For many Poles the preparation of the bodies smacks too much of Nazi experiments conducted in concentration camps, many of them on Polish soil.

The popular repulsion was compounded by revelations yesterday in the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita that the father of Dr von Hagens, popularly known as Dr Death, served in SS units in Poland during the Second World War.

Dr von Hagens’ father, 89-year-old Gerhard Liebchen, heads the doctor’s Polish subsidiary and has been leading the negotiations for the €15 million human body factory.

Dr von Hagens discovered and marketed a technique known as plastination by which he sucks out water and air from corpses and replaces them with an artificial substance that makes the corpses malleable and preserves them.

By bending them into different poses — some of his corpses seems to be running, jumping or playing chess — Dr von Hagens has been able to set up popular but always controversial exhibitions throughout the world.

Some 14 million people have seen his bodies. In Britain he promoted his Body World exhibition by publicly dissecting a corpse. Rows erupted too when Dr von Hagens was accused of buying the corpses of executed Russian and Chinese prisoners. He has denied this but is often vague about the exact origin of his bodies.

The row in Poland centres on the supposed Nazi echoes of the doctor’s work. The Roman Catholic Church has condemned his preparation and exhibition of the corpses as a “serious violation of the dignity of the dead and their reduction to the status of objects”.

Polish newspaper columnists agree. One compared the doctor’s work to concentration camp atrocities. “It is difficult to distinguish it from the kind of abuse that turned body parts into lampshades and soap during the Hitler era,” Zycie Warszawy said.

Dr von Hagens defended himself yesterday. “In those days people were selected for death and then murdered; today people are quite consciously putting their bodies at the disposal of science in the interests of health education,” he said.

Precisely this point — that his corpses are all made over to the doctor as a conscious donation — is disputed in a new book by Torsten Peuker. “We don’t want to play down his achievements in science education,” says Peuker. “But our research shows that the human material he uses has not come exclusively from body donors.”

In Kyrgyzstan, for example, the doctor has been paying €10 for each body. Other corpses, according to Peuker, have been collected from police stations and old people’s homes.

Dr von Hagens promises to make a “Cathedral of Science” out of an old Communist- era engine factory in the rundown village of Sieniewa, barely 20km (12 miles) from the German border.

At the hub of the assembly hall would be, he says, “The altar a huge dissection table.”

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