Raphael Toledano

Raphael Toledano
Born	25 January 1980 (1980-01-25) (age 44)
Occupation	philosopher

Raphael Toledano, born in 1980 in Strasbourg, is a Strasbourg-based doctor who has dedicated himself since 2003 to the historical study of Nazi medical experiments conducted during World War II in Alsace.

Biography

Raphael Toledano was born on 25 January 1980 in Strasbourg.

Thesis

In December 2010, after six years of research, Raphael Toledano defended his doctoral thesis in medicine in Strasbourg on the experiments carried out at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and the Vorbruck-Schirmeck security camp by virologist Eugen Haagen. He was the first to identify and publish the names and biographies of the hundreds of victims of the typhus (189 Roma deported from KL Auschwitz), yellow fever, and influenza experiments conducted by the Nazi virologist. His work earned several awards, including the Auschwitz Prize in 2011, the 6th Véronique Dutriez Prize, the 2010 Strasbourg Medical Faculty Prize, the 2011 Hubert Dayan Prize, and the 2012 Charles Gutsch Prize.

Jewish Skeleton Collection

On 6 July 2013 Raphael Toledano presented a lecture at a symposium on Nazi human experiments at Oxford Brookes University about the deliveries of corpses to August Hirt's Anatomy Institute during the annexation.

On 1 December 2014 his documentary film, co-written and co-directed with Emmanuel Heyd, titled Le nom des 86 (produced by Dora Films), was released. The film tells the story of August Hirt's project to create a "Jewish skeleton collection" at the Anatomy Institute of the Reichsuniversität Straßburg, alongside the identification of the names of the 86 victims by German historian Hans-Joachim Lang.

During his research, Dr. Raphael Toledano found a letter in the Central Archive Depot of Military Justice (located in Le Blanc, Indre) proving the existence of human remains belonging to the 86 Jewish victims of August Hirt, which had been preserved post-war at the Strasbourg Medical Faculty. On 9 July 2015 these remains — preserved in a jar and test tubes, whose existence had been previously dismissed by researchers — were discovered by Dr. Raphael Toledano, with the help of Prof. Jean-Sébastien Raul, at the Museum of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Strasbourg. This discovery led the university to establish a commission in 2016 to investigate its collections.

In 2016, Raphael Toledano published the results of his research in Annals of Anatomy, where he identified and named 232 victims (Soviet prisoners of war, executed resistance fighters, patients) whose bodies were delivered to the Department of Anatomy headed by August Hirt between 1942 and 1944, in addition to the 86 Jewish deportee bodies intended for the "Jewish skeleton collection" project, which had been identified by Hans-Joachim Lang in 2003.

Bibliography

• Raphael Toledano, The Medical Experiments of Professor Eugen Haagen from the Reichsuniversität Strassburg: Facts, Context, and Trial of a National-Socialist Doctor, Doctoral thesis in medicine, No. 150, University of Strasbourg, 2010, 686 pages. (Auschwitz Prize 2011).
• Raphael Toledano, Henri Henrypierre: From Lièpvre to Nuremberg, Journey of a Witness to the Crimes of Struthof, in the 35th Bulletin of the Val de Lièpvre Historical Society, 2013, pp. 87–110.
  • (in English) Raphael Toledano, Anatomy in the Third Reich – The Anatomical Institute of the Reichsuniversität Strassburg and the deliveries of dead bodies, Annals of Anatomy - Anatomischer Anzeiger, Volume 205, May 2016, Pages 128–144.
  • (in English) Raphael Toledano, August Hirt and the supply of corpses at the Anatomical Institute of the Reichsuniversität Strassburg (1941–1944), in: Paul Weindling (ed.), From Clinic to Concentration Camp Reassessing Nazi Medical and Racial Research, 1933–1945, Routledge, 2017.

Filmography

Emmanuel Heyd & Raphael Toledano, Le nom des 86, Dora Films, 2014 (Label "Images en bibliothèques" 2015).