Max Clara

Max Clara (12 February 1899, Völs am Schlern, Austria-Hungary – 13 March 1966, Munich) was a German anatomist and Nazi Party member, who conducted research on the corpses of executed prisoners.

After their mother's death (5 August 1903), Josef Clara moved his residence and the seat of his surgery to the village of Blumau, where he built a sanatorium at the Brenner road near the train station.

According to H. Ferner, he completed his studies with "summa cum laude" (highest honors) on May 5, 1923, but according to his examination record at the University Archive Innsbruck, he graduated with "sufficient" grades.

King Victor Emmanuel III tolerated a certain autonomy of these regions especially for language (most of Tyrol citizens spoke German).

[2] Clara may have applied for membership in the ruling National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF) in 1932, when admission was possible again after some years of suspended admittance.

Clara wrote an introduction to a national academic directory in 1942, in which he stated "with pride that science has contributed to the great plans of the Führer" [3] and called for scientists to submit to the reigning ideology and to be ready to secure the German claim to European leadership "intellectually as much as by the politics of force".

He became an assistant at the Institute of Histology and Embryology at Innsbruck University, but a few months later he had to leave to take over the position of his father in Blumau, who had suddenly passed away in 1923.

In 1930, Clara received a highly prestigious appointment as a member of the German elite scientific society Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina on the recommendation by Hermann Stieve, then director of the anatomical institute in Halle, whom already supported Clara by providing him specimens from most likely executed men for a study on interstitial Leydig cells.

The first to use the eponym was Policard,[5] who in 1955 referred to them by the French name "cellule de Clara", when composing an ultrastructural description of the bronchioles of the rat.

In Istanbul the new government was interested in the scientific and social progression, so during the second world war it accepted 88 exiled Jewish German professors.