Universities and medical research centers, mainly in Germany and Austria, retain and use body parts and cadavers of Nazi victims – a grim legacy of the Holocaust that has largely been ignored.

As many as 20 university medical schools and institutes received the anatomical remains of Nazi terror, according to a professor emeritus of the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto and an expert in the medicine of the Third Reich, William Seidelman.

Most have yet to investigate or even consider that their anatomical collections may contain cadavers of Jewish and non-Jewish victims murdered by the Nazis.

Such specimens are tangible evidence of the role played by medicine and medical science in the crimes of the Nazi regime, Mr. Seidelmen said.

“Academic medicine during the Nazi period exploited human victims for inhuman research,” he said. “Medical science plundered the remains of murdered individuals to acquire specimens for institutes of anatomy, pathology, and neuropathology.”

Every medical school in the Third Reich likely received cadavers of people executed by the Gestapo and SS, he added. In 1942, the Reich’s ministry of justice declared the corpses of executed Poles and Jews would not be released for burial. A number ended up in university anatomical institutes.

Only several institutes are known to have completed investigations and buried their cadavers.

For example, in 1990, it was disclosed that the anatomical institute of the University of Tubingen in Germany had in its collection more than 400 cadavers of people executed by the Nazis. The specimens were buried in a commemorative ceremony in a special section of the Tubingen cemetery.

The investigation at the University of Vienna in Austria was more significant. Dr. Eduard Pernkopf was dean of its medical school starting in 1938 and rector, or president, of the university from 1943 to 1945.

An active Nazi sympathizer, he was the founding editor of a classic atlas of human anatomy, “Topographical Anatomy of the Human Being,” published until the late 1980s, but still used.

It is suspected, but never definitely proved, that the subjects for the intricate watercolor illustrations in the book were victims of Nazi terror.

In early editions, swastikas and SS symbols are visible in the artists’ signatures. Some were airbrushed out of later editions. More disturbing is the possibility that based on age, appearance, and a crude haircut, at least one of the subjects may have been a prisoner.

In 1995, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority of Israel, Yad Vashem, asked the University of Vienna to conduct inquiries about its activities. In its 1998 report, the university disclosed that its Institute of Anatomy received about 1,400 cadavers of people the Gestapo had killed in Vienna.

Although a bomb destroyed the anatomical institute near the end of the war, some of the specimens from the Pernkopf collection were taken to other universities, including the University of Innsbruck, where Werner Platzer, a protege of Pernkopf and editor of later volumes of his atlas, was head of the university’s Institute of Anatomy from 1969 to 1997.

“There has not been a special investigation yet of the institute” a university spokesman said. Mr. Platzer, the professor emeritus, did not return a phone call or e-mail.

On the other hand, in 1990, the Max Planck Society, successor to the preeminent scientific institute in Germany during the war, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, finally removed and buried specimens from two of its divisions – the Institute for Brain Research and Institute for Psychiatry.

“The wartime Institute for Psychiatry was a significant source of scientific legitimation for the regime’s racial policies,” observed Robert Jay Lifton in his monumental study, “The Nazi Doctors.”

A wartime director of the Institute for Brain Research was Dr. Julius Hallervorden, a noted neurologist who acquired hundreds of brain specimens through the murder of psychiatric patients. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine recommend ed that, given his past, Hallervorden’s name be removed from a neurological syndrome that is co-named after him.

Finally, this year, the Max Planck Society, the umbrella organization for both institutes, is expected to complete a major five-year investigation of its politics and practices under the Nazis. A main subject will be “racial hygiene, genetic, and psychiatric research,” according to the society’s Web site.

Two universities that could face further investigation are the University of Strasbourg in Alsace, France, and the University of Posen in Poland, medical schools that were created as “Reich universities” to implement Nazi ideals and policies.

Cooperating with the notorious August Hirt, head of the anatomy department at the University of Strasbourg, the SS gassed approximately 86 Jewish prisoners and transferred the corpses to Hirt’s institute. Involved in horrific experiments, Hirt is believed to have committed suicide in 1945.

The University of Posen made death masks from the bodies of Jews from a nearby concentration camp. Dr. Hermann Voss, director of Posen’s Medical Institute, kept a diary of skeletal remains, which he sold for a profit.

A major purchaser was the Vienna Museum of Natural History. The skulls of Jews and non-Jewish Poles and the masks are believed to have been displayed in a gallery about race.

Two gypsum death busts of Jews are believed to remain in the museum’s collection. In the early 1990s, the skulls of Jewish victims were given to the Austrian Jewish community and buried in Vienna. The skulls of non-Jewish Polish victims were turned over to the government of Poland. The Vienna Jewish Museum once displayed the masks in an exhibition about the Holocaust.

Dr.Voss went on to a successful medical career after the war.

As questions persist, Mr. Seidelman has requested that the German government and university authorities undertake formal investigations, specifically at the University of Heidelberg, about a collection of the brains of murdered children, and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, which allegedly retained cadavers from the Hitler period, including circumcised males, presumably Jews, in its institute of anatomy.

Mr. Seidelman said that since many of the universities, museums, and research institutes of Germany and Austria “are believed to have been involved directly or indirectly in the exploitation of Nazi victims, they have a moral obligation as institutions responsible for the pursuit of knowledge and truth to investigate, document, publicize, and educate future members of the medical profession, researchers, and the public about their roles and about the lessons that can be learned.”