Adam German

Adam Deutsch (born November 18, 1907 in Pécs , † May 30, 1976 probably in Lund ) was a German physician.

Life and activity

Deutsch was a son of Sigmund Deutsch and his wife Sabine, née Krausz. He grew up in a Hungarian-Jewish academic family.

After attending the secondary school in Pécs, he studied chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich from autumn 1925 . In May 1929 he obtained his degree in engineering chemist there. This was followed by a lengthy research stay with Ernest Francois Fourneau (1872-1949) in the Laboratoire de chimie thérapeutique of the Pasteur Institute in Paris (October 1929 to July 1930). In September 1930 he took up a position at the Institute for Chemistry at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, headed by Richard Kuhn .

In May 1932, Deutsch completed his doctorate at the ETH Zurich with a study carried out by Leopold Ruzicka in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research on two topics in the field of unsaturated acids.

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, German was targeted by the new rulers because of his - according to the National Socialist definition - descent as a racial Jew: In December 1933, as a result of the provisions of the law on the restoration of the professional civil service - with a few exceptions, he had to stop working Jews banned from research facilities - retire from the service of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. He then emigrated to Great Britain where he found a job as an assistant lecturer in the Department of Physiology at the University of Edinburgh . He worked there from January 1934 to July 1938. During this time he devoted himself to researching natural dyes, but suffered from constant financial problems.

In 1938 Deutsch moved to Sweden, where he worked from 1938 to 1945 as chief chemist at a pharmaceutical company in Helsingborg .

In the meantime, the National Socialist police authorities classified Deutsch as an enemy of the state: in the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin placed him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people who, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, would be followed by the special commandos of the SS should be located and arrested with special priority.

In November 1945, Deutsch found a job at the Neurophysiological Institute at the University of Copenhagen . In 1946 he returned to Sweden, where he worked at the Chemical Institute of Lund University from August 1946 . Since the spring of 1948 he also taught as a lecturer in biochemistry.

The sources of the last years of Deutsch's life are poor: in 1962 he was a visiting scientist at the New York Institute for Muscle Disease for six months .

family

Deutsch was married twice: in 1944 he married Inga Karlson, who died in 1961. And in 1967 Gunvor Wohlfahrt's second marriage.

There was a daughter from the first marriage, Karin Susanne (* 1945).

Fonts

• 1. About the conversion of diunsaturated acids into cyclic hydrocarbons, 2. Knowledge of the amalgam reduction of polyunsaturated carboxylic acids. Dissertation . 1932.

literature

• Reinhard Rürup : Adam Deutsch. Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg. In: Reinhard Rürup: Fates and Careers. Memorial book for the researchers expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society by the National Socialists. Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-89244-797-9 , pp. 172-174.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry in German on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .