Arthur Czellitzer

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Arthur Czellitzer (until 1920: Arthur Crzellitzer ; * April 5, 1871 in Breslau ; † July 16, 1943 in Sobibor ) was a German-Jewish ophthalmologist who was particularly prominent as a genealogist.

origin

He was the son of Siegfried Crzellitzer and Malvine Schlesinger. Siegfried had continued to run the sugar confectionery factory founded by Arthur's grandfather in Breslau. The architect Fritz Crzellitzer is the son of Arthur's uncle Emil, who had made great fortunes as a stock exchange trader. Arthur Czellitzer had already dealt with genealogy as a schoolboy and collected data on the origins of his family.

Life

From 1889 he studied medicine in Breslau, Munich and Freiburg and was awarded a Dr. med. PhD and approved . He then worked as an assistant in Heidelberg, Strasbourg and Paris. From 1900 he practiced as an ophthalmologist in Berlin. In 1905 he married Margarate Salomon. They had three daughters. In 1907 he founded a private clinic for ophthalmology in Berlin.

He took part in the First World War as a lieutenant and was head of the ophthalmology department in the German military hospital in Warsaw. There he also participated in the Masonic lodge "To the Iron Cross in the East" founded by members of the army in Warsaw at the end of 1915.

In 1924 he founded the Society for Jewish Family Research (Berlin W 9, Tirpitzufer 22) and became its president. He was editor of the journal Jüdische Familienforschung (Berlin 1924–1938, published monthly, 1935 edition approx. 1000 copies); Together, the booklets form a comprehensive reference work on German and international, mostly European, Judaism and their family relationships. Listed name changes after the Stein-Hardenberg reforms and much more are also taken into account . and the Archives for Jewish Family Research . He was a member of the German Society for Hereditary Science, founded in 1927 . He was also a member of the Central Office for German Personal and Family History .

In 1936 he had to close the flourishing eye clinic and fire his non-Jewish employees. While fleeing the persecution of the Jews in Germany, the family moved to Breda on July 9, 1938 . After the German invasion of Holland began , the family joined a refugee train to emigrate to England via France. In Belgium Arthur was arrested by the Belgian police and interned because of his German passport. His wife and daughters were able to continue their escape and were also interned as Germans in England. Margarete spent 15 weeks in Holloway Prison , 4 of them in solitary confinement. Arthur Crzellitzer was released after four days and returned to his home in Breda after 19 days. On April 9, 1943, he was deported to the Westerbork transit camp and transported to the Sobibor extermination camp on July 13, 1943 , where he was murdered on July 16, 1943.

Before that, he had to experience that the research he carried with him, the family chronicles in printed and handwritten form, memoirs, family tables, etc., were used by the Nazis as information material for the persecution of the Jews.

Czellitzer owned an archive of Jewish genealogical documents, including wills, memoirs, chronicles, genealogical tables, and family trees. Before his arrest, he had given the collection to a non-Jewish friend in Tilburg, who hid it in his wool factory, but where it was found by the Germans and burned a year later after Czellitzer's murder.

research

From 1900 to 1912 he reconstructed the lineage of 104 families of his eye patients. In addition, he carried out a large hereditary and socially hygienic study of 786 families from a Berlin workers' district. He saw it as pointless to only look at direct inheritance without considering other family members. He examined for nearsightedness , farsightedness , strabismus , astigmatism , cataracts and nystagmus . He confirmed the role of incest as a cause of blindness and other eye diseases and was able to show latent inheritance over three generations according to Mendel's laws . Czellitzer said that the first-born child carries an increased risk of developing eye diseases. The statistician Karl Pearson advocated an analogous thesis for tuberculosis and crime, which was controversial at the time .

Czellitzer expanded the goal of family research by now considering heredity as essential for the socio-hygienic health of the family. To do this, he demanded mandatory family registers.

Works

Autobiographical writings and stories

Several, in part extensive, autobiographical writings by Arthur Czellitzer are now in the Leo Baeck Institute New York (within the Center for Jewish History), including (signature: ME 67, MM 17):

  • From the script of a life. History of a Jewish Youth in Germany - Fin de Siècle. Written down between my fiftieth and seventy-first years, i.e. between 1921 and 1941.
  • History of my family, Tilburg 1942, digital version (PDF download, 113.572 MB)
  • Revolution - collapse - homecoming (Warsaw 1918)
  • Whitsun Journey (1940)
    • also in: West- und Nordeuropa 1940 - June 1942 , Oldenbourg Verlag, 2008 (Volume 5 of The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933-1945 ), pp. 183–186
  • Life a dream, digitized (Internet archive), issue 1/13 at the Leo Baeck Institute

Books

  • My family tree. A genealogical guide for German Jews , Philo, Berlin 1934

Professional article (selection)

  • Methods of family research, in: Journal for Ethnology , 41st year, issue 2 (1909), pp. 181–198, Dietrich Reimer Verlag,
  • Sociology of eye diseases, pp. 661–670 in: Handbook of social hygiene and health care, Volume 5: Social physiology and pathology , Julius Springer, Berlin 1927 summary

literature

  • Horst Reschke: Arthur Czellitzer , entry for the Encyclopaedia of Jewish Genealogy , 1987, digitized at the Center of Jewish History (PDF download, 3.35 MB)
  • Paul Weindling : Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism. 1870-1945 , Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 235
  • Veronika Lipphardt : Biology of the Jews. Jewish Scientists on "Race" and Heredity 1900-1935 , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008, pp. 140–141, p. 208
  • Czellitzer, Arthur, Dr. med. In: Alfons Labisch / Florian Tennstedt : The way to the "Law on the Unification of the Health System" of July 3, 1934. Development lines and moments of the state and municipal health system in Germany , Part 2, Academy for Public Health in Düsseldorf 1985, ISSN 0172 -2131, p. 395.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Czellitzer, Arthur, Dr. med. In: Alfons Labisch / Florian Tennstedt : The way to the "Law on the Unification of the Health System" of July 3, 1934. Development lines and moments of the state and municipal health system in Germany , Part 2, Academy for Public Health in Düsseldorf 1985, ISSN 0172 -2131, p. 395
  2. ↑ On June 25, 1916, Czellitzer gave the midsummer speech of the lodge, see August Wolfstieg, Bernhard Beyer (Ed.): Bibliography of Freemasonry Literature (Supplementary Volume I), 1926, p. 217, digitized version of the University of Freiburg
  3. ^ P. Weindling: Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism. 1870-1945 , 1993, p. 329
  4. ^ A b P. Weindling: Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism. 1870-1945 , 1993, p. 235
  5. ↑ cf. K. Pearson: On the handicapping of the first-born , 1914
  6. ^ P. Weindling: Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism. 1870-1945 , 1993, p. 238
personal data
SURNAME Czellitzer, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Crzellitzer, Arthur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor
DATE OF BIRTH April 5, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw
DATE OF DEATH July 16, 1943
Place of death Sobibor