Felix Blumenfeld (doctor)

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Grave of Felix Blumenfeld

Felix Blumenfeld (born May 2, 1873 in Gießen ; † January 25, 1942 in Kassel ) was a German pediatrician and the first chief physician of the later Children's Hospital Park Schönfeld .

Live and act

Youth and Studies

Felix Blumenfeld was the child of Salomon A. Blumenfeld and Cäcilie (née Erlanger). The father owned a clothes shop on Walltorstrasse / Luisenplatz in Giessen . Blumenfeld lost his parents at an early age and grew up with his aunt until he graduated from high school . He studied medicine in Marburg and Munich . After completing his studies, he worked as a ship doctor for the Hamburg-America Line in 1898 before going to Berlin as a volunteer assistant, where he received his doctorate in 1900.

Pediatrician in Kassel and First World War

In 1901 he finally settled in Kassel as a pediatrician . Encouraged by the high infant mortality rate among children from poor parents, he began to use his position as a doctor and to get involved in social issues. At his suggestion, milk kitchens were set up in which perfectly hygienic milk-grain mixtures were produced as baby food and sold using a returnable bottle system . The products were also given free of charge to the poor . The premises were in the Wimmelhaus in Obere Fuldagasse No. 16-18 in Kassel. These milk kitchens served as models for other cities, and many managers of such facilities were sent to Kassel for training.

Former Children's Hospital Park Schönfeld (2016)

In 1906, among other things, on the initiative of Blumenfeld, the children's and infant home of the Evangelical Women's Association was founded. Children of single mothers were taken into the home . Blumenfeld became the medical supervisor of the facility on a voluntary basis. After the ten places were occupied within a very short period of time, a new building with 80 beds was built by the carrier in 1909 at Frankfurter Strasse 167, near Park Schönfeld . In addition to his practice, Blumenfeld was the medical director of the children's home. Under his leadership, the home developed into a children's hospital with a high medical standard, with the lowest infant mortality rate in the Prussian state .

In 1915, as chairman of a citizens' association, Blumenfeld helped organize the nailing of the Altkasseler Zaitenstock . At an organized donation event , he asked every citizen to hammer an iron nail into an oak well , the so-called zaitenstock , for 50 pfennigs . The collected proceeds should benefit war invalids. In the courtyard of the Kassel town hall , Blumenfeld gave a contemporary speech on the equality of all people about the fundraising: "Lined up hand to hand, regardless of position or point of view" . Until the Second World War, the Zaitenstock stood on a stone base next to the Wimmelhaus in Fuldagasse.

During the First World War , Blumenfeld served as a medical doctor in a prisoner-of-war camp in Niederzwehren .

Stumbling block in front of his last residence
Stumbling stone in front of the former children's hospital Park Schönfeld

Weimar Republic and National Socialism

In addition to his social and humanitarian commitment, Blumenfeld was also socially and culturally active. He was a member of the Reichsbund of Jewish Front Soldiers and, since 1930, chairman of a committee to ward off the emerging anti-Semitism against Jewish soldiers. In 1914, Blumenfeld joined the Freemasons Association . From 1932 to 1933 he was the last lodge master of the Kassel lodge Zur Einigkeit und Treue , until it was dissolved in the course of the compulsory dissolution of all Masonic lodges . He was very active in local politics and represented the German Democratic Party in the Kassel city council for four years .

Just a few weeks after the National Socialists came to power on April 1, 1933, as a Jew , he was deprived of the management of the children's hospital, he was banned from working and had to give up his apartment and practice in Nahl's house at 41 Obere Koenigsstrasse. His property and library were confiscated and owing to the fact that his wife Leni was not Jewish, he was initially allowed to live in his summer house at Fürstenstrasse 21 (today Hugo-Preuss-Strasse 35). He was forced to do auxiliary and road construction work and had to collect rags and scrap metal at the municipal scrap yard . He was exposed to constant discrimination and surveillance by the Gestapo .

To the deportation to escape and his wife from reprisals to protect committed Felix Blumenfeld on January 25, 1942 suicide . In his suicide note he wrote:

“Under these circumstances, death seems to me to be more desirable than an existence with ever new torments. I therefore go out of this world of meanness, wickedness and inhumanity in order to move into eternal peace and seek the path that leads from darkness to light. "

"Who knows how long this war will last, and what will happen to the Jews in Germany by then is hard to imagine"

“One will not shrink from any means of destruction. Hopefully, in the interests of my sons, it is more honorable and full of character to disappear from the scene, and to leave the house voluntarily as a dead person than to be chased out by the Gestapo thugs. "

He is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Kassel-Bettenhausen .

His two sons, Gerd and Edgar, were able to flee Germany in 1938 and survived the war and persecution. They adopted the name Bloomfield in the United States .

family

parents

  • Salomon ( Salli ) Blumenfeld and Cäcilie Blumenfeld (née Erlanger). His father was the owner of a clothes shop on Walltorstrasse / Luisenplatz in Giessen .

siblings

Thekla Grünbaum (née Blumenfeld) * March 8, 1872 in Giessen; † September 1940 in Treblinka concentration camp .

Husband of

  • Thekla Blumenfeld (née Wertheimer) * May 8, 1879 in Frankfurt; † August 20, 1917 in Kassel.
  • Johanna Helene ( Leni ) Blumenfeld (née Petri) * 1894; † 1969.

father of

  • Edgar Leo Bloomfield * July 20, 1903
  • Gerhard (Gerd) Max Bloomfield * March 3, 1906

Honors

Works

  • 50 cases of acute osteomyelitis in childhood (Diss. Med. 1900)
  • As co-author with Otto Frese: Handbook of ear, nose and throat medicine including the border areas (Chapter III. General pathology and symptomatology 1. Diseases of the nose and its sinuses). In Julius Springer Verlag 1926

literature

  • Lengemann: Citizens' Representation and City Government in Kassel 1835–1996 , Part 2, Marburg 2009, pp. 139–141
  • E. Seidler: Jewish paediatricians 1933-1945: Disenfranchised - Fled - Murdered , published by Verlag S. Karger (July 2007) ISBN 978-3805582841 (p. 307 f.)
  • Hans Joachim Schaefer: You may not have tried everything yet. Memories , published in Kassel University Press (June 28, 2007) ISBN 978-3-89958-288-8 , pp. 104-108.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Seidler E .: Jewish paediatricians 1933-1945 ; Publisher: S. Karger; July 2007 ( ISBN 978-3805582841 ) p. 308
  2. ↑ Uwe Feldner: Stadtlexikon - (almost) everything about Kassel , published by the Herkules-Verlag website of the source (accessed on March 4, 2020)
  3. ^ Adolf Kallweit: Freemasonry in Hessen-Kassel: Royal Art through 2 Centuries from 1743-1965 ; published by Agis-Verlag 1966, p. 41.
  4. ^ Jochen Lengemann: Citizen Representation and City Government in Kassel. 1835-1996 . Part 2. Overviews for the years 1993–2006, short biographies of the municipal mandate holders and officials 1835–2006, letters A to L, 2009, pp. 139–141.
  5. ↑ Felix Blumenfeld in the Hessian biography . Website of the Hessian State Office for Historical Cultural Studies (accessed on December 5, 2016)
  6. ^ Seidler E .: Jewish paediatricians 1933-1945 ; Publisher: S. Karger; July 2007 ( ISBN 978-3805582841 ) p. 307 f.
  7. ↑ Felix Blumenfeld in the Hessische Biographie website of the Hessian State Office for Historical Regional Studies (accessed on December 5, 2016)
  8. ↑ HNA: Stolperstein-Aktion unearths suicide note from Nazi victims
  9. ↑ German Society for Child and Adolescent Medicine eV for the laying of the stumbling blocks ( Memento from September 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ↑ HNA: City honors Kassel politicians, persecuted people and poets with graves of honor , accessed on March 27, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Blumenfeld, Felix
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German pediatrician and victim of the Nazi regime
DATE OF BIRTH May 2, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH to water
DATE OF DEATH January 25, 1942
Place of death kassel