Arnold Dohmen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arnold Dohmen (born August 2, 1906 in Duisburg ; † March 6, 1980 in Lage (Lippe) ) was a German internist , bacteriologist and medical officer of the Army Medical Inspection who carried out hepatitis tests on Jewish children in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp .

Life

Dohmen graduated after completing his school career a degree in medicine and a doctorate with the 1933 published dissertation studies on the Bordet-Gengousche bacteria at the University of Rostock Dr. med.

Dohmen was a member of the NSDAP and SA leader .

At first Dohmen was employed at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf before he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939 . His habilitation took place in 1941 at the University of Hamburg with the text About the forms of residual nitrogen increase in the course of Weil's disease, at the same time a contribution to the clinic of hepatorenal syndrome .

In 1942, Dohmen was transferred to the "Consultant Internist" department of Kurt Gutzeit in Berlin at the Military Medical Academy . In the absence of suitable laboratories in the Military Medical Academy, he carried out his hepatitis animal experiments at the Robert Koch Institute . He infected chicken embryos and mice with infectious material that his colleague Hans Voegt had obtained from hepatitis patients through liver punctures. In the spring of 1943 Dohmen was certain that he had transmitted the hepatitis virus infection to his mice. He turned to the authorized representative for health care Karl Brandt with the request to be allowed to transfer this material from animals to humans. At the beginning of June 1943, Dohmen presented his request to the Reichsarzt SS Ernst-Robert Grawitz , who obtained permission from Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler that Dohmen, although he was not a member of the SS, could have eight Polish concentration camp inmates sentenced to death to examine the Causes of communicable hepatitis should get. At the end of June 1943, Dohmen stayed for four days in Auschwitz and selected eleven Jewish minors and adolescents between the ages of nine and 19 for his hepatitis experiments.

After the destruction of the Robert Koch Institute by an Allied air raid in November 1943, Dohmen relocated his office to the Animal Hygiene Institute at the University of Giessen . At the beginning of June 1944, Dohmen made contacts with the hepatitis researcher Eugen Haagen at a hepatitis conference at the University of Breslau .

According to Gutzeit, Dohmen initially seemed to have withdrawn from his plan to carry out pseudo-medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners:

“In Giessen I once again tried - I don't know how many times - to shake Dohmen out of his animal experimentation lethargy so that we can finally come to the final clarification. Funny how difficult the step from animal to human is, but ultimately the latter is the main thing. "

In September 1944, Dohmen began the hepatitis experiments in Sachsenhausen concentration camp , to which his test victims had been transferred. He injected virus cultures into his victims' intestinal tract. To check the result, he also performed painful liver punctures on two of his victims. The aim of these experiments should be the detection of the hepatitis pathogen and the development of an effective vaccine. Towards the end of the war, the "Elf von Auschwitz" were only able to survive through the intervention of Norwegian prisoner attendants at the camp doctor Heinz Baumkötter , as they used to camouflage that the Jewish children and adolescents could possibly be used for further medical experiments. The Jewish children were sent on a death march on April 21, 1945 as part of the evacuation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp ; At the beginning of May 1945 they were liberated near Lübeck by members of the British Army .

After the end of the war, Dohmen practiced as a resident internist in the Detmold district . On February 27, 1975 a preliminary investigation against him was closed. Dohmen previously denied having been involved in the selection of the children and stated that he only carried out sham experiments. The responsible public prosecutor's office did not consider this version to be refutable.

The fate of the children was dealt with in the documentary film Every time had to be a miracle - The children of Sachsenhausen .

literature

  • Ernst Klee : Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. 3. Edition. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-596-14906-1 .
  • Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Updated 2nd edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007. ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
  • Brigitte Leyendecker, Burghard F. Klapp: German hepatitis research in the Second World War . In: C. Pross, Götz Aly (ed.), Der Wert des Menschen. Medicine in Germany 1918–1945 . Hentrich, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-926175-62-1 , pp. 261-293.
  • Brigitte Leyendecker: The effect of a footnote from Mitscherlich's and Mielke's documentation on the Nuremberg medical trial. Hans Voegt in the network of hepatitis researchers before and after 1945 . In: Sigrid Oehler-Klein, Volker Roelcke (ed.): Politics of the past in university medicine after 1945. Institutional and individual strategies in dealing with National Socialism . Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-515-09015-5 , pp. 65-96.
  • Saul Oren-Hornfeld: Like burning fire. A victim of medical experiments in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp tells the story. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-936411-71-9 , pp. 107-160.
  • Ulf Schmidt: Hitler's doctor Karl Brandt. Medicine and Power in the Third Reich. Construction Verlag, Berlin 2009. ISBN 978-3-351-02671-4 , pp. 401-465.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the entry by Arnold Dohmen in the Rostock matriculation portal
  2. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 115 f.
  3. ^ A b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 259 ff.
  4. ^ Letter from Kurt Gutzeit to his colleague Wilhelm Fähndrich from August 23, 1944. Quoted in: Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, the Nazi medicine and its victims. Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 262.
  5. ↑ a b c Susanne Lenz: Doctor abused children for experiments . In: Berliner Zeitung , December 2, 1996
personal data
SURNAME Dohmen, Arnold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German internist and bacteriologist who was involved in hepatitis experiments in Sachsenhausen concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH 2nd August 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Duisburg
DATE OF DEATH March 6, 1980
Place of death Location (lip)