Julius Hallervorden (21 October 1882 – 29 May 1965) was a German physician and neuroscientist who infamously studied the brains of 697 prisoners and 60 children who were euthanized at Brandenburg Psychiatric Hospital.
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Hallervorden was born in Allenburg, East Prussia (Druzhba, Znamensk, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia) 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 (Gorzów Wielkopolski). In 1921 and 1925/26 he worked at the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychatrie in Munich, he left Landsberg in 1929 to organize a centralized psychiatric healthcare in the Province of Brandenburg.[1]
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.[2]
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:
Hallervorden: "Look here now, boys. If you are going to kill all those people, at least take the brains out so that the material can be utilized.” They asked me, “ How many can you examine?” and so I told them ... the more the better".[2]
Along with Hugo Spatz, Hallervorden is credited with the discovery of Hallervorden-Spatz syndrome (now referred to as Pantothenate kinase-associated neurodegeneration).[3][4] After World War II, Hallervorden became President of the German Neuropathological Society and continued his research at the Max Planck Institute in Giessen, Germany.[2]