Edmund Forster

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Edmund Forster (born September 3, 1878 in Munich , † September 11, 1933 in Greifswald ) was a German psychiatrist and neurologist . He owes his fame to verbal statements according to which he should have treated Adolf Hitler in 1918 for hysterical symptoms. These statements are now being questioned by medical historians.

Life and work

His father was Josef Forster , a doctor and later a professor at the University of Strasbourg. Edmund Forster studied medicine at various universities. In 1901 he received his doctorate from the University of Strasbourg with a thesis in the field of neurophysiology . From 1909 he was a lecturer at the Charité , from 1913 an associate professor there. After the First World War began , Forster became a marine doctor . From 1915 he was deployed in Belgium, where he was promoted to naval medical officer and awarded the Iron Cross 1st class . Later he may have been in the Pasewalk reserve hospital .

On April 30, 1925, Forster became professor of psychiatry at the University of Greifswald and director of the mental hospital there. At the same time he became an extraordinary member of the Scientific Senate for Army Medical Services . In 1933 - after the National Socialist accession to power  - Forster was accused of preferring Jewish doctors. On 31 August 1933 he was suspended for alleged remarks against Nazism from duty and committed a few days later suicide . Forster left two sons, including Balduin Forster , who became professor of forensic medicine at the University of Freiburg.

The alleged treatment of Hitler

→ See also: Hitler in the Pasewalk reserve hospital

After mustard gas poisoning , which Hitler contracted during a defensive battle in Flanders , he was taken to the Pasewalk military hospital 800 km away in October 1918 for treatment. The complaints for which he was treated there can no longer be proven today, because Hitler's medical record was already considered lost at the end of the 1920s. In Mein Kampf , Hitler reported that he was blind after the gas attack, then recovered, but suffered a relapse after receiving news of the war defeat and the November Revolution. Since Hitler portrays his temporary renewed blindness as the dramatic turning point at which he felt his fateful calling to go into politics and “save” Germany, his first biographers also strongly accentuated the Pasewalk episode.

No documents have survived that could prove that Forster and Hitler, who was still completely unknown at the time, actually met each other in Pasewalk. When the intelligence service of the US Department of War ( OSS ) tried to create a psychological report on Hitler's personality in 1943, however, the doctor Karl Kroner , who lived in exile in Iceland , gave the Americans on record that Forster examined Hitler in Pasewalk and that he was diagnosed with " hysteria " have asked. Independently of Kroner, Ernst Weiß wrote a novel in 1939 ( Ich, der Augenzeuge ), in which he reported in the form of a fictional medical autobiography of the "healing" of a "hysterical" war blind AH in a Reichswehr hospital. After the OSS report was approved at the beginning of the 1970s, it suggested a whole series of Hitler psychopathographies, which - as Jan Armbruster showed in 2009 - borrowed their details and basic tone primarily from Weiss' novel.

Among other things, this led to the interpretation that Forster had been driven to suicide by the National Socialists in 1933 because he had insider knowledge about Hitler that was supposed to be suppressed.

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literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang Wilhelmus : History of the Jews in Pomerania. Ingo Koch Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-937179-41-0 , p. 151.
  2. ↑ Jan Armbruster: The treatment of Adolf Hitler in the Pasewalk military hospital in 1918: Historical myth formation through one-sided or speculative pathography (PDF; 1.7 MB) . In: Journal for Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry , 2009, Volume 10 (4), pp. 18-22
personal data
SURNAME Forster, Edmund
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychiatrist
DATE OF BIRTH September 3, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH September 11, 1933
Place of death Greifswald