Reply to Marc Scherer

Our review of Hans Joachim Scherer 7 was written to honor a neuropathologist who made seminal contributions to our understanding of the pathology and biology of gliomas. I was particularly intrigued by his distinction of two major glioblastoma subtypes: “From a biologic and clinical point of view, the secondary glioblastomas developing in astrocytomas must be distinguished from ‘primary’ glioblastomas. They are probably responsible for most of the glioblastomas of long clinical duration” 8. Since histologically these subtypes could not reliably be distinguished, they remained conceptual. In 1996, our lab showed that their genetic profile differs significantly 9 and the identification in 2009 of IDH1 mutations 4 has provided a reliable genetic marker of secondary glioblastoma 3 which can be expected to be included as distinct disease entity in the next edition of the WHO Classification of Tumors of the Nervous System.

In his Letter to the Editor, Marc Scherer asserts that in our article “unjustified allegations have been put forward which prejudice” his father's reputation. I will focus on two major issues. We wrote of the post‐war account, by Ludo van Bogaert (1897–1989), that after the invasion of Belgium by German troops, Scherer tried to usurp his position at the Institute Bunge in Antwerp. According to the documents provided by Marc Scherer, there was a good professional relationship between both neuropathologists. It is therefore difficult to assume that a person of van Bogaert's reputation would invent such an episode. However, as Marc Scherer points out, there are no documents supporting van Bogaert's allegation.

Following his retirement as Professor of Neuropathology at the University of Tübingen, my co‐author Jürgen Peiffer (1922–2006) studied extensively, and with meticulous adherence to historical sources, the involvement of prominent neuropathologists in Nazi Germany's euthanasia (T4) program 5, 6. He was driven by the critical need to analyze the complicity of science with human rights abuse in the past to learn from it for our future.

From 1939 to 1942 more than 5000 children, predominantly with mental/neurological disabilities, were murdered, mostly by carbon monoxide poisoning. In contrast to adult victims, the brains of euthanized children were made available for medical research. After his return to Germany, Scherer was appointed in 1942 Chief of the Neuropathological Laboratory at the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland). Polish archives show that he signed 209 autopsy reports of children killed in an Institution in Lublowitz (now Lubliniec), a small town South‐East of Breslau 1. It is not known whether he investigated the brains willingly or, more likely, under pressure from the organizers of the euthanasia program. His curriculum vitae suggests that he was opposed, rather that sympathetic, to the Nazi regime. Marc Scherer cites several German colleagues who testified to this in letters written after World War II. Most of the authors of these letters were, in one way or another, connected to or supporting the T4 program 2. Among the supportive colleagues was Viktor von Weizsäcker, Director of the Neurological Research Institute and Scherer's superior in Breslau. Marc Scherer quotes von Weizsäcker's warm and very positive account of Scherer's personality. However, von Weizsäcker himself defended the killing of “lebensunwertes Leben” (life unworthy of life), the Nazi term for members of the populace who had no right to live and should be euthanized. In a lecture in Heidelberg in 1933 he is quoted as saying: “As physicians we are responsibly involved in the sacrifice of the individual for the whole” and “it would not be fair if the German physician would believe that he did not have to responsibly contribute to the necessary Vernichtungspolitik (policy of extermination)” 2. Scherer did not publish the results obtained by investigating the brains of euthanized children. His fate was to find himself working in an environment where medical research was bereft of compassion for the dignity of the mentally ill and the disabled 5.