Friedrich Timm

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Friedrich Carl August Timm (born September 22, 1895 in Güstrow , † September 3, 1985 in Göttingen ) was a German forensic doctor and university professor.

Early years

The merchant's son completed his school career at the Realgymnasium in Güstrow in 1914 with a secondary school diploma and then took part in the First World War as a war volunteer . After the end of the war in 1919 , he began studying chemistry at the University of Rostock and continued his studies a year later at the University of Leipzig , where he graduated in 1922. He then worked from 1922 to 1926 as a scientific assistant at the University of Leipzig, initially at the Chemical Institute and then in the inorganic and finally the organic department. In the meantime, in 1924, he became a Dr. phil. PhD . From 1926 to 1930 he studied at the University of Leipzig, a study of medicine , which he completed in December 1930th Timm received his doctorate as Dr. med. and was first assistant and then senior assistant to Richard Kockel at the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the University of Leipzig . In July 1932 he qualified as a professor for forensic medicine and scientific forensics and became a private lecturer. From 1931 Timm worked part-time as a court doctor in Leipzig and after Kockel's death in January 1934 took over the management of the institute.

Timm had been married to Irene, nee Mothes, since 1933. The couple had two children.

time of the nationalsocialism

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , Timm became a member of the NSDAP in May 1933 ( membership number 2,383,147). He also joined other Nazi organizations, including a. the NS-Ärztebund , the NS-Lehrerbund , the NSV and the NS-Dozentbund . From 1934 to 1935 he was an air raid doctor in Leipzig, then was a junior physician in the reserve in the army of the Wehrmacht and finally reached the rank of senior physician there . R.

In October 1938, Timm took over the role of forensic doctor Gerhard Buhtz , who was appointed to the University of Breslau, at the Institute for Forensic Medicine and Scientific Criminology at the University of Jena . At the end of December 1938 he was appointed full professor for forensic medicine and scientific forensics at the University of Jena, where he also took over the management of the Institute for Forensic Medicine.

As a doctoral supervisor, Timm was in charge of the Buchenwald camp doctor Erich Wagner's dissertation in 1940/41 with the title A Contribution to the Tattoo Question , which he and the other examiners Felix Lommel , Wolfgang Lintzel and the dermatologist Josef Hämel rated as “very good”. For this work, 800 tattooed beech forest prisoners were examined according to origin and social behavior. According to the doctor's clerk Eugen Kogon, skin specimens were prepared in the “Department of Pathology” and exhibited to SS visitors.

For SS judge Konrad Morgen , Timm was also involved in 1943 as an obducent in the investigations into the allegations of corruption and murder surrounding the Buchenwald camp commandant Karl Otto Koch.

Timm was also a member of a commission made up of forensic doctors who examined the exhumed bodies of the Vinnitsa massacre in the Soviet Union in July 1943 . As a result, the commission members signed a protocol that established the Soviet perpetrators for this crime.

On September 1, 1944, Timm was awarded the War Merit Cross, Second Class, by the Reich Research Council.

post war period

After the end of the war, Timm was released from his professorship in the Soviet occupation zone on December 15, 1945 due to his membership in the NSDAP. In March 1946, however, the President of the State of Thuringia entrusted him with the management of the institute, as he was to return to forensic medicine on the instructions of the Soviet military administration .

On April 22, 1947, Timm was arrested by Soviet military police. For "defamation of the Soviet Union" he was sentenced by the Soviet military tribunal in Dresden on July 15, 1947 to ten years imprisonment, since he had belonged in 1943 to the expert commission to investigate the mass murders of Vinnitsa. With his signature, Timm had stated that the bodies exhumed in Vinnitsa were NKVD victims. Initially, Timm was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen special camp and was transferred from there to Fort Zinna in Torgau in 1950 . Due to the medical care of fellow prisoners under the most difficult conditions, he was revered as the "Angel of Fort Zinna". Timm was released from prison in 1955 and moved to West Germany. He received a visiting professorship at the Medical Research Institute of the Max Planck Society in Göttingen and later also headed the histochemistry department there. In 1958 he became honorary professor at the University of Göttingen . The German Society for Forensic and Social Medicine had proposed Timm for the Federal Health Council in 1957 .

Since September 1996, a plaque in the Torgau cemetery, co-financed by the Saxon Memorials Foundation, has been commemorating Timm's work in Fort Zinna. After it became known that Timm, as a doctoral supervisor, had supervised the dissertation of the concentration camp doctor Erich Wagner on the tattoo issue and had given it a very good rating, the Saxon Memorials Foundation awarded the foundation's own Documentation and Information Center (DIZ) Torgau a research contract on Timm's vita. The Federal Association of Victims of Nazi Military Justice criticizes the fact that no neutral body was used to investigate Timm's Nazi past and that no decision has yet been made to remove the memorial plaque.

Fonts (selection)

  • Poisoning in humans and animals according to own observations , Springer, Berlin 1930. From: Dt. Magazine fd ges. judicial Medicine. Vol. 18, no. 1 (also medical dissertation at the University of Leipzig)
  • Cell microchemistry of heavy metal poisons , Leipzig 1932 (Med. Habilitation thesis)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Enrollment of Friedrich Timm in the Rostock matriculation portal
  2. ↑ Christian Bode: On the history of forensic medicine at the University of Jena in the period from 1901 to 1945 , Jena 2007, p. 91f.
  3. ↑ Ernst Hermann August Ludwig Degener, Walter Habel: Who is who? , Volume 17, Schmidt-Römhild, 1971, p. 1117.
  4. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 626.
  5. ↑ Christian Bode: On the history of forensic medicine at the University of Jena in the period from 1901 to 1945 , Jena 2007, p. 92.
  6. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , p. 236.
  7. ^ Scientific journal: Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe , Volume 18, Issues 4–6, self-published by Friedrich Wilhelm University, 1969, p. 829.
  8. ↑ Christian Bode: On the history of forensic medicine at the University of Jena in the period from 1901 to 1945. Jena 2007, p. 106 f.
  9. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , p. 236.
  10. ↑ Andreas Hilger : "Let justice take its course"? The punishment of German war criminals and violent criminals in the Soviet Union and the Soviet Zone / GDR. In: Norbert Frei : Transnational politics of the past. How to deal with German war criminals in Europe after the Second World War. Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-89244-940-9 , pp. 180–246, here p. 237.
  11. ↑ a b Christian Bode: On the history of forensic medicine at the University of Jena in the period from 1901 to 1945 , Jena 2007, p. 93.
  12. ^ Christian Bode: On the history of forensic medicine at the University of Jena in the period from 1901 to 1945 , Jena 2007, p. 93f.
  13. ↑ Günter Fippel: Democratic opponents and arbitrary victims of an occupying power and SED in Sachsenhausen (1946-1950) . Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, Leipzig 2008, ISBN 978-3-86583-251-1 , p. 117.
  14. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, p. 236.
  15. ^ Ernst Klee: German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. 2001, p. 320.
  16. ↑ Ludwig Baumann and Manfred Messerschmidt: Statement by the Federal Association: Victims of Nazi military justice on the competition for a joint memorial in Torgau Fort Zinna , memorial circular 91 pp. 32–34.
personal data
SURNAME Timm, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Timm, Friedrich Carl August (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German forensic doctor and university lecturer
DATE OF BIRTH September 22, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Guestrow
DATE OF DEATH 3rd September 1985
Place of death Goettingen