Does Dead Human Body Exhibition Use Executed Prisoners' Bodies?

The dead human bodies preserved by being injected full of plastic by German anatomist Gunther von Hagens have toured the world for decades, and made their author a very wealthy man. For years, too, the Body World exhibitions have also been a rich source of controversy, dogged by claims that the bodies of executed Chinese prisoners—including prisoners of conscience—have been splayed open and put on display for a paying public.

Now, von Hagens has been challenged to put to rest some of those allegations, by supplying DNA samples of the specimens currently on display at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria.

Ethan Gutmann, a researcher who has written extensively about organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience in China—primarily practitioners of Falun Gong, a persecuted spiritual discipline—said on July 12, standing in the Maria-Theresien-Platz outside the museum, that DNA samples would effectively resolve the controversy.

“We now have a show which is traveling around which may have the DNA of murdered prisoners of conscience,” Gutmann said in an interview with NTD Television, putting emphasis on the word “may.”

“The legs on some of the female specimens appear to be unnaturally short,” Gutmann said, based on observations he made when he visited the exhibition in Vienna recently. “The frames are a little frail; the skulls are a little fine. I’m not an expert, but these look Chinese.”

Gutmann’s suspicion is not based only on the anatomical features he observed. In 1999 von Hagens set up shop in Dalian, a city in northeast China, and acquired an unknown number of bodies, some of which were used for his exhibitions.

At that time, Bo Xilai, the now-disgraced Chinese official, was mayor. Bo is now under detention and awaits trial for violation of Communist Party discipline and a range of other offenses, but was known to have been a protégé to the former leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin, and an early proponent of Jiang’s campaign to persecute Falun Gong.

According to a 2004 investigative report in the German newspaper Der Spiegel, by the year 2001: “Around von Hagens’ corpse factory in Dalian, there were already three labor camps and prisons. Among them were the ‘No. 3 Provincial Prison’ and the ‘[Dalian City] Reeducation Through Labor Camp.’ In the notorious ‘[Dalian] Yaojia Detention Center,’ political prisoners are detained, among them adherents of the spiritual movement Falun Gong.”

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Photo: One of the dead bodies on display in “Bodies, the Exhibition.” (Screenshot/Bodies, the Exhibition)