Ferenc Orsós

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Ferenc Orsós interviews Parfjon Kisseljow, Katyn, April 30, 1943. Marko Markow stands next to Orsós.
Orsós (left) hands over the final report of the medical commission to Leonardo Conti (right), Berlin, May 4, 1943
Grave of Ferenc Orsós in the main cemetery in Mainz

Ferenc Orsós (born August 22, 1879 in Temesvár , Austria-Hungary ; died July 25, 1962 in Mainz ) was a Hungarian forensic doctor . From April 28, 1943, he headed the International Medical Commission for the Katyn Massacre .

Life

Orsós studied medicine in Budapest , first became an assistant doctor there, and from 1906 was a prosector and forensic doctor in Pécs . During the First World War he was a prisoner of war in Russia for four years. In Budapest he became director of forensic medicine at the University of Budapest and worked as a forensic doctor at all of the higher courts in Hungary. Orsós became a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1928 . In 1939 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . By 1943 he had taken part in 80,000 autopsies, developing a method for determining the time of death . When questioned in Frankfurt in 1952, he referred to his 1941 article in the "Hungarian Medical Journal".

Orsós became president of the Hungarian Medical Association and founded an organization of National Socialist doctors in Hungary ("Magyar Orvosok Nemzeti Egyesülete, MONE"). As chairman of MONE, he called for Jews to be excluded from the medical profession and for anti-Semitic measures to be implemented in Hungary. In 1941 he advocated forbidding not only Hungarians and Jews, but also Hungarians and Gypsies, to marry , based on the German racial legislation that was also introduced in Hungary. After the German occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944, more than 400,000 Jews were deported and most of them gassed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in cooperation with the Eichmann Command and the Hungarian authorities . The medical organizations led by Orsós denounced the Jewish doctors in Hungary and handed them over for deportation.

On December 6, 1944, Orsós fled Budapest with the Germans and went to Halle an der Saale with the staff of his institute . After the war he stayed in Halle and in West Berlin . Then he moved to Mainz, where he was still working as a senior anatomy teacher at the art academy . Orsós, who had been indicted by a people's court in absentia in Hungary, also had to fear attacks on his person by the Soviet secret service.

Investigation of Katyn in 1943

Signatures of the commission members on April 30, 1943

In February 1943, soldiers of the Wehrmacht had discovered the mass graves after indications from locals , and Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary on April 14, 1943 that it was to be used for propaganda purposes. The exhumation of the corpses in Katyn began in March under the direction of Gerhard Buhtz . An international medical commission was put together, which accompanied the exhumation from April 28th to 30th, 1943, carried out its own investigations and prepared a report. When the German Foreign Ministry asked the Hungarian government to send a Hungarian member in April 1943, Ferenc Orsós was appointed by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the group of international pathologists, Orsós was appointed as primus inter pares as the group's spokesman because he had the greatest experience in the field and was fluent in Russian.

The report was handed over by the group of international pathologists on May 4, 1943 in Berlin by Orsós to the Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti . The Foreign Office in London was because of anti-Semitic and pro-German position Orsós doubts about the credibility of the Katyn report of the International Medical Commission as from the historian Rohan D'Olier Butler written memorandum about the attitude of the British government to Causa Katyn ( Butler Memorandum ).

Investigation of Vinnytsia in 1943

Among the members of the Katyn Commission, Ferenc Orsós and Alexander Birkle also took part in an 11-person international commission to investigate the Vinnytsia massacre (1937/1938) from July 13 to July 15, 1943 ; According to his own statement in Nuremberg , Markov was not invited.

Investigation of Katyn 1952

In the verdict of the Nuremberg trial , the Katyn massacre, which, from the Soviet point of view, should be included in the indictment against German war criminals , was excluded. Five years later, during the Cold War , the American Congress set up a commission of inquiry in Washington, whose members also came to Frankfurt in the spring of 1952 to question witnesses. Orsós was questioned there on April 21, 1952, and he and the Tramsen and Palmieri, who were also questioned, confirmed the investigation methods and results of 1943. During the questioning of the witnesses, Orsós asked that his name should not be mentioned in the newspaper, which the committee of inquiry could not promise, as the press was present at the public questioning.

Fonts

  • Animating and aborting the womb , Helsinki: Societas medicorum Fennica Duodecim, 1961
  • Contributions to the morphology of the vagina , Helsinki: Munksgaard, undated
  • Emlékkönyv: Orsós Ferenc (Festschrift), printing: Debrecen: Tisza István-Tudományegyetemi Nyomda, undated

literature

  • Anna Elisabeth Jessen: Kraniet from Katyn. Beretning om massakren i 1940. Copenhagen: Høst & Søn, 2008 ISBN 978-87-638-0703-6
    • DR2 History : Massakren i Katyn - "The Katyn Massacre" is the title of a documentary from Denmark about the Danish pathologist Helge Tramsen, directed by Lisbeth Jessen, 2006. 58 min (broadcast on ARTE and NDR)
  • Allen Paul, Katyn: The Untold Story of Stalin's Polish Massacre (Scribner's, 1991), pp. 228-229, and 255;
  • Mária M. Kovács, "Aescupalius militans: Érdekvédelem és politikai radikalizmus az orvosok körében 1919-1945" (Aesculapius militans: Interest protection and political radicalism among medical doctors [in Hungary]), Valóság (Budapest) XXVIII / 8 (August 1985), Pp. 69-82.
  • László Karsi, A cigánykérdés Magyarországon 1919–1945: Ut a cigány Holocausthoz (The gypsy question in Hungary, 1919–1945: Toward a gypsy Holocaust) (Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1992), pp. 36, 40, and 46;
  • Agnes Kerekes, editor, Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon (Hungarian biographical encyclopaedia), 3 volumes (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó 1967–1981), Volume II, pp. 323–326.
  • United States. Congress. House. Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances on the Katyn Forest Massacre, The Katyn Forest Massacre: hearings before the Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, Eighty -second Congress, first [-second] session, on investigation of the murder of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia .. (1952) , Washington: US Govt. Print. Off. 1952
  • Gottwalt Christian Hirsch : Orsós, Ferenc . In: Index Biologorum. Inverstigatores Laboratoria Periodica. Editio Prima, Springer, Berlin 1928, p. 220

Web links

Commons : Ferenc Orsós  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Commission of Inquiry of the US Congress, p. 1601.
  2. ↑ A halal utani csontmesztelenecles, szuvasodas es pseudocallus , in: Orvosi Hetilap (d. I. "Hungarian Medical Journal, founded 1857") (Athenaeum Burlapest) 1941, no. 11. "The English version is approximately: The post mortal decalcification, callus, and pseudocallus on bones. That is the title of the article "
  3. ↑ "the Orso's theory on the calcification of brain pulp in the skull and organic changes Brought about by interment, Which would indicate the time in Which the body had been buried" , investigating committee of the US Congress, S. 1600th
  4. ↑ misjudgment at Nuremberg .
  5. ^ Statement by Tramsen, Commission of Inquiry of the US Congress, 1422
  6. ↑ published as: Official material on the mass murder of Katyn: Im Auftrage d. Foreign Office on the basis of a document Evidence , zsgest. edit u. ed. vd Dt. Information point, Berlin: Rather 1943 DNB
  7. ^ The Butler Memorandum pp. 13-14.
  8. ↑ Nuremberg Trial , July 2, 1946, p. 391.
  9. ↑ "On April 27, 1952, a subcommittee of the Select Committee on the Katyn Forest Massacre traveled to Naples, Italy, and took the testimony of Dr. Vincenzo Mario Palmieri. ” Commission of Inquiry, p. 1615.
personal data
SURNAME Orsós, Ferenc
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Orsos
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian forensic doctor
DATE OF BIRTH August 22, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Temesvár , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH July 25, 1962
Place of death Mainz