Erich Hippke

Erich Hippke (1908)

Erich Hippke (* 7. March 1888 in Prökuls , County Memel , Lithuania Minor ; † 10. June 1969 in Bonn ) was a German medical officer, last generaloberstabsarzt the Wehrmacht. After the war he was a resident doctor in Hamburg and Berlin.

Life

Hippke was the son of the forest treasurer Wilhelm Hippke . On March 28, 1907, he entered the Kaiser Wilhelms Academy for military medical education . He became active in the Pépinière-Corps Franconia with Kurt Oehlmann , Otto von Schjerning , Berthold von Kern , Willy Vorkastner and Max Wissemann . He was an excellent consenior . After the state examination at the Charité he served in 1913/14 as a junior doctor in Stargard , Bromberg , Demmin and Kolberg . During the First World War he was the troop doctor of the Infantry Regiment von der Goltz (7th Pomeranian) No. 54 in Galicia, Macedonia and Turkey. On 28 July 1919 he was supported by the Friedrich-Wilhelms University for Dr. med. PhD. The reviewers were Albert Köhler and Otto Hildebrand . Taken over by the Reichswehr , he was sent to the Berlin Hygiene Institute. As a senior staff doctor, he was a hygienist in the military districts of Königsberg (I), Munich (VII) and Dresden (IV) from 1922 . He was a division doctor in Hanover and a teaching staff officer at the war school in Dresden.

With the formation of the Wehrmacht in April 1935 he was taken over into the medical service of the Air Force (Wehrmacht) . He was promoted on 1 February 1939 Surgeon General , on 1 January 1940 surgeon general and on 1 July 1941 generaloberstabsarzt . From 1937 to the end of December 1943 he was inspector of the Air Force's medical services. He was also a member of the board of trustees of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research . With Hippke's participation as the highest-ranking air force member, negative pressure experiments and attempts to cool down on prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp took place from 1941 onwards . In May 1942, the altitude tests were completed and Hippke reported to SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff . In February 1943, Hippke expressed his "most sincere thanks" to Heinrich Himmler and described the human experiments as "great help". Opposite Wolff explained Hippke in March 1943: "All work in the field of aviation medicine - ie the height - were already under my scientific supervision in my capacity as head of the German aviation medicine." After nine months in the Führerreserve from the High Command of the Air Force took it on Retired September 30, 1944 at the age of 58.

Hippke's successor in office, Oskar Schröder , was indicted in the Nuremberg doctors' trial after the end of the war ; Hippke was not charged because he went into hiding and his whereabouts were unknown at the start of the trial. Hippke became a company doctor for the Hamburg subway and an employee of the Hamburg Medical Association . When he was arrested in December 1946, he was working as a general practitioner in Hamburg. As the sanitary inspector responsible for the human experiments, he was questioned in the so-called milk trial against his superior Erhard Milch as a witness of the Military Court II. He left Nuremberg without charge. He was then a health insurance doctor in Berlin until 1962 . During the reconstruction of the air force (Bundeswehr) medical system , he became a consultant.

Awards

• Iron Cross 2nd and 1st class
• Iron crescent
• Red Cross Medal (Prussia) III. class
• Cross of Honor of the World War
• Service award (Wehrmacht) IV.–I. class
• Decoration of honor of the German Red Cross 1st class
• Spain cross in bronze
• Imperial Order of the Yoke and the Arrows
• War Merit Cross (1939) 2nd and 1st class with swords
• Military Order of Savoy

literature

• Ulrich-Dieter Oppitz, Thure von Uexküll : Medical crime in court: the verdict in the Nuremberg medical trial against Karl Brandt and others as well as from the trial against Field Marshal Milch , Palm & Enke, 1999. ISBN 978-3-7896-0595-6 .
• Ernst Klee : Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. 3. Edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-596-14906-1 .
• Ernst Klee: The personal lexicon for the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
• Alexander Mitscherlich , Fred Mielke: Science without humanity: Medical and eugenic wrong ways under dictatorship, bureaucracy and war. Schneider, Heidelberg 1949. The entire edition was bought up by the medical associations. New edition: Medicine without humanity: Documents of the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial. Fischer, Heidelberg 1960. ISBN 3-596-22003-3 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Erich Hippke in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Paul Wätzold: Master list of the Kaiser Wilhelms Academy for military medical education (1910)
2. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 60 , 432
3. ↑ Dissertation: About foreign bodies in the stomach .
4. ^ WorldCat
5. ↑ Ludwig Eiber , Robert Sigel: Dachauer Trials: Nazi Crimes Before American Military Courts in Dachau 1945-48 , Wallstein Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-83530167-2 , p. 156 ff
6. ^ Letter from Hippke to Himmler dated February 19, 1943. In the facsimile ( memento of the original dated June 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the Nuremberg Trials Project. (Nuremberg Document NO-268). 
7. ^ Letter from Hippkes to Wolff dated March 6, 1943. In the facsimile ( memento of the original dated December 31, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the Nuremberg Trials Project. (Nuremberg Document NO-262) 
8. ↑ Udo Benzenhöfer: Nürnberger Ärzteprozess: The selection of the accused. Deutsches Ärzteblatt 1996; 93: A-2929-2931 (issue 45) (PDF; 258 kB).
9. ^ H. Zehmisch: German swastika medicine. Ideologues and practitioners . ( Memento of the original from January 13, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 176 kB) In: Ärzteblatt Sachsen 4/2005. Pp. 142–145, here p. 145. 
10. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 258.