Following his medical studies, he served in the German Army during First World War and became interested in the effect of stress and other environmental factors on the female reproductive system, the subject of his later research.

The Nazis imprisoned and executed many of their political opponents, and their corpses became Stieve's primary research material, with his full awareness of their origin.

He also joined the Orgesch, a paramilitary organization that was ordered disbanded by the Allies in 1921 as a violation of the provisions of Treaty of Versailles that limited German rearmament.

Later that year Stieve supported the Kapp Putsch, a failed military coup that briefly forced the republic's civilian government to flee Berlin.

[1] That same year, he joined another paramilitary organization, Der Stahlhelm, which primarily served as the DNVP's armed wing, ostensibly providing security at its meetings.

However, despite welcoming Adolf Hitler's rule as a restoration of national pride, he did not join the Nazi party,[1] one of the few German medical school administrators who did not do so.

Stieve also was a nationalist in the language theme as he supported an intention of replacing English-source words like April and Mai with Germanic equivalents.

He got histories that included information about how the women had reacted to their death sentences, how well they had adjusted to prison life, and the timing of their menstrual cycles.

In 1942 they changed schedules so that executions took place at night; Stieve was able to persuade them to return to mornings so that he could process the bodies and tissue the same day.

The bodies of Harro Schulze-Boysen and his wife Libertas, along with Arvid Harnack and Liane Berkowitz, all members of the Red Orchestra,[12] which tried to thwart Germany's invasion of the U.S.S.R. in 1941, were taken there after their executions near the end of 1942.

The next year the body of Elfriede Scholz, sister of novelist Erich Maria Remarque, was also released to Stieve after her execution for "undermining morale" after saying that the war was lost.

[1] Stieve's list of his research files was obtained 70 years later and as of 2018 these documents are held in Memorial Site for the German Resistance in Berlin.

[1] Another one of Stieve's students carried her remains home in a shopping bag and had them buried in Zehlendorf Cemetery, making her the only member of the Red Orchestra whose burial site is known.

Later Pommer became a dissident herself, hiding a family member of one those involved in the 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler and eventually being jailed herself near the end of the war.

The identities of those Stieve did his research on only became known almost 70 years after the war when a list he had compiled in 1946 for a Protestant minister trying to help some of the relatives of Plötzensee inmates find their remains.

After the Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg in 1946 led to convictions of 14 physicians who had conducted experiments on unwilling living subjects in concentration camps, the country's medical profession looked within itself to see who else among its members had also committed war crimes.

In 1948 it was announced that only several hundred of the country's thousands of physicians had done so, a number that excluded Stieve and many of his fellow anatomists who did their work at universities rather than camps.

It felt compelled to put to rest "spiteful false accusations" by pointing out that Stieve had never set foot in a concentration camp, nor had he made any request to the prison administration that "this or that should happen" before the execution.

"[6] In a 2009 review, German medical historians Andreas Winkelmann and Udo Schagen conclude that "Stieve was neither a murderer nor a fervent Nazi.

The basis for the claim was a 1972 book by antiabortion activist Fred Mecklenburg, which cited a purported Nazi experiment in which women put under traumatic stress did not ovulate.

Sabine Hildebrandt [Wikidata], a historian and anatomist at Harvard Medical School recognized this as apparently an imperfect understanding of Stieve's findings.