August Hirt

August Hirt
Vice Dean of the Medical Faculty Prof. Dr. med. August Hirt, director of the Institute of Anatomy of the Reichsuniversität Straßburg from November 1941 to November 1944
Birth name	August Erwin Theobald Hirt
Birth date	28 April 1898(1898-04-28)
Place of birth	Mannheim, Grand Duchy of Baden, German Empire
Death date	2 June 1945 (aged 47)
Place of death	Schluchsee, Württemberg, Allied-occupied Germany
Allegiance	German Empire National Socialist Germany
Service/branch	Imperial German Army SS Heer
Rank	SS-Sturmbannführer Oberarzt
Service number	#100,414 NSDAP #4,012,784
Battles/wars	World War I World War II Battle of France
Awards	Iron Cross
Relations	∞ 1923 Marie Frieda Häffner

August Erwin Theobald Hirt (28 April 1898 – 2 June 1945) was a veteran of WWI, an anatomist, university professor and SS officer. He had both the Swiss and the German citizenship.

Life

August Hirt with his wife

Dienstaltersliste der Schutzstaffel der NSDAP for SS-Untersturmführer (1 December 1937)

August attended the Karl-Friedrich-Gymnasium in Mannheim and volunteered (Kriegsfreiwlliger) for the Imperial German Army 1914 after his parents gave their consent with a heavy heart. He served with the 7th Company/2. Badisches Grenadier-Regiment „Kaiser Wilhelm I.“ Nr. 110. On 2 February 1915, he was wounded for the first time at the Western Front. In October 1916, he was seriously wounded by a bullet to the upper jaw. After a long stay in military hospital, he was discharged from the army in 1917. This injury, which limited his ability to articulate, hindered him accordingly and made it difficult for him to eat, led to Hirt receiving a disability pension for the rest of his life.

In 1917, he would achieve his Abitur and began his medical studies in Heidelberg in the winter semester of 1917. After his state examination in 1921, Hirt received his medical license. In April 1921, Hirt became an intern at the Anatomical Institute of the University of Heidelberg and in the same year he became an assistant to Professor Dr. Hermann Braus at the University of Heidelberg and thus a civil servant. In the course of this, he was granted German citizenship as a necessary prerequisite for official civil servant status. In 1922, Hirt received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg. His doctoral supervisor was Kurt Elze, but it was common practice at the time for the institute director to be noted on the doctoral certificate and in the copies of the dissertation. People spoke of having received their doctorate “under” the institute director Braus, just as Hirt did in his CV. This led to some confusion in the literature about Hirt’s doctoral supervisor.

In 1922, August Hirt became second prosector (Zweiter Prosektor) at the anatomy department. In 1925, he completed his habilitation in anatomy under Privy Councilor Professor Dr. Erich Kallius in Heidelberg. His habilitation thesis, "On the fiber course of the renal nerves," was highly praised by the reviewers. In 1930, Hirt was given an extraordinary professorship in anatomy at the Medical Faculty of the University of Heidelberg. From 1921, Hirt researched and published primarily on the autonomic nervous system, particularly on the influence of the sympathetic nervous system on organ systems. He also worked with his colleague Philipp Ellinger on a new type of microscopy technique: the two scientists developed a method for examining living tissue under the microscope.

Hirt and Ellinger developed intravital microscopy in 1929. In this method, test animals were injected with fluorescent substances such as fluorescein or trypaflavin and their organs were irradiated with ultraviolet light under the microscope. The fluorescent light from the cells of the organs then produced the microscopic image. Ellinger and Hirt used the method to examine kidney function. They noticed that some cells, such as the epithelial cells of the renal tubules, but also liver cells, fluoresced yellow-green when exposed to ultraviolet radiation, even when the animals had not yet been treated with fluorescent dyes. The patent specification No. 581687, dated 30 October 1929, was filed by Dr. Philipp Ellinger and Dr. August Hirt in Heidelberg; the patent granted on 13 July 1933.

Hirt and Ellinger discovered that fluorescein only binds to basic cell components and trypaflavin only binds to acidic cell components. This property of trypaflavin later became the starting point for Hirt's approach to therapy against sclerotherapy damage. Since the new microscopy method only used invisible ultraviolet light, the inaccuracies that had previously been caused by light refraction were eliminated. These groundbreaking inventions established Hirt's scientific reputation, which resulted in I.G. Farben, among others, later paying Hirt a research grant of a considerable 1,500 Reichsmarks per quarter. In this way, the largest German chemical company, which had been created through mergers, promoted the further development of the methodology for observing the distribution of dyes intravitally under the fluorescence microscope. After the war, there were unfounded slanders that Hirt had claimed sole credit for Ellinger's contributions to the process: the patent specification bearing Ellinger's name has been openly available for inspection since 1933 and no one attempted to change this until 1945. In addition, Hirt stated in his CV to the NSDAP after 1941 that he had published several times on this topic together with Ellinger.

On 1 April 1933, Hirt applied for the SS and became SS-Anwärter on 16 October 1933 a SS-Mann. After the death of Erich Kallius in early 1935, Hirt became acting head of anatomy at the University of Heidelberg at the age of 36. Hirt also enjoyed a good professional reputation among his colleagues. In relevant specialist journals it was written, among other things, that Hirt had now succeeded in "observing tissue from cold- and warm-blooded animals in the living state for a longer period of time using a luminescence microscope." In 1936, Hirt could already look back on 18 successful publications. Accordingly – and due to his other academic achievements – it was not surprising that the 38-year-old Hirt was appointed full professor on 16 July 1936 with effect from 1 June 1936, and became first deputy director and then director of the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Greifswald.

On 30 January 1937, Hirt was promoted to SS-Untersturmführer. On 1 March or 1 May 1937, depending on the source, Hirt joined the NSDAP. On 3 October 1938 (effective 1 October 1938), the Ministry of Science transferred the professors of anatomy at the universities of Greifswald and Frankfurt, Hirt and Wilhelm Pfuhl, by exchanging their chairs. This happened because the two families preferred the other's climate for health reasons and had previously mutually requested this exchange. Hirt began his work in Frankfurt with greatly improved equipment at his new institute, which included various new types of microscopes. He was also considered for the position of head of the SS study group in Frankfurt am Main in July 1939.

Shortly before the start of WWII, on 12 August 1939, August Hirt was drafted into the Wehrmacht (until 9 April 1941), where he initially served as a troop doctor (Truppenarzt) in a tank destroyer battalion on the Western Front. The high losses and the enormous suffering of the soldiers caused by poison gas attacks in the First World War were firmly etched in the collective memory. Therefore, the soldiers of all the warring powers in Europe carried gas masks with them, because no one could rule out that a warring party would again use gaseous warfare agents, as shown below. Research into effective filters and protection against warfare agents was therefore a field of high priority in the defense industry and medicine. August Hirt had already experimented with LOST on rats in Frankfurt and observed that high doses of vitamin A accumulated in the liver and appeared to protect the rats against LOST. He reported about it on 2 June 1942 as follows:

After the prophylactic administration of vitamin A and subsequent poisoning with LOST, the rats, which otherwise reacted lethally to LOST within 24-48 hours, remained alive for several weeks, and one even for a year. “The examination of the organs of the [...] killed animals then revealed that the liver had stored plenty of vitamin A and that hardly any significant amounts of the toxic products could be detected.”

The effect of LOST can generally be described as an antiproliferative, i.e. growth-inhibiting effect. This leads to a particularly significant inhibition of cell division in cells with a high cell division rate. In the period between the world wars, a further development of the less toxic nitrogen mustard was brought onto the market under the trade name mechlorethamine. This drug was used in medicine as the first cytostatic agent in 1942. The extent to which Himmler, who was interested in cancer research, was informed about the use of this cytostatic drug should be examined in more detail (nitrogen mustard is still approved as a chemotherapy drug in the USA today). In the post-war decades, numerous nitrogen mustard derivatives were developed for cytostatic chemotherapy and later approved in the EU (bendamustine, chlorambucil, cyclophosphamide, estramustine, ifosfamide, melphalan, trofosfamide).

Hirt was granted leave for the academic year 1940 to continue training doctors in Frankfurt. But at the beginning of 1941 he was ordered back to the front. On 15 February 1941, Hirt received a letter from the Reich Ministry of Science informing him that he was one of the candidates for the chair of anatomy at the elite Reich University of Strasbourg, which was due to reopen at the end of the year. After some time, he was appointed to the prestigious chair on 1 October 1941, with exemption from military service. On 21 October 1941, Hirt arrived in Strasbourg to take up his new position. Up to this point, August Hirt could look back on a steep academic career. At the age of just 43, the university professor received his third appointment, and this time to one of the three newly founded "Reich Universities" of the NS state, which was associated with a generous endowment for the chair and a comparatively generous salary (an annual salary of 11,600 Reichsmarks plus 7,000 Reichsmarks tuition fee guarantee). He was also allowed to take his two assistants, Anton Kiesselbach and Karl Kaspar Wimmer, his preparator Otto Bong and his secretary Lieselotte Seepe (b. 14 August 1907) with him to the University of Strasbourg. Although Kiesselbach was drafted into the Wehrmacht during the changeover in 1941, he was able to follow Hirt to Strasbourg at the turn of the year 1941/42 after being temporarily discharged due to a kidney disease.

Hirt was not only one of the best paid professors at the University of Strasbourg - he was also a simple member of the NSDAP, a unsalaried member of the SS and had a clean record. As a doctor during the war, he was driven by the ambitious goal of reducing the suffering of future chemical weapons victims through prevention. He also continued to pursue his two research focuses that had brought him respect: intravital microscopy and the influence of the sympathetic nervous system on the organs. But then Heinrich Himmler became aware of the research of SS-Untersturmführer Hirt when it was time to expand the Ahnenerbe into the field of military science. This was not only suited to Hirt's LOST research, of which Himmler probably knew nothing at the time. Himmler assumed that Hirt could use intravital microscopy to make the introduction of pathogens into the human organism by insects visible and then research preventive measures. Hirt's scientific reputation must have made a good impression on Himmler and Sievers too. Only in this one case of recruitment for the Institute for Military Research did Sievers not repeatedly try to engage the scientist full-time for the Ahnenerbe, as happened with May Plötner, Boseck and others. It must also have been clear to Himmler and Sievers that a serious scientist would hardly leave an excellently equipped professorship to become a full-time employee of an organization run by the head of a branch of the NSDAP - Heinrich Himmler.

On 9 April 1942, Sievers informed Hirt that he had been with Himmler over the Easter holidays and that the Entomological Institute had since been approved by Himmler. He also added that Himmler was waiting for the research report on Hirt's LOST experiments, which was not included in Hirt's first short research report on microscopy and sympathetic nervous system research. He invited Hirt, if his health allowed it, to Dachau to observe Sigmund Rascher's experiments. Sievers also announced that Hirt would be promoted two ranks from SS-Untersturmführer to SS-Hauptsturmführer. Sievers planned to travel to Strasbourg at the end of May 1942 to discuss the collaboration with Hirt in person. A telegram from Hirt dated 25 May 1942 caused the travel plans to be postponed, as Hirt would be in the lecturer's camp from 26 May to 30 May 1942. In August 1942, Hirt was taken over by the Waffen-SS, but without renewed field service as a military doctor.

Hirt was considered an extraordinary expert on the combat agent LOST, also known as mustard gas. A treacherous poison that is fatal even if small amounts come into contact with the skin for a short time. Himmler fears that the Allies could use such chemical warfare agents. And therefore commissions Hirt to develop an antidote. The doctor had already carried out corresponding tests on rats before the war. Allegedly there were also human experiments on Jewish-Bolshevik partisans who had been sentenced to death, but also deceased prisoners. Sievers suggested to Hirt that those who died in the Natzweiler concentration camp, provided they were Soviet citizens or had no relatives, should be brought to the anatomy department in Strasbourg. On 14 September 1942, he suggested this in a letter to the responsible department, Richard Glücks (WVHA). Here, as well as in a secret memo from Sievers dated 14 September 1942, it states:

"Re: Transfer of prisoners who died in KL Natzweiler to the anatomy department of the University of Strasbourg Reference: oral conversation dated 9 September 1942; At the meeting held in Natzweiler on 31 August 1942, SS-Hauptsturmführer Prof. Dr. med. Hirt, Director of the anatomy department at the University of Strasbourg, explained that it was possible to transfer deceased prisoners to the anatomy department. This could include those who had no relatives, and Soviets. Since the Reich University of Strasbourg is being completely rebuilt, there are not enough corpses in the anatomy department. Apart from the transfer to Strasbourg, which has to take place anyway, there are no costs for KL Natzweiler. If you agree to this arrangement, we ask for your approval and for the camp command to be informed."

For further comprehension, it is important to note that, according to this letter, the deceased from Natzweiler had to be transferred to Strasbourg anyway. The background to this is the fact that Natzweiler only received a crematorium barracks in October 1943. In September 1942, it was still common practice to bring the deceased to the municipal crematorium in Strasbourg for cremation. From 4 February 1943, death certificates were no longer recorded in the civil register of the Natzweiler office, but directly in the concentration camp, where a provisional crematorium had been in operation since then. Glücks responded to Sievers' request on 15 September 1942 in the affirmative:

"In response to the letter cited above, I would like to inform you that I have informed the camp commandant of the Natzweiler concentration camp, as you requested."

The delivery of corpses from concentration camps to anatomy departments was not an isolated case. For example, the anatomy department of the University of Hamburg, under its director Professor Dr. Karl Zeiger, received corpses from the Neuengamme concentration camp. Deceased prisoners were to serve a higher purpose even after death, namely research to protect life, including that of soldiers at the front. Hirt then sent a declaration of commitment dated 23 June 1943:

"The Anatomical Institute of the Reich University of Strasbourg undertakes to 1. coffin the bodies of deceased Eastern workers who have no relatives and who have been made available for examination by KL Natzweiler, after using them in a dignified manner in teaching, and to cremate them in the Strasbourg crematorium in an appropriate manner free of charge. 2. in all cases, in the event of any queries, to always state that the body in question has been cremated. 3. after the body has been cremated, to return the urn to KL Natzweiler for safekeeping and to provide the burial number."

Without providing any evidence, Hans-Joachim Lang and others claimed that Hirt had planned a museum to use the skeletons to prove the racial inferiority of Jews to people in future times when no Jews were present. This myth spread quickly on the Internet, as search engine queries show at any time. It was about the expansion of the anatomy department of the then newly acquired University of Strasbourg, namely the new expansion of the so-called Anatomical Museum, which exists in all university anatomy departments. It was only a public anatomical museum that was planned, like hundreds of others that can be found and visited in many countries of the world in the 21st century.

The imminent capture of Strasbourg by Allied troops prevented Hirt from continuing his research. In his handwritten letter to Sievers on 9 April 1944, Hirt had already suggested that the secret files of the department and the institute be collected from Strasbourg:

"The alarms are piling up and it would probably be time to have all the secret files collected by courier. To be on the safe side, I will write to the offices and ask that a courier come next week to collect everything."

On 5 September 1944, Hirt informed the Ahnenerbe that no one in his institute had a weapon, so he was requesting one, and that the laboratory technician Mayer, as an "old field soldier," should also receive one. As a result, a 7.65-millimeter service pistol was sent to Hirt on 9 September 1944. The employees Bennemann and Schmitt were transferred to the Entomological Institute of the Institute for Military Research in Dachau because the front was approaching. According to the travel expenses statement, they went there on 18 September 1944. Then a stroke of fate threw Hirt off course: On 12 October 1944, Hirt wrote to Sievers:

"As I already informed you by express card, my property was completely destroyed by 12 bombs on 25 September. My wife and my son were killed."

In response to the express card mentioned above, Sievers had already expressed his condolences on 5 October 1944:

"Dear Comrade Hirt, - with deep shock and heartfelt sympathy we share in your relentlessly hard loss. Rest assured that we, as your comrades, will always remember the obligation your heavy sacrifice imposes on us. I am convinced that all this destruction, which seems so senseless, has a meaning in itself and that the victory of the Reich lies in it, even if it is in our own downfall, and that it must emerge from it. With loyal comradeship to you, I would like to say with a heartfelt handshake what words cannot. Always yours, Wolfram Sievers"

After Hirt had already received the informal relocation request on 29 October 1944, and the formal relocation order from Sievers on 2 November 1944, he spent the following days dealing with the relocation of his institute's equipment and personnel. For this purpose, he received blank waybills538 from the Ahnenerbe and – as he wrote to the Ahnenerbe in Strasbourg on October 28, 1944 – had already moved two sets of instruments to Tübingen. Hirt kept one set in Strasbourg because the semester was still running and he wanted to stay that long so that the students' education would not be interrupted. However, he wanted to send some of his staff into the interior of the Reich. However, in his letter of October 28, 1944, he asked Sievers for permission to move his laboratory to Fort Fransecky outside the gates of Strasbourg and requested vehicles and petrol from Sievers for this purpose. Sievers also tried to support Hirt in this regard, but was unsuccessful due to the shortage of vehicles. Contrary to the instructions of Gauleiter Wagner that no one was allowed to leave Strasbourg, Sievers once again used the "blank" order that Himmler had previously issued in a different context, this time to save his friend Hirt:

"By order of the Reichsführer-SS, Department H of the Institute for Military Scientific Research is to be withdrawn from Strasbourg due to the military situation and in order to continue its research tasks, which the Reich Marshal also recognized as important to the state and the war effort, and to be partially relocated to Tübingen or Würzburg!"

American tanks drove up in front of the Bürgerspital at 10 a.m. on 23 November 1944. The American soldiers took the staff there prisoner. They found half of the professors in the medical faculty – seven of 14 – Friedrich Klinge, Johannes Stein, Theodor Nühsmann, Hans Lullies, Karl Schmidt, Ludwig Zukschwerdt and Hans Jakobi. This was due to the faculty's decision that all clinicians should remain with their patients in the Bürgerspital if possible. The US troops left these doctors alone. They allowed Zukschwerdt, whom they found during an operation, to continue operating.

The American troops did not find the Vice Dean of the Medical Faculty, Professor Dr. August Hirt, in the Bürgerspital, as he was not in Strasbourg at the time, but in Heidelberg. There he and his 19-year-old daughter Renate visited relatives of his dead wife and picked up books. On 7 December 1944, Himmler, who by now was entrusted with the leadership of Army Group Upper Rhine in addition to all his other duties, sent an SD telegram from the Birkenwald field command post to Sievers via Karl Brandt:

"Dear Comrade Sievers. Has Professor Dr. Hirt left Strasbourg? Heil Hitler, yours, Dr. Brandt."

Sievers replied on 7 December 1944 by telex from Waischenfeld via the SD in Bayreuth:

"Hirt is currently in Tübingen. On the critical day he was in Heidelberg to pick up things, but then did not get back to Strasbourg. To date, there has been no news of his colleagues. The rest of the research facility remained in Strasbourg. I'm just glad that we completely destroyed the collection and everything connected with it."

Hirt was not as easily accepted in Tübingen as his instruments. This was because there was no accommodation for him and his staff due to the consequences of the Allied air raids.555 He therefore initially worked in Würzburg at the Anatomical Institute, as he had not only known the professor, Professor Dr. Kurt Elze, for a long time, but Sievers had also expressly asked him to support Hirt on December 29, 1944. Hirt was unable to continue his LOST experiments in Würzburg with his doctoral supervisor Kurt Elze and was no longer particularly welcome there after a newspaper article about Hirt's activities during the war appeared in the "Daily Mail" on 3 January 1945. Hirt traveled to Waischenfeld on 15 February 1945, where he arrived at 9:20 p.m. and discussed things with Sievers until 1:30 a.m. Among other things, the discussions covered the "Strasbourg events in November 1944 and the repatriation of Hirt's secretary Seepe from captivity via Switzerland to Germany." On the next day and the day after that, 17 and 18 February 1945, Sievers and Hirt discussed the matter all day. A look at Sievers' service diaries from 1 January 1941 to 31 March 1945 shows that such a long and exclusive discussion was unique, which speaks for the special significance of this meeting. On 17 February 1945, Sievers issued Hirt a confirmation that he was dependent on diet food. Apparently the injuries from the First World War and the damage caused by LOST were so serious that Hirt's health was severely affected. On 18 February 1945, both agreed that Hirt should continue working in Tübingen, since Würzburg had been rejected as an alternative location. After the war, Sievers reported in Nuremberg that Hirt had been as depressed about the loss of his relatives as he had been about the expected collapse of the Third Reich. Hirt was certain that he would not survive a collapse of Germany.

Memberships

• 1933 Allgemeine SS
• 1935 National Socialist Lecturers' Association (NS-Dozentenbund)
• 1937 NSDAP
• Ahnenerbe under Wolfram Sievers
• SS Main Race and Settlement Office (SS-RuSHA)

Death

Since Prof. Dr. Hirt, as a doctor, was able to realistically assess his health situation and his life expectancy and, apart from his daughter, he had lost his entire family, his property, his academic reputation and his honor, August Hirt left Tübingen, evaded capture, reached the southern Black Forest. It has been confirmed that he initially found shelter in the "Tiroler Hütte" near the "Tiroler Tanne" in the forest between Schluchsee-Seebrugg and Schönenbach. In order to find out about the political "general situation", he went to the nearby Karlishof forest farm to listen to the radio news.

The eleven-year-old daughter of the family living there was suffering from life-threatening diphtheria, which led to severe constriction of the airways. According to a contemporary witness, no doctor was available to treat her. Now it was the doctor Hirt's turn. He operated on the girl successfully and pointed out to the parents that without his intervention their daughter could have been dead in two hours. This emergency operation created a fateful bond between the father and probably also some Schönenbach residents with the "doctor from outside".

Hirt then moved his overnight camp with a suitcase as luggage to Schönenbach, where he stayed overnight with the mayor's family. During the day he spends his time doing housework and looking after the children or wandering around in the forest. On 25 April 1945, the French take Neustadt in the Black Forest, north of Schönenbach, and Waldshut, south of the Rhine. The noose tightens for him. One of Hirt's roommates heard that he spoke to the French in their own language. Even after the war ended on 8 May 1945, Hirt visited the Karlishof to listen to the radio. It is certain that on the morning of 2 June 1945, he asked the Karlishof farmer to lend him a pistol. He walked to the nearby atonement cross "S'steinerne Krizle". There he took his own life with a clean shot through the heart.

The Karlishof farmer found him, as agreed, lying by a tree about 30 meters from the cross, with the pistol next to him. When they said goodbye that morning, Hirt instructed him to bury the body in the forest so that no one else would find it and his death would remain a secret. However, shortly afterwards, the shepherd boys from Schönenbach walked past the "Steinerne Krizle". Among them was Rolf Kaltenbach, who found Hirt leaning against the cross. Contrary to Hirt's last wish, the farmer dutifully reports the death to the municipality of Schönenbach. The municipality arranges a burial at the Catholic church in Grafenhausen. A few years after the end of the war, Hirt's daughter Renate, together with Hirt's loyal employee Lieselotte Seepe, are seen looking for their father and boss in Schönenbach. At the end of the 1950s, Renate has a gravestone erected for her father in the cemetery, specifically on plot 27.

Family

August was the son of Johannes Hirt (b. 20 September 1851 in Zell, Switzerland), a Swiss master plasterer (Gipsermeister) and later liqueur manufacturer, and his young German wife from Mannheim Charlotte Marie Katharine, née Rastberger (b. 11 September 1870). He had eight siblings, two are known:

• Hilda Friederike Charlotte (b. 7 December 1895 in Mannheim)
• Friedrich Alois Erwin (b. 10 February 1897 in Mannheim)

Marriage

On 25 September 1923, Hirt married his fiancée Marie Frieda "Friedel" Häffner and would become father of two children:

• Renate (b. 25 September 1925)
• Rainer Wolfgang (b. 26 September 1929)

During an Allied bombing raid on Straßburg-Neudorf on 25 September 1944, Hirt's wife and son were killed, a fate that he could hardly cope with. After the enemy occupied Strasbourg at the end of November 1944, August Hirt fled with his daughter Renate to Tübingen, where he stayed with friends until the invading Allies occupied Württemberg. When he had to flee again, he left his beloved Renate with the family, knowing his fate was doomed. Renate studied medicine and philosophy at the university of Tübingen. She later worked as a teacher for the deaf and mute (Schule für Gehörlose und Schwerhörige) in Neckergemünd and Heidelberg (Baden-Württemberg).

SS promotions

• SS-Untersturmführer: 30 January 1937
• SS-Obersturmführer: 31 August 1942 with effect from 9 November 1941
• SS-Hauptsturmführer: 31 August 1942 with effect from 20 April 1942
• SS-Sturmbannführer: 20 April 1944

Awards and decorations

• Iron Cross (1914), 2nd Class
• Wound Badge (1918) in Silver
• Honour Cross of the World War 1914/1918 with Swords
• DRL/Reich Sports Badge (Deutsches Reichssportabzeichen) in Bronze
• SA Sports Badge (SA-Sportabzeichen) in Bronze
• SS Long Service Award (SS-Dienstauszeichnung) for 8 years
• War Merit Cross (1939), 2nd Class with Swords on 30 August 1943

Works (excerpt)

• Der Grenzstrang des Sympathicus bei einigen Sauriern, Dissertation, 1922 (Dr. med.)
• Über den Faserverlauf der Nierennerven, Habilitation, 1925 (Dr. med. habil.)

Research contracts

• 1925 Studies of the sympathetic nervous system
  • Financial help was approvd for the procurement of laboratory animals (dogs, cats) and the provision of two lancets made of stainless Krupp steel.
• 1935 Studies on the development of the pharyngeal arch derivatives and the human tongue
  • Hirt carried out the research in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Hermann Hoepke (b. 13 May 1889 in Eberswalde; d. 22 December 1993 in Heidelberg) at the Anatomical Institute of the University of Heidelberg.
• 1943 Changes in the living organism when exposed to warfare agents as a basis for preventing damage through the prophylactic use of certain active ingredients
• 1943 Behavior of yellow cross (LOST) in the living organism
• 1943 Vitamin research