Ernst Rodenwaldt

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Ernst Rodenwaldt in the Weltevreden health laboratory

Ernst Robert Carl Rodenwaldt (born August 5, 1878 in Berlin ; † June 4, 1965 in Ruhpolding ) was a German hygienist , medical officer and, most recently, general doctor of the Wehrmacht. He is considered one of the most famous tropical medicine specialists in Germany and was a leading global malaria expert at the time.

Life

Rodenwaldt was the son of a high school professor and brother of Gerhart Rodenwaldt , one of the most important archaeologists of the 20th century. After graduating from high school at Köllnisches Gymnasium , he served as a one-year volunteer in the Guard Fusilier Regiment in 1897/98 . At the same time, he began his medical studies at the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Akademie for military medical education in Berlin, where he passed his state examination on January 30, 1903. The Friedrichs University Halle doctorate him in 1904 to Dr. med. From 1909 to 1913 Rodenwaldt worked as a colonial doctor in Togo , where, in addition to the fight against smallpox and malaria, he also reformed obstetrics. During the First World War he worked as a medical officer in Asia Minor for the allied Ottoman Empire. In the theaters of war there, he was able to achieve great success in combating malaria, typhus, cholera and typhus. In the winter of 1916/1917 typhus had spread to almost the entire city of Smyrna, which presented Rodenwaldt with a great challenge. In Jerusalem, Rodenwaldt supervised the war hospitals of the German Borromean women and the Kaiserswerth deaconesses . After the war he completed his habilitation in Heidelberg in 1919 with his studies on malaria research. In Heidelberg, Rodenwaldt became a member of the Rupertia Association . Between 1921 and 1934 he worked in the East Indies , where after just one year he was assigned the task of combating malaria for the entire archipelago. In 1928 he was appointed inspector of the public health service and from 1932 was the head of the health laboratory in Weltevreden . Due to his epidemic control successes and his numerous publications, he was considered the world's leading malaria expert at the time.

On March 1, he became a member of the NSDAP's foreign organization , to which he was a member until February 25, 1933. The Christian Albrechts University in Kiel appointed him to the chair for hygiene in 1934 . In 1935 he switched to the chair at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . In this role he also held compulsory lectures on racial hygiene. With the beginning of the Second World War he was called back to the military medical service. In 1940 he became head of the Institute for Tropical Medicine and Tropical Hygiene of the Military Medical Academy and consultant tropical medicine with the head of the army medical services. He was involved in the scientific evaluation of the "human experiments of the Wehrmacht". However, he declined appointments to the Munich Chair for Racial Hygiene or the Berlin Reich Institute for Genetic Research. In 1943 he was appointed general doctor. Rodenwaldt's missions took him to France, where he was subordinate to a special colonial medical hospital near Bordeaux, to the Netherlands and Belgium, to Italy, the Balkans and North Africa. In 1943/1944 particular attention was paid to the malaria-infested regions around the Montecassino Abbey .

At the end of the war he was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Windermere, England (Cumbria) . After a few months there, he became the chief physician of a German prison hospital. At the instigation of his English colleagues, he was released to Germany in early 1946, where he learned that the American military government had dismissed him as professor of hygiene at the end of 1945 because of Nazi charges. After he was classified as a “minor offender” in the context of denazification in the first instance, he was finally acquitted in a second trial in 1948.

After the acquittal, he received a teaching position at the University of Heidelberg in the same year. After his retirement in 1951, he became head of the geomedical research center of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences . Until his death he worked as a consultant for various organizations. He had influence on the medical service of the Bundeswehr , was an advisory board member in the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and was involved in development aid .

Works

Rodenwaldt wrote countless papers in the field of tropical medicine. From 1952 to 1961, a three-volume world epidemic atlas was created and published under his leadership , which was considered a standard geomedical work. In addition, he also conducted research in the field of geomorphology and, together with epidemic geography, developed the new research field of geomedicine . In 1941 he was the author of a knapsack for the High Command of the Wehrmacht with the title “Islam”, which today is considered an interesting work for the National Socialists' way of thinking about Islam at the time. This is portrayed so positively in the book and the prejudices that still exist today are cleared up that the Islamic scholar Stefan Weidner judged: "Even from today's point of view, so much of this propaganda pamphlet is factually and psychologically correct that one almost feels a little uncomfortable . "

Maintenance of tradition

Rodenwaldt was celebrated and honored as a luminary in German tropical medicine. He was a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina . On his 85th birthday he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Tübingen. On December 15, 1967, the Bundeswehr Institute for Military Medicine and Hygiene in Koblenz was given the name "Ernst Rodenwaldt Institute". On November 30, 1967, the National Hygiene Institute of the Republic of Togo was named after Ernst Rodenwaldt. On August 5th, 1978 a Rodenwaldt relief was unveiled in Lomé. However, after the suspicion was confirmed that Rodenwaldt had knowledge of the human experiments during the Nazi era, the traditional name "Ernst-Rodenwaldt-Institut" was removed on March 24, 1998. In October 1998 the Rodenwaldt Institute in Togo was renamed "Institut National d'Hygiène".

Publications (selection)

  • with Heinz Zeiss : Introduction to hygiene and epidemic theory , between 1936 and 1943 a total of five editions, Ferdinand Enke Verlag, Stuttgart.
  • The mestizos of Kisar. Edited by the Mededeelingen van den Dienst der Volksgezondheit in Nederlandsch-Indiï, 2 volumes, Batavia 1927.
  • Tropical hygiene. Stuttgart 1938.
  • A tropical doctor tells his life. Stuttgart 1957.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ WorldCat
  2. ↑ Dissertation: Recordings of the mental inventory of healthy people as a benchmark for defect testing in sick people .
  3. ↑ a b c d Manuela Kiminus: Ernst Rodenwaldt - life and work
  4. ↑ a b c d Kutzer, Michael: Rodenwaldt, Ernst Robert Karl. In: Neue Deutsche Biographie 21 (2003), pp. 697/698 [online version]
  5. ^ Wolfgang U. Eckart : Medicine and War. Germany 1914-1924 , Ferdinand-Schöningh-Verlag Paderborn 2014, pp. 320–323, ISBN 978-3-506-75677-0 .
  6. ↑ Habilitation thesis: On the quinine resistance of plasmodia in human malaria .
  7. ↑ Wolfgang U. Eckart : The Heidelberg Anatomy in National Socialism , in: Sara Doll, Joachim Kirsch, Wolfgang U. Eckart (Ed.): When Death Serves Life - Man as Teaching Aid , Springer Germany 2017, p. 77. doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-662-52674-3
  8. ^ Stefan Weidner on May 13, 2013 in cicero.de: The multicultural confession of the Wehrmacht


personal data
SURNAME Rodenwaldt, Ernst
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ernst Robert Carl Rodenwaldt (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German tropical medicine
DATE OF BIRTH August 5, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH June 4, 1965
Place of death Ruhpolding