Anton Kiesselbach

Anton Kiesselbach (born June 13, 1907 in Kempenich ; † July 27, 1984 in Düsseldorf ) was a German anatomist and university professor .

Life

Kiesselbach studied after completing their academic major in zoology and in 1934 at the University of Cologne with the dissertation studies on the descent testiculorum at Didelphis Dr. phil. PhD . In the second half of 1934 he examined ciliate animals from the Adriatic at the German-Italian Institute for Marine Biology Rovigno d'Istria on behalf of the German Research Foundation . He then worked at the Zoological Institute of the University of Cologne and from 1935 at the Institute for Developmental Mechanics at the University of Greifswald as a research assistant. His habilitation took place with the work "The behavior of some marine hypotrich ciliates under normal and changed environmental conditions with special consideration of the large core conditions", which was published in Greifswald in 1939. At that time Kiesselbach was a research assistant to August Hirt , whom he followed in April 1939 to the Anatomical Institute of the University of Frankfurt .

During the Second World War , Kiesselbach, who was a member of the NSDAP and SA , was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941. As a troop doctor, he initially worked in a hospital in Oberhof . From 1942 he continued this work half-time in Lingolsheim and was responsible for the anatomical introductory events for freshmen with a half-time position as a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg under Hirt. He was Hirt's assistant at the Anatomical Institute when he had concentration camp inmates murdered in 1943 in order to put together a collection of human skeletons. He does not claim to have participated in Hirt's human experiments with Lost in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp . Ernst Klee states, however, that during the attempts at the lot in the run-up to the human experiments with Hirt and his assistants Karl Wimmer and Kiesselbach, there was damage to the lot. According to several memos from Wolfram Sievers , managing director of the SS - Forschungsgemeinschaft Deutsches Ahnenerbe , Kiesselbach suffered kidney bleeding as a result of the attempts to lose it. Kiesselbach dissected the left testicles of 30 prisoners from the Natzweiler concentration camp , which had previously been removed. In this way he was able to continue his research on "stopped spermatogenesis" and found that sperm formation failed in fear of death. After the US Army captured Strasbourg at the end of November 1944, Kiesselbach was drafted into the Wehrmacht again.

At the end of the war, Kiesselbach became an American prisoner of war and, until his release in May 1947, looked after fellow prisoners in Augsburg as a doctor . From October 1947 Kiesselbach worked in Regensburg at the branch of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Munich . The chemist Wolfgang Grassmann , who conducted experiments on leather impregnation against the warfare agent mustard during the Nazi era, also taught there. In a different context, Grassmann had promoted carrying attempts by prisoners on the shoe test track of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to test leather substitutes. In 1953, Kiesselbach switched to teaching comparative anatomy at the Philosophical-Theological University of Regensburg , where he was appointed full professor of biology in 1955. In the same year he was appointed full professor for topographic anatomy at the Medical Academy in Düsseldorf and headed the anatomical institute there. From 1962 he was full professor at the Medical Academy in Düsseldorf, where he was rector in the 1963/1964 year of office. In Düsseldorf, Kiesselbach is said to have pointed out during his lectures, based on his earlier activities, that sperm formation stops “when there is fear of death”.

Because of his time as assistant to Hirt, who had carried out human experiments on Jewish prisoners and had built up a skeleton collection, proceedings were opened against Kiesselbach before the Düsseldorf Regional Court in 1963 and discontinued in 1965 due to lack of evidence.

"I did not participate in the lost experiments carried out by Prof. Hirt, nor did I participate in the animal experiments."

- Statement by Anton Kiesselbach on June 23, 1965

In the dispute about the renaming of the University of Düsseldorf to “Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf”, Kiesselbach was opposed to the renaming and in an interview at the beginning of 1969 said the following to the proponent of the renaming, Manfred Windfuhr : “It is in the public interest to raise the question of Designation free to discuss. I follow the development of the Philosophical Faculty all the more with great discomfort when, for example, a professor who is not yet part of our faculty and has not yet given a lecture here tactlessly and brazenly wants to force a name for the university through democratic rape ”. Windfuhr did not comment on Kiesselbach's Nazi past.

Kiesselbach was a member of the board of trustees of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. He was a holder of the Médaille de Vermeil de la Société, Sciences, Lettres, Paris and an honorary member of the non-profit association of taxidermists and dermoplastists in Germany . The Lord Mayor of Regensburg awarded him the Reichssaal Medal in 1979 .

literature

• Ernst Klee : The personal lexicon for the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
• Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. 3. Edition. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-596-14906-1 .
• Max Plassmann: On the biography of the anatomist Prof. Dr. Dr. Anton Kiesselbach before his time in Düsseldorf. In: Düsseldorfer Jahrbuch 2015, Volume 85, pp. 299–320.
• Angelika Uhlmann: August Hirt and his colleagues Kiesselbach, Wimmer and Mayer. The careers before the University of Strasbourg . Rev. All. Pays Lang. Everything. 43 (3) 2011, pp. 333-340.

Web links

• Literature by and about Anton Kiesselbach in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c d e} Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. , Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 374ff.
2. ↑ Kirsten Esch: Research and Crime: the Reich University of Strasbourg. Documentary SWR. 2017 (broadcast on Arte 2018-06-05).
3. ↑ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. , Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 362
4. ↑ Fritz Bauer Institute (Ed.): "Elimination of Jewish Influence ..." Anti-Semitic Research, Elites and Careers in National Socialism. Frankfurt a. M. / New York 1999, p. 127, ISBN 3-593-36098-5 .
5. ↑ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. , Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 384
6. ^ Anton Kiesselbach: On the history of anatomical teaching in Regensburg , in: Negotiations of the Anatomical Society / 74. 1980, p. 19.
7. ↑ Florian Schmaltz: Warfare agent research in National Socialism: on cooperation between Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the military and industry , (= History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism, Volume 11), Wallstein Verlag, 2005, p. 298.
8. ^ Anne Sudrow: From leather to plastic. Material research on the "shoe test track" in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp 1940-1945 , in: Helmut Maier (ed.): Armaments research in National Socialism. Organization, mobilization and delimitation of the technical sciences , Göttingen 2002, pp. 214–249, here p. 229.
9. ↑ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. , Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 376f.
10. ↑ Der Archivar , Vol. 58, 2005, Issue 3, p. 225
11. ↑ Quoted in: Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, the Nazi medicine and its victims. , Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 375.
12. ↑ Thomas Gutmann: Heine after 1945 , In: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (APuZ) 3/2006 and published in the Düsseldorfer Nachrichten of January 25, 1969
13. ↑ Dietmar Goltschnigg, Charlotte Grollegg-Edler u. Peter Revers: Harry… Heinrich… Henri… Heine - German, Jew, European , Verlag Erich Schmidt, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-503-09840-8 , p. 403