Fred Dubitscher

Alfred "Fred" Hans Friedrich Egon Dubitscher (born July 6, 1905 in Krefeld , † November 11, 1978 in Cologne ) was a German psychiatrist and racial hygienist .

Studies and career entry

Dubitscher studied medicine after graduating from high school and was approved after graduation in 1930 and in the same year in Münster as a Dr. med. PhD . He completed his internship at the Institute for Clinical Psychology and the Brain Injury Ward in Bonn under Walther Poppelreuter and most recently at the Chemnitz Municipal Mental Hospital . In 1933 he finished his training as a specialist in neurology.

Collaboration at the Reich Health Office and Nazi activity

From 1934 he was a research assistant in the Reich Health Office . In the RGA he took over the deputy head of the department of heritage and race maintenance under Eduard Schütt . Dubitscher worked in the subdivision L 1 General and Applied Hereditary and Racial Care, where the “Reich-uniform card index for all hereditary diseases, hereditary problems and for the high-value” was kept for the genetic inventory of the German people. In 1938 he was promoted to government councilor and later to senior government councilor.

From July 1937 to March 1943 he was also a senior physician at the " Polyclinic for Hereditary and Racial Care" at the Empress Auguste Victoria House in Berlin-Charlottenburg, also under Schütt. In May 1941 he took over the deputy chairmanship of the Polyclinic Association for Hereditary and Racial Care. In 1942 he became deputy director of the facility. The outpatient clinic also functioned as a “counseling center for genetic and racial care”, where applications for sterilization, marriage loans , honorary sponsorships and allowance for large children were processed, and marriage examinations were carried out. The establishment also served to advise health authorities and to prepare hereditary race reports for paternity proceedings, hereditary health courts and the Reich Office for Family Research , which later became the Reich Family Office. In doing so, Dubitscher took measurements of body features in people to be assessed. At this institution he was significantly involved in research on "anti-social clans" . With this research he wanted to achieve the subordination of this group of people to the law for the prevention of hereditary offspring . Other research focuses of Dubitscher were nonsense and studies of intelligence.

Dubitscher belonged to the DAF , the NSV and the German Air Sports Association . In 1941 he applied for membership in the National Socialist Medical Association , but was not a party member. From May 1936 he was an assessor at the Hereditary Health Court and later at the Hereditary Health Supreme Court in Berlin .

post war period

After the end of the Second World War he briefly managed the Reich Health Office as the successor to the interned Hans Reiter . He was then temporarily banned from working by the American military administration. In 1946 he headed the human medicine department at the facility, which has since been renamed the Institute for General Hygiene by RGA. He was incriminated by former colleagues in 1947 for anti-Semitic contributions in the new 1940 book “Grundriß der Hygiene” by Carl Flügge . Before the denazification commission in Berlin-Steglitz he justified his statements at the time as commissioned work by Hans Reiters, the scope of which he could not have foreseen before the onset of the Holocaust . According to his own statement, he was himself in the resistance against National Socialism . He was arrested by the Gestapo on January 26, 1944 after denouncing the Gestapo spy Paul Reckzeh at Tempelhof Airport . He had come into custody because of meetings with the Berlin lawyer Alfred Etscheid (1878-1944), who was connected to the national conservative resistance, and suspected of collaborating with foreign resistance groups. However, the denazification commission did not have any relevant documents. However, one Ravensbrück survivor testified that she saw Dubitscher in shackles after being questioned in the concentration camp . Furthermore, Dubitscher stated that, in cooperation with Etscheid, he had saved Jews and half-Jews from deportation by means of ancestry reports he had prepared . This statement was confirmed by Etscheid's former business partners. Although the Steglitz denazification commission wanted to denazify Dubitscher in December 1947 because of exonerating statements, the American military administration refused to do so in February 1948, referring to his Nazi work. In March 1948 he moved to Cologne with his family.

Doctors at the state supply office

In February 1949 Dubitscher was denazified in Cologne as exonerated and was able to continue his professional career. From the beginning of July 1949 he was a contract doctor at the State Insurance Institution of the Rhine Province, two years later he was made civil servant and promoted to senior medical officer. From 1951 until his retirement in July 1970, he worked at the state supply office in North Rhine, where he became a senior doctor in 1961. In 1962 he was promoted to government medical director and in 1969 to senior government medical director.

As part of his work, Dubitscher created expert neurological reports, in particular assessing brain-injured war victims. Furthermore, in 1957 he published a work on suicide from a medical care perspective as part of a research project funded by the Federal Minister of Labor and the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs of North Rhine-Westphalia . The occasion was an implementation ordinance for the Federal Supply Act : Relatives of soldiers and civilians who had committed suicide as a result of the war were able to receive pension payments. In 1958 he carried out the research project initiated by the Federal Minister for Labor and Social Affairs, “Socio-biological determination of the addicts and those at risk of addiction who are cared for and looked after” in the context of addicted war invalids.

In the journal Deutsches Panorama published Frank Arnau in 1966 an article in connection with the NS-loaded Hans Globke , where he went on, other "forms brown-stained past." Among other things, he named Dubitscher, whom he introduced as follows: "In a state that left countless Nazi doctors, euthanasia professors, patient starvation and vivisectors unmolested, there are of course worthwhile offices for many small theoretical supporters of sterilization." Arnau left u. a. on whose work the bullshit and antisocial behavior, and concluded his remarks as follows: "How can a doctor who the lowest After doctrines of Nazi Erbwissenschaft championed and for the boundless expansion of the circle to be sterilized with the path of the Regulations and the implementing regulations came in, nor in 1966 worked as a government medical councilor in a leading position at a state supply office? Or is a pension office to be understood as an office that supplies former high-quality National Socialists at the expense of the German taxpayers? ”The Wesel mayor and social democrat Willi Nakaten asked the Labor and Social Affairs Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia whether Dubitscher, with his Nazi past, was still in office is durable.

Dubitscher married Gerda, born Kindt, in Fürstenberg / Havel in 1944 . He last lived in Cologne and died in 1978 at the age of 73 in a Cologne hospital.

Fonts (selection)

• Ergographic examination of post-encephalic patients , Med. Diss., University of Münster 1930
• Der Schwachsinn , G. Thieme, Leipzig 1937, In: Handbuch der Erbkrankheiten, Volume 1
• Antisocial clans: hereditary u. sociological studies , G. Thieme, Leipzig 1942
• The suicide with special consideration of health care considerations , Thieme, Stuttgart 1957, belongs to work and health, NFH 61
• Life difficulties and suicide: advice u. Prevention , Thieme, Stuttgart 1971

literature

• Susanne Doetz: Everyday life and practice of forced sterilization. The Berlin University Women's Clinic under Walter Stoeckel 1942-1944 , dissertation at the Institute for the History of Medicine of the Medical Faculty Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin 2005 online (pdf 28.6 MB)
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 (= Fischer. 16048). Updated edition, 2nd edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Fred Dubitscher in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Death certificate No. 10100 dated November 14, 1978, Cologne registry office. In: LAV NRW R civil status register. Retrieved July 30, 2018 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Robin T. Maitra: Treatises on the history of medicine and the natural sciences, edition 88, Matthiesen, 2001, p. 144f.
3. ^ ^{A b c} Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt: Racial hygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich. Bio-bibliographical manual. Berlin 2006, p. 365
4. ^ ^{A b} Günter Grau: Lexicon on the persecution of homosexuals 1933–1945. Institutions - People - Areas of Activity , Berlin 2011, p. 242
5. ↑ Susanne Doetz: Everyday life and practice of forced sterilization . The Berlin University Women's Clinic under Walter Stoeckel 1942-1944 , Berlin 2005, p. 129f.
6. ↑ ^{a b} Susanne Doetz: Everyday life and practice of forced sterilization. The Berlin University Women's Clinic under Walter Stoeckel 1942-1944 , Berlin 2005, p. 135
7. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 120
8. ↑ Susanne Doetz: Everyday life and practice of forced sterilization. The Berlin University Women's Clinic under Walter Stoeckel 1942-1944 , Berlin 2005, p. 136ff.
9. ↑ Susanne Doetz: Everyday life and practice of forced sterilization. The Berlin University Women's Clinic under Walter Stoeckel 1942-1944 , Berlin 2005, p. 140
10. ↑ Susanne Doetz: Everyday life and practice of forced sterilization. The Berlin University Women's Clinic under Walter Stoeckel 1942-1944 , Berlin 2005, pp. 140ff.
11. ^ Frank Arnau: Some spots on the federal vest. In: Deutsches Panorama 1, 1966, p. 52. Quoted from: Susanne Doetz: Everyday life and practice of forced sterilization. The Berlin University Women's Clinic under Walter Stoeckel 1942-1944 , Berlin 2005, p. 144
12. ^ Frank Arnau: Some spots on the federal vest . In: Deutsches Panorama 1, 1966, p. 55. Quoted from: Susanne Doetz: Everyday life and practice of forced sterilization. The Berlin University Women's Clinic under Walter Stoeckel 1942-1944 , Berlin 2005, p. 144
13. ↑ Susanne Doetz: Everyday life and practice of forced sterilization. The Berlin University Women's Clinic under Walter Stoeckel 1942-1944 , Berlin 2005, pp. 144f.