Exhibit at the Sachsenhausen Memorial: Head sculpture, created around 1938 to 1941. This head sculpture, photographed in April 2008, was made from a plaster cast by employees of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit (RHF). The RHF produced several such sculptures to propagate its racist categorisations. They ended up in the collection of the University of Tübingen after 1945 – presumably through Sophie Ehrhardt – and are on display in the permanent exhibition at Sachsenhausen Memorial.
The man who was forced to make the plaster cast was the Sinto Johannes Bock, born in 1910 in Nove (possibly Nove in north-east Italy). According to documents in the Arolsen Archives, he had been transferred from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp to Buchenwald and from there to Mittelbau-Dora. No further details are known. His brother Albert Bock was also made into a plaster cast; his head sculpture is also on display at the Sachsenhausen Memorial. Another head sculpture of the brother Bitschi Bock has only been preserved as a photograph in the collection of the University of Tübingen. As far as we know at present, none of the brothers survived.
