Vincenzo Mario Palmieri

File:The Katyn Massacre, 1940 HU106222.jpg

Member of the International Medical Commission Vincenzo Palmieri, dictating results of the body examination to his personal assistant

Vincenzo Mario Palmieri (16 July 1899 – 23 December 1994) was an Italian forensic physician and politician. He was active in 1943 as a member of the International Medical Commission in the autopsy of the victims of the Katyn massacre.

Biography

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-J14110, Katyn, Öffnung der Massengräber, Abschlussbericht.jpg

Palmieri (foreground left) at a meeting of members of the International Commission that investigated the Katyń massacre, 1943. In the foreground are Hungarian Ferenc Orsós (left) and Germany's Health Chief Leonardo Conti (right)

Vincenzo Palmieri studied medicine in Naples and specialized in forensic medicine after receiving his doctorate in 1922. He also studied in Lyon, Vienna and Strasbourg, and with Fritz Straßmann in Berlin. In 1927 he became a teaching assistant in Naples. From 1936 to 1939 he directed the Forensic Medicine Institute of the University of Sassari. From 1942 he was full professor at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Naples and worked there until 1974. He published 289 scientific journal articles.

Palmieri was appointed a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina on June 5, 1940. He was for a time president of the Società Italiana di Medicina legale.

In April 1943, when the German Foreign Ministry asked the Italian government to send a member to the International Medical Commission for the autopsy of the victims of the Katyn massacre, Palmieri was named and set off for Berlin on Easter Sunday, April 25. The commission worked in Katyn from April 28 to 30, 1943, and concluded that the Poles had been shot in the Soviet Union in 1940. The report was handed over to Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti in Berlin.

After the war, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) tried to brand him as a collaborator with the Germans and to discredit him because of his participation in the Doctors' Commission, referring to the Burdenko Commission report prepared by the Soviet government in 1944. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) was the only party to have done so.

Palmieri, like the other doctors interviewed, reiterated to the Madden Commission of the U.S. House of Representatives in Frankfurt, in 1952 that the Poles had not been murdered by the Germans.

As a Christian Democracy candidate, he was elected mayor of Naples on October 10, 1962, replacing in the post the popular entrepreneur Achille Lauro, who was the candidate of monarchist and other nationalist groups. Palmieri, however, resigned from office on July 30, 1963.

Works

• L'alcolismo come problema medico-legale (1933)
• Medicina forense (1936)
• Medicina legale canonistica (1955)
• Dall'assicurazione alla sicurezza sociale (1957)
• "Fasti napoletani nello sviluppo dell'antropologia criminale, dai tempi andati a quelli attuali", Quaderni di criminologia clinica, Vol. II (1970), pp. 269–79.

References

• Jelardi, Andrea (2006). Strade, personaggi e storie di Napoli da Posillipo a Toledo. Napoli: Guida.
• Melillo, Luigia (2009). Katyn. Una verità storica negata. La perizia di V.M. Palmieri. Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale".

External links

• Report - Information on the Katyn Forest Incident