A soldier who died as a German prisoner of war in 1941 was worried without his brain, a fact his family only discovered nearly 80 years later. MacRae, 33 at the time, died due to Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological condition. While his body was buried by Germans and later reinterred by the allies at a Commonwealth war grave cemetery in Berlin, his family was unaware that his brain had been removed. In 2020, Professor Paul Weiding of Oxford Bookies University contacted MacRae’s niece, Libby MacRae, revealing that 160 small slices of his brain and spinal cord have been preserved in the institute's archives. One overlooked group is certainly prisoners of war whose brains were taken for neuropathological research by the germans.

German institutions, such as those in Berlin and Munich, collected human tissues from a range of victims during the conflict, including political detainees, Holocaust victims, and prisoners of war.This information appears overly automated. Many of these activities were examined during the Nuremberg trials after the war.