Franz Vonessen (doctor)

Franz Vonessen (born November 10, 1892 in Rellinghausen , † April 11, 1970 in Cologne ) was a German doctor . As chief physician of the City of Cologne Health Office of the faithful refused Catholic in the era of National Socialism membership in Nazi organizations, after which he was initially demoted. When he also refused to participate in compulsory sterilizations under the law for the prevention of hereditary offspring , he was retired in 1937 at the age of 42. After the war, the administration of the victorious powers appointed him as head of the Cologne health department.

Life

Vonessen was the third youngest of ten children of a Rellinghausen merchant family described as Catholic and pious. Three older siblings died shortly after giving birth. In Essen he attended elementary school and in Steele the humanistic grammar school. At the age of 13 he first came into contact with cultural and religious life in Cologne when he and his family visited the cathedral capitular and art collector Alexander Schnütgen , a cousin of his father. Franz Vonessen graduated from high school in March 1911.

He then began studying medicine at the University of Freiburg and became a member of the KDStV Ripuaria Freiburg im Breisgau student association . During the First World War he had to interrupt his studies and was deployed as a military junior doctor in Trier , Rosbach (Windeck) and Bonn . Due to a rheumatic illness, he did not have to serve on the war front. In December 1918 he passed his medical state examination in Bonn. In July 1919 he received his doctorate there. From 1918 Vonessen worked briefly in two Cologne hospitals, but then switched to the city's health department as a welfare doctor .

In May 1920 Vonessen married the teacher Hedwig Küppers. The marriage later produced five daughters and one son.

City doctor in the Cologne health department

In early 1921 Franz Vonessen was promoted to city doctor under Peter Krautwig , who founded the Cologne Health Department in 1905 as the first German authority of its kind. Vonnessen turned down an offer from the Mayor of Bottrop , Erich Baur, for a position as head of the local health department and instead stayed in Cologne.

In the post-war period of the First World War he was concerned with the social and health misery of large parts of the population caused by poverty, which in the winter of 1922/23 caused, among other things, an extraordinary increase in tuberculosis cases in Cologne. At the same time he called for understanding and help for Cologne's nervous and mentally ill people, whose suffering he associated with the deprivations of this time. In 1922, it was his responsibility to set up a “welfare office for the nervous” for the first time. The term was chosen to distinguish it from the "insane care" customary at the time, which aimed at the placement of mentally and mentally ill citizens in asylums . The welfare office was deliberately set up not in the Lindenburg psychiatric clinic , but in a general hospital . The target group were also epileptics , demented people , children and adolescents with psychiatric disorders and addicts who received advice and support from the welfare office.

Head city doctor

After Krautwig's death in 1926, Karl Coerper became head of the health department and head of the health department. Coerper promoted Vonessen in 1929 to the chief city doctor and head of the hospital department of the office. At the same time he exercised the office of a medical officer of the State Insurance Institution of the Rhine Province . He published on social hygiene and social medicine , but after long deliberations declined an offer to participate in the planning of the Institute for Health Care of the German Caritas Association .

The family owned a house in Cologne-Braunsfeld . The Vonessens were active in the local Catholic parish of St. Joseph, which was led by the pastor Joseph Frings . One of the family's distant neighbors is the Konrad Adenauers family , with whom the Vonessens had an acquaintance who, among other things, expressed themselves in joint music evenings. The families' children were also friends.

On March 7, 1931 Franz Vonessen was caught in an attack by the SA during a church event in the parish hall of St. Joseph . Unlike Pastor Frings, who was attacked with a chair, Vonessen was unharmed. The increasingly insecure situation made him consider an application to work as a social security doctor at the international labor office in Geneva , but he did not put it into practice.

After the National Socialists seized power , Vonessen was asked to become a member of the civil service department, which later functioned as the NSDAP's civil servant department, in connection with the law to restore the professional civil service . He complied with this in November 1933, but remained a supporter of the German Center Party and a non-member of the NSDAP until it was marginalized . Citing the law, Lord Mayor Günter Riesen Vonesen announced at the end of the year that he had applied for a transfer to a lower-ranking office, citing the law. In addition to the non-membership in the party was allowed to his refusal to the children in the Hitler Youth to register and regularly for the Promotion of National Labor have contributed to donate to the fact that Vonessen demoted in March 1934 simple town doctor and to a spot near the king's forest offset has been.

Refused to participate in the euthanasia

Reichsgesetzblatt of July 25, 1933

On July 14, 1933, Hitler's cabinet passed the law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring . It should be the ideas of the Nazi eugenics prevail in which people with so-called hereditary diseases, these included congenital idiocy , schizophrenia , circular ( manic-depressive ) insanity (now bipolar disorder ), hereditary epilepsy (today epilepsy ), hereditary chorea (now chorea Huntington's disease ), hereditary blindness , hereditary deafness, and severe hereditary physical deformity have been subjected to forced sterilization . All doctors in the civil service were obliged to report these diseases to the hereditary health courts to be created, while other doctors were only asked to do so.

As the leading city doctor, Franz Vonessen struggled to take a stance on this law, which could also impose on him an obligation to notify the relevant diseases and to participate in the preparation of forced sterilizations. He looked at his church for guidance, but came across inconsistent viewpoints. The encyclical Casti connubii of 1930 prohibited any form of (forced) sterilization. The Eichstätter Bishop Konrad von Preysing described the concern of the Nazi legislature as a “good cause”, which, however, did not justify the use of the “bad agent” sterilization. The Cologne Vicar General Emmerich David advised the doctors concerned to agree with their superiors to avoid personal statements until the different points of view in discussions between state and church have been clarified, or to wait for implementing provisions to be issued. In a personal conversation with David, however, Vonessen learned, "It is better if a Catholic does that", if necessary to comply with the "Hereditary Health Act". Vonessen's superior, Coerper, gave him some time in a conversation at the end of 1933 to obtain the necessary certainty for a position from the church authorities.

After the law came into force on January 1, 1934, the Archdiocese of Cologne pointed out the prohibition of sterilization based on its own or the state's will in all services , but left the law open to dealing with the notification obligation for medical professionals. Franz von Papen , Catholic and Vice Chancellor in Hitler's cabinet, announced a compromise solution in a letter to Cardinal Adolf Bertram in March 1934 , according to which only doctors “who are internally committed to the law” would have to submit the prescribed applications. Instead, on April 1, 1935, the law on the standardization of health care came into force. It assigned the health authorities, as now state institutions, the compulsory participation in the preparation and implementation of compulsory sterilizations in the context of Nazi “hereditary and racial care”. Vonessen, until now a doctor in the service of the municipality, had to reckon with the fact that he would be called upon as a medical officer within the meaning of the law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring to directly assist in its implementation.

While Vonessen was still waiting for a binding statement from the church, there were already 2,555 cases of sterilization in Cologne from 1935, including those that could be traced back to reports from Catholic doctors and public health officers. Vonessen's superior, Coerper, urged him to qualify as a state medical officer, but Vonessen refused, citing the obligation to cooperate in forced sterilizations. He also refused to assign “hereditary and racial maintenance” to his office as city and district office. The Bonn theologian Fritz Tillmann interviewed by him chose a trick in which he classified the complaint of a sick person to the hereditary health court as being involved in a morally inadmissible forced sterilization, but the complaint was nevertheless permissible for "weighty reasons". This could be, for example, “considerations for the common good” or “justified individual good”, i.e. the endangerment of the doctor himself. Bishop von Preysing, on the other hand, described the advertisement as clearly unauthorized participation, but remained the only one among the German bishops with such a clear position.

In July 1935, Coerper asked Vonessen in writing, on behalf of the Lord Mayor, whether he wanted to take the district medical exam within a year and take on all related legal tasks. In September of the same year Vonessen agreed to qualify as a district doctor, but asked that he be excluded from participating in the sterility process for religious reasons. He declined the request to draw conclusions from this himself. Until 1936, the city and district administration could not make a decision about his professional fate, but continued to put pressure on Vonessen. Because of this, suffering from a slowly progressing encephalitis , Vonessen finally agreed on the transfer to retirement with the benefit of a pension with benefits. This regulation came into force on April 1, 1937.

Second World War

In order to be able to support his family and pay off loans, Franz Vonessen opened a pulmonary practice on the Hohenzollernring after his recovery in autumn 1937 , which was well attended. After the November pogroms in 1938 , the situation for Jews in Cologne became more threatening. Vonessen continued to treat Jewish patients and was asked several times to issue certificates to facilitate emigration, which he did. Consulates from several states sent people who wanted to emigrate to his practice. The Belgian consulate appointed him its medical officer.

In March 1940, the Vonessen family received the former governor of Styria , Karl Maria Stepan , who was staying with a neighbor a few weeks after his release from the Dachau concentration camp . They received shocking, authentic news from him about the operation of the concentration camp, where political prisoners in particular were tortured and humiliated at the time . At the beginning of the 1940s it became increasingly difficult to provide assistance to Jewish residents of Cologne. Ultimately, Vonessen was warned by the Gestapo for his "generosity" in issuing medical certificates. In several cases he was able to help Jews to hide or give them ration cards.

One of the bombers recorded the attack on Pforzheim

The first heavy attacks by Allied bombers at the end of May 1942 survived Vonessen's private apartment and practice unscathed. On June 1, 1942, however, his practice in the city center was largely destroyed. He later opened a new practice in Cologne-Braunsfeld . In the meantime, as an Aryan doctor, he was no longer allowed to treat Jews under threat of punishment, and they were no longer allowed to see him as a doctor. Nevertheless, after several attempts, he succeeded in 1943, together with the Cologne Caritas director Karl Boskamp, ​​a baptized Jewish woman with two adult daughters who had secretly come to his practice, to obtain false identity documents through relationships with an SS man. In the following war years, the family experienced numerous heavy air raids, including on Braunsfeld, and survived the partial destruction of their house by bombs in the cellar. Parts of the family were temporarily housed outside Cologne. On February 23, 1945 Vonessen and one of his daughters experienced a devastating air raid on Pforzheim , which led to a fire storm with 17,600 deaths and a building destruction of 98% of the city area. The family then moved to Mühlacker until the end of the war . Vonessen himself took a job at a Stuttgart hospital at short notice. His son Clemens was missing as a soldier in Russia until 1948 .

Head of the Cologne Health Department

On May 2, 1945, two days before Konrad Adenauer's return , Franz Vonessen was brought to Cologne by the US military after he had agreed to the request to take over the management of the local health department. Vonessen was able to bring his family to Cologne at the end of May. As head of the health department and head of the health department under the American military government, it was one of his tasks to restore basic medical care in the severely destroyed Cologne. The authority initially resided in the Augusta Hospital due to the destroyed offices on Neumarkt . The medical challenges of the immediate post-war period included tuberculosis infections and the widespread malnutrition among adults and children. In 1946, in spite of the start of school meals, the health department determined that 30% of Cologne's school children were in an “extremely poor” nutritional state.

Vonessen had a letter contact with Konrad Adenauer from 1946 about health policy issues. Vonessen was close to the newly founded CDU , but without being a member. In his private life, he supported Adenauer in obtaining medication that his wife needed because of an edema . In 1947 Vonessen went through the denazification process of the British occupying powers.

Despite his resistance to the criminal health policy of the Nazi era, Vonessen no longer went into this in his publications of the post-war period. Even about doctors loyal to the Nazi regime, such as his former superior Coerper, who was responsible for numerous compulsory sterilizations and who participated in deportations , he only spoke in passing. Also to the unhindered career of colleagues who z. Some of them still openly represented a racial hygiene and eugenic ideology in the post-war period, he did not comment.

Franz Vonessen built up the areas of health monitoring and health care in the Cologne health department and supported the reconstruction of the Cologne hospitals. During his regular retirement in 1957, Mayor Theo Burauen paid tribute to his development work and his refusal to submit to the “compulsion of dictatorship” and the Hereditary Health Act and to accept his forced retirement in return. In his farewell address, City Director Max Adenauer also referred to Vonessen's refusal to "carry out orders that no sane and morally high-ranking person could carry out".

Vonessen received the Order of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic in 1957 . In 1965 he received the Great Cross of Merit of the Order of Merit.

Franz Vonessen - family grave in Cologne's Melaten cemetery

In his retirement, Vonessen took over the chairmanship of the board of the North Rhine-Westphalia Hospital Association from February 1958, and in July 1958 the chairman of the board of the German Hospital Institute.

Franz Vonessen died on April 11, 1970 in Cologne. He was buried in the family grave in Cologne's Melaten cemetery (corridor 42).

Publications (selection)

• For the diagnosis of meningitis cerebrospinalis epidemica (the initial rash in meningitis cerebrospinalis epidemica); Dissertation at the Medical University Clinic Bonn, 1919
• Food distribution in hospitals, warming cart system and tray system / Siegfried Eichhorn; Richard Joachim Sahl; Franz Vonessen, Cologne, Opladen, Westdeutscher-Verlag, 1968

literature

• Klaus Schmidt : The endangered life. The Cologne doctor and health politician Franz Vonessen (1892-1970). A biography . Greven Verlag, Cologne 2004. ISBN 978-3-7743-0346-1 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Schmidt, pp. 10-11
2. ^ Schmidt, page 14
3. ^ Schmidt, pp. 17-19
4. ^ Schmidt, page 18
5. ^ Schmidt, pp. 29-30
6. ^ Schmidt, p. 52
7. ^ Schmidt, p. 49
8. ↑ Kurt Nowak: Euthanasia and Sterilization in the Third Reich. The confrontation of the Protestant and Catholic Church with the law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring and the euthanasia campaign, Göttingen 1980, ISBN 9783525555576 , pp. 111–119
9. ↑ Schmidt, p. 50
10. ↑ Schmidt, p. 62a
11. ↑ Schmidt, p. 66
12. ↑ Schmidt, p. 80ff
13. ↑ Schmidt, pp. 93-94
14. ↑ Schmidt, pp. 96-102
15. ↑ Schmidt, pp. 104-118
16. ↑ Schmidt, pp. 120-128
17. ↑ Schmidt, 139-140
18. ↑ Both cited from Schmidt, pp. 146–147