From Scientific Object to Commemorated Victim: the Children of the Spiegelgrund

Abstract

The legacy of German medical research in the era of National Socialism remains contentious, as regards identification of victims, and the appropriate handling of scientific specimens. These questions are acutely posed by the scientific slides, brain sections, and other body parts of victims, who were killed for research. These slides continued to be held by Austrian and German scientific institutes in the second half of the twentieth century. That scientists continued research on these slides between 1945 and the late1980s suggests a disassociation of guilt and responsibility for the deaths of the victims by the German scientific community.

The legacy of German medical research in the era of National Socialism remains contentious, as regards identification of victims, and the appropriate handling of scientific specimens. These questions are acutely posed by the scientific slides, brain sections, and other body parts of victims, who were killed for research.(Weindling 2012) These slides were held by Austrian and German scientific institutes in the second half of the twentieth century. That scientists continued research on these slides between 1945 and the late1980s suggests a disassociation of guilt and responsibility for the deaths of the victims by the German scientific community. German post-war scientists classified the Nazis as racial fanatics whose killing of large numbers of victims was unstoppable. Scientists might salvage something for the benefit of science by retaining brains, bones and other body parts for their research. Nazism was linked to “pseudo-science”, and so by definition a true scientist could not be seen as involved in Nazi racial atrocities.

The disassociation between Nazi racial policy and science was a frequent defence made after WW2. When in November 1946 the human geneticist Otmar von Verschuer’s links to Joseph Mengele were considered by Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft Institute directors, the panel took the view that Verschuer was innocent of ordering killings in Auschwitz.(Weindling 1989: 568-9) Verschuer was legitimated by the fiction that he was merely making intelligent use of a by-product of wartime killings. In effect, the scientific panel gave approval to all postwar use of victims’ body parts.(Weindling 1989: 568-9) At the same time, the scientific significance of the slides and body parts changed. At the time of the killings, these were so-called “racial degenerates” of “lesser value” when it came to the German race/s (again, a problematic category). Others were of “lower races” as Jews and Slavs. Later, the racial categorization evaporated, and research was on anomalies in the brain or as evidence of an impaired motor system.

This extenuating view of German science has been found to be historically untenable. In examining Nazi racial policy, historians of eugenics showed an active participation by a range of scientific specialists at the level of racial ideology. The post-1945 German scientific communities in West and East Germany were notoriously silent about expulsion of Jewish colleagues, and the racialisation of many branches of science, instead presenting themselves as victims of National Socialism. Since the 1980s historians have shown that German scientists took an active role to support Nazism at a number of levels.(Mueller-Hill 1984) The scientists’ activities included: linking race to questions of mental health and disease, and working within a scientific paradigm of “racial pathology.” They were complicit in the diagnosing the suitability of patients/ victims for compulsory sterilization and “euthanasia”, not least in adjudicating on racial ancestry and in the prevalence of genetic diseases in family ancestry. Scientists lobbied for making available research funds for racial research, and the wider scientific community took an important role in peer review of projects. They ordered the killings of persons deemed to be “interesting” research subjects for purposes of scientific research. The research on “idiot” children at the Psychiatric Clinic in Heidelberg well shows this‘.(Mundt et al 2001) Not only was German research in biology and medical science permeated by aims, ideas and ends aligned with Nazi racial ideology, the procedures and research practices remained scientific, as can be seen in areas like brain research.

Most research on German biology, medicine and racial ideology in the Nazi era has been perpetrator oriented. Although there was a multitude of surviving victims after 1945, there was little interest in providing compensation or resolving health issues, or in professional and scientific organizations scrutinizing their record of responsibility. Overall, there was negligible interest in determining who victims were. Federal German laws on confidentiality relating to medical issues meant that documents have been withheld from academic scrutiny or at best issued in an anonymized form. In effect, this suppression of data on victims has retrospectively legitimated the properly “medical” nature of Nazi racial research and policy.

What we are left with is a divided memory. On the one hand, the tendency has been to commemorate Holocaust victims as individuals. On the other, medical victims have been subjected to anonymisation. This situation is tellingly expressed by the contrast between two memorials concerning scientific victims. The first is the memorial for Nazi “euthanasia” victims, erected on the Waldfriedhof (Berlin) in 1990, where an unrecorded number of specimens and slides of brain anatomical research were buried. The identity of the victims killed in the Nazi euthanasia programme, and researched on by Julius von Hallervorden and colleagues, was not reconstructed (Weindling 2012). The memorial carries only the German inscription To commemorate victims of National Socialism and their medical misuse. A warning to all researchers to exercise responsible self-limitation..

The second is a memorial at the Otto Wagner Spital, Vienna.

Both memorials commemorate Nazi “euthanasia” victims, whose brain sections were used for neuro-pathological research. These two commemorations were from contrasting perspectives. The Waldfriedhof memorial is oriented to scientific ethics and seeks – quite explicitly – to address science rather than to commemorate victims as persons. The Spiegelgrund memorial commemorates the victims as individuals. The artistic representations form a contrast in that the victims at Berlin-Buch remain anonymous, and the Vienna victims can be identified by name. It is this contrast that I wish to explore. The issues show how scientific institutes responded to the large collections of brain tissue slides that they housed in the period since 1945 until the 1990s.

In 2002, slides and other anatomical preparations of nearly 600 child victims from the Spiegelgrund psychiatric hospital were buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery. In all, 789 children are known from the death registers kept at the time.¹ A memorial for 789 victims was inaugurated at the hospital, today the Otto Wagner Spital, where there is also a well laid out exhibition on the history of eugenics and Nazi “euthanasia”. There were two ceremonies at the Zentralfriedhof. One was for relatives to mourn, and another more public one to commemorate the 789 victims of a combined scientific and Nazi atrocity. At the same time, efforts to prosecute one of the involved doctors, Heinrich Gross, who had continued researching on the specimens, were unsuccessful.(Czech 1998)

The victims’ bodies and the slides had become inseparable. However, the meaning and significance of the histological remains changed fundamentally. The Spiegelgrund commemorations raise the issue of identification of victims, and the extent to which individual victims of Nazi coercive medical research can be identified. More broadly, a number of broader questions arise concerning how medical and research institutes retained collections of body parts after WW2. It is necessary to establish what kind of research was carried out on these body parts during the war, and in the post-war era; what was the scientific and medical response to demands from the late 1980s to remove these victims’ body parts from research institutes. Radicals like Götz Aly and the holding institutions shared a common agenda of rapid disposal. They ignored crucial issues of the extent to which individual victims can be identified, and their identities and individual fates commemorated. In this respect, it is necessary to establish who had referred, diagnosed, and decided on the fate of the victim; the circumstances of the killing; and whether medical and scientific persons were involved in selecting “interesting cases” to be earmarked for killing, and subsequent retention of their bodies for research. The slides then need to be reconnected to the life history of the killed persons. Whether scientists actually selected and researched on the victims as living persons would show complicity in the killing.

Wider issues concern the funding agencies, and individual academics who approved the original research. It is necessary to establish what use was made in the postwar period of the specimens. What were the removal and burial policies for the remains after 1990? Finally, how were the human remains on the slides eventually handled, and were the slides consigned to a furnace for the glass to be melted prior to burial? Here the Spiegelgrund victims can be compared to other sets of victims, not least of neuropathology, as held by research institutes in the Federal Republic of Germany.(Weindling 2008)

Until the early 1990s Austrian and German scientific institutes retained the collections stemming from executions and the killing of victims of Nazi medical research. In the 1990s German institutes rapidly removed these body parts. They did not destroy the specimens, but they were generally buried in a religious ceremony. This process was carried out with the minimum of publicity, as a means of removing objects suddenly deemed a burden. German scientists were concerned that they would be excluded from international academic circles in which North American scientists had a strong voice. (Weindling 2012)

Individual victims were generally not identified, apart from the University of Tübingen (see Tübingen 1990). In Frankfurt am Main, the burial attended by a few representatives of the university provoked a protest that relatives had not been invited. By not identifying individuals, some awkward questions of the victim’s identity were avoided: scientists had studied the living whole person. The person was selected for killing, and then the histological specimens allowed a certain type of theory of causality – whether of an infection, a disability or movement disorder, or a mental illness, to be analysed. ³

The historian Götz Aly (1985; 2013) drew attention to the presence of the specimen collections of victims:

Auf dem Vorschlag des Autors, die Gehirnschnitte von Euthanasieopfern zu vernichten, die Akten der weiteren medizinischen Benutzung zu entziehen und im historischen Archiv unterzubringen, hat die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft bisher nicht reagiert To the suggestion.of the author, that the brain sections of the euthanasia victims should be destroyed, and the socuments should be made unavailable for any further medical use, and should be stored in an historical archive, there has been no response from the Max Planck Society.(Aly 1985)

Aly demanded the destruction of the specimens and slides to prevent their further exploitation, and to guarantee the archiving of documents. Aly’s crusade caused animosity among the scientists and relevant authorities, as (with considerable historical justification) he was intent on demonstrating the continuity of perpetrating elites from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic. Yet his confrontational position meant that the destruction of specimens also meant destruction of victims’ identities.⁴ By calling for the removal and destruction of slides, Aly inadvertently colluded with a policy of denial and oblivion. The removal in Germany coincided with a new critical awareness of Nazi atrocities, and institutions successfully rid themselves of small or large collections of criminally obtained body parts.

German medical researchers became anxious of opposition from international scientific opinion. The geneticist Benno Müller-Hill (1984) published a book with interviews with perpetrators and their associates. His work attracted a strong following among US and UK scientists, but he remained concerned with the perpetrators, and their mindset. Critically aware physicians like William Seidelman in Canada made public their concerns about German medical researchers not facing up to the legacy of their responsibilities, and had the ear of editors of journals like JAMA.(cf Seidelman and Israel 1997; Seidelman 2012) German scientists could not afford any international embarrassment. The rapid disposal was so successful, that there is no readily available overview or historical evaluation of these collections of remains from victims of Nazi medicine. One has to reconstruct the collections and what they held institution by institution.

Study of the dispatch of corpses sent to anatomy departments during the war at universities like Jena, Marburg, Tübingen and Vienna shows a rapid rise of executed persons. Tübingen conducted a thorough and conscientious evaluation of victims’ identities. This scrutiny was thanks to the critically aware neuropathologist Jürgen Peiffer (1991). He was dismayed that as a young researcher he was – unwittingly – given the brain of a “euthanasia” victim for brain pathological research. After retirement he conducted important historical research on euthanasia victims, reconstructing why some victims were selected for brain research purposes.

As Nazi justice caused a rise in the numbers executed, anatomical institutes had a plentiful supply of corpses. But the researchers’ appetite was considerable. Gabriele Czarnowski (2008) has shown how in Graz foetuses were obtained from forced abortions on slave labourers, and then exploited for research at the university’s gynaecological clinic. The extent to which this situation was the case elsewhere in Germany and in areas under German occupation (as in Strasbourg/Strassburg, and Poznań/Posen, and other institutions established in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union) remains unresolved. We know that medical researchers drew on Auschwitz for victims – as did August Hirt for the Jewish skeleton collection at Strasbourg, or for twenty Jewish children subjected to a TB immunological experiment and subsequently murdered.(Lang 2004; Schwarberg 1996) A notorious example is how the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology obtained the heterochromic eyes of a Sinti family from Auschwitz doctors.(Hesse 2001)

“Euthanasia” victims in Germany generally have their names blacked out in documents and are not commemorated by name. An example is the memorial of children killed in the course of research by the psychiatrist Carl Schneider in Heidelberg. On this memorial only the first name of each child victim and an initial is given.(Mundt et al. 2001) The apparent reason is the stigma attached to mental disorder. Here the descendents are prioritized over the victims, even though the reasons for the killing may be construed as primarily racial and not familial.

The discovery of minute swastikas in the plates of the Pernkopf anatomical atlas caused a wave of criticism in North America.⁵ A commission was instituted by the Vienna medical faculty. A paper was published in The Lancet indicating that the corpses for dissection came not from Holocaust victims but from executed so-called “criminals”.(Angetter 2000) The implication was that this meant that the bodies were legitimately obtained. But this was an unfortunate implication, because the numbers of executions of “criminals” (a category that could include anti-Nazi dissidents) rose disproportionately in Nazi Germany.(Hildebrandt 2009a,b,c) That the number of executions rose enormously in Nazi Germany, and that those executed were often dissidents was at first ignored.(Seidelman and Israel 1997. Angetter 2000. Hubenstorf 2000. Hildebrandt 2006) The Pernkopf commission published its final report in 1998, but it was not widely circulated.(Akademischer Senat der Univ. Wien 1998)

The Nazi judicial authorities allowed medical intervention around the time of execution. Examples of such research include the physiologist Gotthilft von Studnitz who treated victims’ eyes just before the person was blindfolded for the execution – his interest was light deprivation; and Heinrich Stieve, the Berlin anatomist. Stieve is accused of wishing to assess the physiological effects of fear and sexual arousal among women shortly before their execution.(Weindling 2010 ) Currently, there is considerable discussion over whether Stieve actually arranged for the women to be subjected to forced sexual penetration. He was interested in obtaining “exceptionally high-quality histological images of the human ovary”.(Winkelmann and Schagen 2009; Seidelman 2009)

The “euthanasia” killings provided medical researchers with a plentiful supply of brains for dissection. Julius Hallervorden and Hugo Spatz were among those who exploited this source of body parts. In Vienna a children’s special clinic – a Kinderfachabteilung – was founded on 24 July 1940 as part of the youth welfare department. These clinics were part of a network of killing centres for children, established by the Nazis. Here children were killed by starvation, and the administering of Luminal mixed into drinks or administered as suppositories. The standard number of the deaths from child “euthanasia” is an estimated 5000 deaths, an estimate produced by a Frankfurt am Main prosecutor.(Benzenhöfer and Oelschäger 2002) This number has never properly been reassessed, and a comprehensive listing of child victims of “euthanasia” is long overdue.(Kaelber and Reiter 2011)

“Euthanasia” specimens of executed children were kept by the neuropathologist Heinrich Gross (1915-2005). This physician was a convinced Nazi, a member of the Hitler Youth in 1932, from 1933 a storm trooper as a member of the SA, and from 1938 a member of the NSDAP. He also had contact with German physician Hans Heinze, just prior to the beginning of euthanasia. Gross was responsible for the murder of eight children in 1944. He was part of a group of “euthanasia” doctors at the Steinhof asylum (the full name being the Wagner von Jauregg-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt ‘Am Steinhof’). After the war, the more senior physicians from the Spiegelgrund, Erwin Jekelius and Ernst Illing were convicted for “euthanasia” and sentenced to death by hanging in 1946. Gross, who now worked at another Vienna psychiatric hospital, the Rosenhügel, was convicted for the death of a child in 1950, but in 1951 this sentence was annulled and thereafter he worked undisturbed by legal action, and enjoyed a successful postwar career (Czech 1998, 1999, 2001). His expertise was often called on by the Austrian legal system on matters of forensic psychiatry. In 1952 he published in the journal Morphologisches Jahrbuch the first of a series of neuropathological studies of what he called “interesting cases”. He gave his academic affiliation as “aus der Prosektur der Heil und Pflegeanstalt Am Steinhof” (Gross 1952).

Gross analysed “a case” about which that he had already lectured on the 23 November1942 at the Wiener Biologische Gesellschaft. This concerned Günther Pernegger, who was born on 16 November1941. When six weeks old, he was dispatched to the “Kinderfachabteilung” at the Steinhof, because of malformations of his head and hands. The patient died on 25 January 1942 after seven weeks in the institution, ostensibly from a lung infection and an inability to eat adequately. False causes of death were routinely used when a patient was ordered to be killed. The pathologist for the Steinhof, a certain Barbara Uiberrak, remained in office from1938 until the 1960s, and thus was able to allow Gross access to victims’ slides and body parts From 1953 Gross joined the socialist SPÖ (the socialist party of Austria), and from 1955 he returned to work at the Steinhof. From 1964 he began receiving funds for research on brain malformations from the Ludwig Boltzmann Society, and from 1968 his department was funded as one of the prestigious Ludwig Boltzmann institutes (a scaled-down Austrian equivalent of the Max Planck Institutes in West-Germany).⁶ The “Ludwig Boltzmann-Institut zur Erforschung der Mißbildungen des Nervensystems” was in the neurohistological pavilion in the Steinhof. More than 700 brains and spinal tissues of child “euthanasia” victims were kept at his institute.

From the 1990s there was a drawn out and ultimately unsuccessful effort to prosecute Gross. At the same time the anatomical collection became a focus of attention.(Czech 2000. 2002a-d) The collection remained housed in the original site of research, a pathological laboratory (there is also a chapel of rest designed by Otto Wagner). This is closed to the public (and access was refused to a polite request as an interested historian, when I visited the hospital). The collection was designated as one of victims awaiting burial. Ernst Klee used the collection as a macabre background for a film documenting his research on Nazi medical atrocities (Weindling 1995).

In 2002 burial of the Spiegelgrund victims’ body parts took place at the City Cemetery in Vienna. No effort was made to remove the body part from a slide. It was felt that the slide and the body were in practical terms immutably linked. Removal of tissue from the slide was impractical. This was a difficult but sensitive decision avoiding the cleaning off and even re-use of the glassware. In Vienna, there was first a private ceremony for relatives at the Zentralfriedhof. On the following day there was a public commemoration. Still, publicity for victims was muted – placards held by attending children show only the first name of the victims. The graves carry the full name of the murdered child victim. There has in 2013 been a further burial of retained body parts.

The psychiatric hospital is now called the “Otto Wagner Spital” after its fin de siècle architect Otto Wagner. The name changes of the hospital – Am Steinhof for the psychiatric hospital founded in 1907, within this Am Spiegelgrund between 1940 and 1945 for the children’s department that was largely a “euthanasia” killing centre, Wagner von Jauregg Heil- und Pflegeanstalt der Stadt Wien from 1941, and currently Otto-Wagner Hospital – obscure the historical continuities.⁷ An informative historical exhibition on the links between Nazi “euthanasia” and eugenics has been opened in one of the pavilions.⁸ In front of the concert hall at the hospital, a light shines every night for every victim. There are in fact two burial locations for some victims, – one is the grave in the Zentralfriedhof, and the other is that established by the family in cases where the body parts not retained for research were returned for burial. There is additionally the memorial at the hospital with the lights, conveying the numbers of individual victims. Since the 1980s, an ethic of commemoration has arisen that shifted from a general category – whether religious, a diseased or disabled group, or nationality – to identified individuals. The Vietnam war memorial for U.S. troops in Washington DC (completed in 1982) was an early example. Holocaust history went in this direction with the wall giving all veterans’ names. This approach is evident in the campaign by the Stern journalist Günther Schwarberg (1984) to commemorate twenty Jewish child experiment victims killed just before the end of the war in a Hamburg school cellar on the Bullenhuser Damm.(Schwarberg 1984) By way of contrast, German officials, researchers and the public have steadfastly upheld anonymisation. For a subsequent Berlin-Buch memorial at the site of the former KWI for Brain Research, the sculpture endorsed the agenda of withholding victims’ names. The molecular biologist and human rights activist Jens Reich reflected:

Wenn wir vor ihr stehen und über sie nachsinnen, dann werden wir nicht auf ein Einzelschicksal geführt. Es gibt keinen Namen, es wird keine historisch nachweisbare Person zitiert. Nur in dieser Anonymität kann uns das Nachdenken über die Figur auf den Grund für ihre Aufstellung hier im Park führen. Nur vor einem so idealtypischen Kinderkörper wiederum können wir jedoch auch das Nachdenken zu uns zurückführen, konkret werden lassen. Etwa durch die Frage: Hätte eines deiner eigenen Kinder auch so ein Schicksal erleiden können?⁹ If we stand before this, and reflect, then we are not led to an individual fate. There are no names, and no identifiable historical person. Only in this anonymity can we reflect on this sculpture and the reason for its place here in the park. Only before such an idealised child’s body can we be led back on reflecting on ourselves. Here the question arises: could one of your children have suffered such a fate?

Here the response by Jens Reich to the sculpture explains that there are no names which evoke an identifiable historical person, and that it is only with anonymisation that a true reflection is possible. The memorial represents a negation of individual suffering, and appears to me as fundamentally misconceived. The Spiegelgrund memorial, in contrast, has gone decisively in the direction of individual commemoration. This is appropriate for three reasons:

1. The victim is commemorated as an individual – and identity is restored.

2. Only by knowing an individual name can the circumstances of the individual’s life history be reconstructed.

3. Anonymisation perpetuates an oppressive stigma. The concealment also colludes in an official interest in concealing links between victim and perpetrator.

In the case of the Spiegelgrund victims, the scientific slide changes from becoming an object for research. The slide has become properly transformed into a part of a tragically murdered person. An incidental consequence is that it becomes a piece of forensic evidence relevant for prosecution, as well as raising problematic issues for bioethics, historical understanding, and commemoration. But only exceptionally are victims’ identities established, as for the Spiegelgrund victims. In Austria the high profile of the Spiegelgrund victims distracts from other less well researched killing centres.¹⁰ In the Federal Republic of Germany there is considerable concern with the supposed viewpoint of surviving relatives, and how the killing of a person may be regarded as having a stigma for relatives. The 20 children murdered at the Bullenhuser Damm were identified against the wishes of German officialdom. What is disturbing is the lack of documentation about the preparations removed from university and Max Planck Society collections in the early 1990s. Only exceptionally were the body parts properly documented and identified. We do not know whether the slides and containers were buried with the body parts, or whether the glassware was “cleaned”. One might see the official elite as acting in the name of victims’ relatives without having fully consulted them. This point was made regarding burials of specimens in Frankfurt/M.(Weindling 2012) It might have been better for institutions to retain the body parts and slides, and openly confront their difficult and disturbing legacy. As with so many aspects of medical atrocities in Nazi Germany, there has been a great reluctance to identify and acknowledge victims of scientific and medical crimes, and the uncomfortable consequences of their suppressed history between 1945 and the present.

Appendix. Post-war Papers by Heinrich Gross

H. Gross, Zur Morphologie des Schädels bei der Acrocephalosyndaktylie, Morphologisches Jahrbuch 92 (1952), 350-372.

O. Braun, H.Gross, Zur Kenntnis der eigenartigen mit Nierenfehlbildungen kombinierten Gesichtsveränderungen (“Dysplasia renofacialis”). In: Virchows Archiv 329 (1956), 433-452.

H.Gross, B. Uiberrak, Klinisch-anatomische Befunde bei Hemimegalencephalie. In: Virchows Archiv 327 (1955), 577-589.

H.Gross, Anatomische Befunde bei der Dysostosis Craniofacialis (Crouzon). Morphologisches Jahrbuch 96 (1956), 115-125.

H.Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, Über eine eigenartig kombinierte Hirnmißbildung. In:Morphologisches Jahrbuch 98 (1957), 263-287.

H.Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, B. Uiberrak: Über eine spätinfantile Form der Hallervorden- Spatzschen Krankheit. I. Mitteilung: Klinisch-anatomische Befunde. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde 176 (1957), 77-103.

H.Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, Über eine Sonderform der Arhinencephalie mit Pseudobalken. In: Wiener Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde 15 (1958), 91-103.

H. Gross, Die Rhombencephalosynapsis, eine systemisierte Kleinhirnfehlbildung. In: Archiv für Psychiatrie und Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie 199 (1959), 537-552.

H. Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, Über eine kombinierte Progressive pontocerebellare Systemathrophie bei einem Kleinkind. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde 179 (1959), 388-400.

H. Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, Balkenmangel bei hereditätem, hypersekretorischen Hydrocephalus.In Morphologisches Jahrbuch 100 (1960), 63-80.

H.Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, Klinisch-anatomischer Beitrag zur Dementia infantilis Heller. In: Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift 72 (1960), 375-377.

H. Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, Über eine Mikrencephalia vera mit Fehlbildung und ubiquitäter Laminarschädigung der Großhirnrinde. In: Wiener Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde 17 (1960), 324-336.

H. Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, F. Seitelberger, Über eine systemisierte Fehlbildung des Rautenhirns. In: Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift 74 (1962), 705-708.

H. Gross, Der Hypertelorismus. In: Ophthalmologica 131 (1956), 137-156.

H. Gross, Zur Pathogenese der Sehnervenathrophie bei den turricephalen Schädeldysostosen. In:v. Graefes Archiv für Ophthalmologie 157 (1956), 225-236.

H. Gross, Zur Kenntnis der Beziehungen zwischen Gehirn und Schädelkapsel bei den turricephalen, craniostenotischen Dysostosen. In: Virchows Archiv 330 (1957), 365-383.

H. Gross, B. Uiberrak, Morphologische Befunde bei familiärer Mikrencephalie. In: Morphologisches Jahrbuch 98 (1957), 207-226.

H Gross, H. Hoff, E. Kaltenbäck, Über die wichtigsten Fehlbildungen der telencephalen Hirnkammern. In: Wiener Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde 16 (1959), 1-34.

H. Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, Neue Erkenntnisse über die Formalgenese der echten Porencephalie. In Morphologisches Jahrbuch 100 (1960), 517-545.

H. Gross, F. Seitelberger, Die pathologische Anatomie der zerebralen spastischen Paresen. In:Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 116 (1966), 756-760.

H. Gross, K. Jellinger, E. Kaltenbäck, H. Pfolz, Zur Morphologie und Pathogenese Des Balkenmangels. In: Aktuelle Probleme der Neuropathologie, ed. K. Jellinger (Wien 1973), 72-82.

H.Gross, M. Simányi, Porencephaly. In: Handbook of Clinical Neurology, Bd. 30, ed. P. J. Vinken, G. W. Bruyn (Amsterdam/New York/Oxford 1977), 681-692.

H.Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, M. Godizinski, Tuberöse Sklerose: Neuropathologischer Befund und klinisches Korrelat bei 21 Fällen. In: Aktuelle Probleme der Neuropathologie 4, ed. K. Jellinger, H.Gross (Wien 1978), 75-87.

Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, Die intrauterine Zerebralschädigung als ätiologischer Faktor bei angeborenen, hochgradigen Schwachsinnszuständen. In: Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift 70 (1958), 853-858.

H. Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, Ätiologische Probleme bei den angeborenen und frühzeitig erworbenen hochgradigen Schwachsinnszuständen. In: Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift 71 (1959), 119-123.

H. Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, Die perinatale Hirnschädigung als ätiologischer Faktor der psychischen Entwicklungsstörungen im Kindesalter. In: IV. Internationaler Kongreß für Neuropathologie, Proceedings, Bd. 3 (Stuttgart 1962), 24-28.

H. Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, Differentialdiagnostische Probleme der frühkindlich manifest werdenden Schwachsinnszustände. In: Wiener Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde 20 (1963), 101-107.

H. Gross, K. Jellinger, E. Kaltenbäck und A. Rett, Infantile Cerebral Disorders. In: Journal of the neurological Sciences 7 (1968), 551-564.

H. Gross, K. Jellinger, Morphologische Aspekte zerebraler Mißbildungen. In: Wiener Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde 27 (1969), 9-37.

H. Gross, K. Jellinger, E. Kaltenbäck, Clinical and morphological aspects of cerebral malformations. In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Congenital Malformations (Excerpta Medica International Congress Series No. 191, The Hague 1969), 84.

H. Gross, E. Kaltenbäck, Zur Neuropathologie des “postenzephalitischen” Syndroms bei infantilen Zerebralschäden. In: Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift 82 (1970), 668.

H. Gross, K. Jellinger, E. Kaltenbäck, Morphologische Aspekte epileptischer Manifestationen bei infantilen Zerebralschäden. In: 1. Donau-Symposium für Neuropathologie, ed. Wiener Medizinische Akademie (Wien 1971), 71-78.

K. Jellinger, H.Gross, Congenital telencephalic midline defects. In: Neuropädiatrie 4 (1973), 446-452.

K. Jellinger, H. Gross, Holoprosencephalie und Arhinencephalie. In: Aktuelle Probleme der Neuropathologie, ed. K. Jellinger (Wien 1973)