It does appear that Haeckel was convicted by a University Court of fraud. At least I found one reference to accused and one reference to convicted but nothing else yet.
http://zygote.swarthmore.edu/evo5.html
"Interestingly, this knowledge appears to be "old hat" among German biologists. Haeckel's drawings were not trusted (see Goldschmidt, 1956), and Haeckel was accused of scientific fraud by a university court in Jena, where he worked and by other embryologists, as well (see Hamblin, 1997; Richardson et al., 1997b). "
New Scientist reports:
http://www.keysites.com/ns/970906/nshorts.html
"Although Haeckel confessed to drawing from memory and was convicted of fraud at the University of Jena,
the drawings persist. "That's the real mystery," says Richardson."
Richardson (1997): Siehe Pennisi: Haeckel's embryos: Fraud rediscovered. Science 277, 1435.
Kevin, your turn...
For starters...
http://www.atheism.org/library/historical/joseph_mccabe/dictionary.html
Haeckel, Professor Ernst Heinrich, M.D., Ph.D., Sc.D., LL.D., (1834-1919), the famous German zoologist.
As Haeckel outspokenly rejected all religion all his life and wrote the very anti-religious Riddle of the Universe, which sold several million copies in a score of languages, religious writers have been untruthful about his scientific distinction; and some scientific men, who envied his courage and candor, have encouraged them. His many large scientific works brought him 4 gold medals and 70 diplomas from scientific bodies all over the world. He was one of the most generous and upright men. When I went to stay with him in Jena I found that streets and squares of the city had been named after him. The clergy put out a ridiculous legend that he had "forged" illustrations for his books-he was a good artist-which I completely disproved 26 years ago, but some of them still drone about "Haeckel's forgeries." When the charge was first raised, by a disreputable lecturer, 50 of the leading scientists of Germany
published a scalding condemnation of it in the German press.
In German:
http://www.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/~stueber/haeckel/sturz.html
http://www.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/~loennig/mendel/mendel.htm
http://www.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/~stueber/stueber.html
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/haeckel.html (timed out for me)
Btw whether or not Haeckel committed fraud, his overall findings still hold and are still quite exciting.
Whether or not Haeckel went too far in his excitement is a question for historians.
http://www2.ncsu.edu/ncas/evolution/
The following statement was prepared by Susan E. Peters, Associate Professor of Biology, UNC-Charlotte:
A criticism is made that by teaching the fact that all vertebrate embryos form gill slits early in development, we perpetuate a fraud that was unmasked over 120 years ago. It is further claimed that teaching the gill slit story is "ignorant ... or deceitful," and that all references to this story should be stricken from textbooks. This response is simply hogwash. Ernst Haeckl was a great German
embryologist who was instantly excited about the theory of evolution when Darwin's book was first published. The reason he was so excited is that evolution explained what Haeckl had been observing for years - that because of common descent, there are great similarities between the embryos of all vertebrates, and that many structures, like the gill slits, which have known functions in ancestral
forms (fish), are also found in descendants (land vertebrates). Why on earth should land vertebrates like mammals have gill slits during development? Haeckl recognized that these are retained from the ancestor. Unfortunately, in his zeal to show the many ways in which ontogeny (development) recapitulates phylogeny (evolutionary history), Haeckl went too far. He misinterpreted the evidence and thought that adult ancestral structure was passed on to embryos of descendants - that, in fact, functional gills developed while a mammal embryo was in utero, and that later in development the gills were modified into mammalian structures.
Wilhelm His, another scientist, pointed out Haeckl's errors and fudging of his drawings. And today we evolutionary anatomists know that adult ancestral structures do not form in the embryos of descendants. What is found in modern embryos, however, are many examples of the embryonic structures of ancestors. Yes, "gill slits" do, in fact, form transiently in mammalian embryos, but they are not the fully developed gill slits with functioning gills inside that Haeckl imagined. In mammals (as in all vertebrate embryos) the first part of the gut, the pharynx, develops a series of paired pouches in the "neck" region of the embryo. In the embryo, these pouches grow outward, contact the skin, and openings - slits - form through the skin. In fishes, the lining of the pouches goes on to develop the gill filaments that become their breathing apparatus. In land vertebrates, the gill filaments never develop. Anterior pouches develop into ear structures, parathyroid glands and a few other derivative
s, but never functioning gills.
This is an example of modifying an ancestral structure for other functions in a descendant - the primary way by which new things form in evolution. We think that embryonic modification of ancestral structures to form new ones is so common because it is the easiest way to get something new without interfering with functions that must continue in the embryo. As an analogy, if you live in a 2-bedroom house and your family grows so that you need a 4-bedroom house, the easiest way to get it is to add-on, rather than
tearing down and rebuilding. This, in fact, is how you would have to do it if you needed to continue living in the house while changing it. Thus, using the gill slit story to explain how and why embryonic development is so important is not "deceitful" or "ignorant"; rather, it is basic to communicating with students our understanding of evolutionary change.