of Ahnenerbe, Hirt became the head of Department "H" (Hirt). To avoid being called back into the Wehrmacht, he transferred to the SS forces and became part of the Personal Staff of Reichsführer-SS.
During his time at the anatomical institute in Strasbourg, Hirt worked on the scientific justification for Nazi racial theories. The institute collaborated closely with the Ahnenerbe society. Hirt created an extensive anthropological collection of skeletons, skulls, and body fragments for his racial studies, which was later discovered by Allied forces in his laboratory storage. The "work material" used for his experiments included prisoners from Auschwitz of various nationalities. According to the testimony of a kapo from the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, Ferdinand Halla, around 150 people went through Hirt's experiments, with 7 or 8 dying and the rest being sent to other concentration camps.
Escape and Death
After the liberation of Strasbourg, Hirt fled with his daughter to Tübingen in November 1944 to evade advancing Allied forces. He went into hiding in the Black Forest, posing as a peasant. Hirt eventually took his own life by shooting himself. However, the search for him continued until the late 1950s. In 1963, he was sentenced to death in absentia in France.
