NAZI BRAIN JARS By Caroline Drees =============== VIENNA, Austria (Reuter) - The brains of hundreds of mentally handicapped children murdered by Nazis in World War II, which have lain stacked in jars of formaldehyde in the cellar of Vienna hospital for more than 50 years, will be laid to rest Wednesday. ``Most of the brains belonged to children under the age of 10,'' said Eberhard Gabriel, chief physician at the psychiatric hospital where the Nazis conducted their experiments with the remains and where they have been kept since the war. ``They called the center a 'neurological clinic for children and youths', and in it the Nazis murdered patients,'' Gabriel told Reuters. ``Medical records show the children were mentally impaired, many of them with multiple handicaps.'' The Nazis not only slaughtered millions of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals but also the handicapped, including Germans and Austrians, in their grand plan to create an Aryan master race. The remains of the 10 known German victims, who had been brought to Vienna from Hamburg when the Allies began to bomb German cities, were repatriated early this week and will be buried on May 8 in a cemetery in northern Germany. The others -- stored in the glass containers meticulously labeled with the victim's name, date of death and usually the diagnosis ``idiocy'' -- will be cremated and interred at Vienna's central cemetery in a plot of honor. No date has yet been set. The children, some carted off to Vienna from Germany, were among the many members of society whom Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime branded ``unworthy of life.'' Among the German victims was little Irma Kosemund, whose sister Antje recently urged the hospital authorities to bring her sibling's remains back home. Her initiative led to the return of all 10 remains. ``We don't exactly know what happened to the bodies of the murdered children,'' said Wolfgang Neugebauer, who heads the anti-fascist Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance in Vienna. ``They were probably cremated or buried, because the Nazi doctors were only interested in the brains,'' said Neugebauer, who was involved in planning the memorial in Austria. ``Most of the time the victims' families just got an ash-filled urn,'' he added. A spokesman for Vienna's deputy mayor Sepp Rieder, who is in charge of health issues, said the city had tried to track down relatives of the Austrian victims but to no avail. ``We found some of the German relatives and they will attend the burial in Hamburg, but here it has been very difficult, because there are very few family members left,'' he said. While Dr. Gabriel said he accepted the decision to bury the brains, he is afraid the horror of their death could be too easily forgotten. In the 50 years the brains had been stored at the hospital, he said they had been treated with respect and kept in a special remembrance room visited only rarely by medical staff. Gabriel said he would have preferred to keep the brains in the remembrance room as a permanent visible testimony to the terror of the Holocaust. ``A burial in a memorial plot is a one-time event,'' Gabriel said. ``And after that: out of sight, out of mind.'' Reuters/Variety