Julius Hallervorden
Julius Hallervorden was a German physician and neuroscientist.
Hallervorden was born in Allenburg, East Prussia 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. 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.
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.
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:
Along with Hugo Spatz, Hallervorden is credited with the discovery of Hallervorden-Spatz syndrome. After World War II, Hallervorden became President of the German Neuropathological Society and continued his research at the Max Planck Institute in Giessen, Germany.
