Julius Hallervorden


Julius Hallervorden was a Nazi German physician and neuroscientist who infamously studied the brains of 697 prisoners and 60 children who were euthanized at Brandenburg Psychiatric Hospital.
Hallervorden was born in Allenburg, East Prussia to psychiatrist Eugen Hallervorden. He studied medicine at the Albertina in Königsberg. He worked in Berlin in 1909/10 and from 1913 on in Landsberg/Warthe. In 1921 and 1925/26 he worked at the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie in Munich, he left Landsberg in 1929 to organize a centralized psychiatric healthcare in the Province of Brandenburg.
In 1938, he became the head of the Neuropathology Department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research. He was a member of the Nazi Party and admitted to knowingly performing much of his research on the brains of executed prisoners and participated in the action T4 euthanasia program.
In a conversation with Leo Alexander, a Jewish Austrian neurologist and Holocaust refugee who was forced to emigrate to the United States during World [War II], Hallervorden said the following of his participation in the T4 program:
Along with Hugo Spatz, Hallervorden is credited with the discovery of Hallervorden-Spatz syndrome. After World War II, Hallervorden became President of the German Neuropathological Society and continued his research at the Max Planck Institute in Giessen, Germany.