Eduard Pernkopf (November 24, 1888 – April 17, 1955) was an Austrian professor of anatomy who later served as rector of the University of Vienna, his alma mater.

In 1920 he returned to Vienna to work as one of Hochstetter's assistants, lecturing to first- and second-year students about the cardiovascular and peripheral nervous systems.

At the ceremony installing him in that position, he acknowledged Hochstetter's tutelage by dropping to his knees in front of the older man and kissing him on the hand.

He required medical faculty to declare their ethnic lineage as either "Aryan" or "non-Aryan" and swear loyalty to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

[5] Four days after becoming dean, he gave a speech to the medical faculty advocating Nazi racial hygiene theories and policies and urging his fellow physicians to implement them in their teaching and practice.

and a Nazi salute, praising Hitler as "a son of Austria who had to leave Austria in order to bring it back into the family of German-speaking nations", he returned to that theme in his conclusion: To him who is the proclaimer of National Socialist thought and the new way of looking at the world and in whom the legend of history has blossomed and has awakened and who has the heroic spirit within him, the greatest son of our homeland, we wish to give our gratitude and also to say that we doctors with our whole life and our whole soul gladly wish to serve him.

He worked 18-hour days dissecting corpses, teaching classes and discharging his administrative responsibilities while a team of artists created the images that would eventually be in the atlas.

[3] Outside of these four, some other artists, mostly family members such as Schrott's father and Batke's wife, contributed some pictures during the atlas's early years.

The only deviation from this high level of realism was the use of color, where Pernkopf instructed them to use brighter hues than those found in real cadavers so that a reader would better learn to recognize and distinguish key anatomical landmarks.

Lepier nevertheless volunteered as an air raid warden, as did Batke when he returned home after being wounded and receiving the Iron Cross on the Eastern front.

[8] In 1943, Pernkopf reached the pinnacle of the academic career ladder when he was named the University of Vienna's rector, its highest official.

Fearing that he might suffer legal or political repercussions for his previous Nazi party membership and prewar actions, he went on what he claimed was a vacation to Strobl in the state of Salzburg.

Hans Hoff, a Jewish physician who had left the Vienna faculty in 1938, gave him two rooms at the school's neurological institute.

There was some tension among them as the three who had served felt Lepier, with whom they had never been close personally to begin with, had had a much easier time of it during the war than they had, a bitterness aggravated by the Third Reich's defeat by the Allies.

A few years later, the publisher brought out a condensed two-volume set with all the color plates, removing most of Pernkopf's explanatory text (and, later, airbrushing out the Nazi symbols Lepier and the others added to their signatures).

[11] In 1996 Dr. Howard Israel, an oral surgeon at Columbia University, revealed that the subject bodies may have in some cases been those of executed political prisoners, LGBT men and women, Roma and Jews.

[11] Looking at older copies in the archives, Dr. Israel discovered many of the Nazi symbols in the artists' signatures, which had been removed from more widely circulated later versions.

The project confirmed that at least 1,377 bodies of executed persons were delivered to the University during the Nazi times and its usage cannot be excluded from at least 800 images of the atlas.

[15] Some readers have wondered if the bodies shown in cutaway may have been Jewish inmates at concentration camps,[16] since they appear gaunt and have shaved heads or close-cropped haircuts.

Wiesenthal himself answered that it was unlikely, since during the Third Reich the Vienna Landsgericht, or district court, passed death sentences solely on "non-Jewish Austrian patriots, communists and other enemies of the Nazis.

"[Pernkopf's] atlas is still one of the very best in terms of accuracy, showing levels of detail concerning fascia and neurovascular structures that are of direct relevance for the actual dissection process," says Sabine Hildebrandt, a Michigan anatomy professor and German native who has researched him and other Nazi-era anatomists thoroughly.

Finally, forcing it out of circulation would be no less an act of censorship than that perpetrated by Hitler's regime when it publicly burned books shortly after assuming power.

"Rather, it is up to a new human generation to glean good from this murky history by continuing to use Pernkopf's atlas in a rational, historically conscious manner.

"[17] On the other hand, "There can be no doubt that Pernkopf, as head of the Anatomy Institute, was instrumental in the procurement of the bodies of the victims of Nazi terror for dissection, and ultimately, for the creation of his Atlas," argues Pieter Carstens, a professor of public law at the University of Pretoria.