August Hirt (28 April 1898 – 2 June 1945) was an anatomist with Swiss and German nationality who served as a chairman at the Reich University in Strasbourg during World War II.

The skeletons of his victims were meant to become specimens at the Institute of anatomy in Strasbourg, but completion of the project was stopped by the progress of the war.

In 1922, Hirt obtained his doctorate in medicine with "Der Grenzstrang des Sympathicus bei einigen Sauriern" (English: The Ganglions in the Sympathetic Nervous System of Some Lizards).

100 414), and was promoted to Hauptsturmführer (captain) on 1 July 1937, but he was only a member of the Nazi Party from 1 May 1937, when he enrolled in the universities of the Reich (Mitgliedsnr.

Hirt conceived and directed one called the Jewish skull collection, which was begun but not completed as intended.

We have the opportunity to acquire a tangible scientific document by procuring the skulls of Jewish–Bolsheviks who embody the disgusting but characteristic subhuman.

[4]: 882  They were selected among the inmates in August 1943 at Auschwitz by his assistants, the anthropologists Bruno Beger and Hans Fleischhacker.

Of those initially selected, it is believed that 89 persons (60 men and 29 women) were sent to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

[7] In September 1944, the rapid approach of the Allies led to the project being abandoned and Himmler ordered the destruction of all traces of this compromising collection.

The Allies found corpses and partial remains preserved in formalin for eighty-six bodies upon the liberation of Strasbourg.

August Hirt fled Strasbourg in September 1944, hiding in Tübingen in southern Germany across the river from Alsace.

[9] In the book, Die Namen der Nummern (The Names of the Numbers, 2004, ISBN 978-3455094640), Hans-Joachim Lang describes this mass murder.

In addition, a memorial plaque honoring the victims was placed outside the Anatomy Institute at Strasbourg's University Hospital.

[10] In 2015, a researcher, Raphael Toledano, identified tissue samples of victims in test tubes and a jar in the Strasbourg Medical Institute's closed collection.