Hans Reiter (medic)

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Hans Conrad Julius Reiter (born February 26, 1881 in Reudnitz , † November 25, 1969 in Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe ) was a Berlin bacteriologist and hygienist . In 1916, Reiter described a clinical picture with inflammation of the joints (arthritis), eye inflammation (conjunctivitis / uveitis) and urethritis (urethritis), which is known internationally as Reiter's disease or Reiter's syndrome to this day . During the time of National Socialism he was President of the Reich Health Office and, as a functionary and staunch Nazi propagandist, guaranteed the implementation of National Socialist policies in medicine and, above all, in the public health service. After the war, Reiter was imprisoned and heard as a witness in the Nuremberg trials. After his discharge due to illness, he worked as a doctor in the Königin-Elena-Klinik in Kassel until his retirement. There was no public discussion of National Socialism.

Life

Hans Reiter was the son of the factory owner Richard Hermann Reiter and his wife Margarete. In 1901 he passed his Abitur at the St. Thomas School in Leipzig and then served as a one-year volunteer with the 106th Infantry Regiment "King George"; he was released as a paramedic. Reiter studied medicine in Leipzig, Breslau and Tübingen, where he passed the medical state examination in 1906. Since 1901 he was a member of the Cheruscia Landsmannschaft . Reiter was in 1906 at the University of Leipzig with a thesis on nephritis and tuberculosis at Henry Curschmann Dr. med. PhD . He then trained at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and then did his military service as a doctor with the No. 1 Railway Regiment in Berlin. In 1909 Reiter worked at London's St Mary's Hospital for the then leading immunologist Sir Almroth Edward Wright . From 1908 to 1911 he worked in Berlin in various laboratories, including as an assistant at the Berlin Lung Polyclinic and the Pharmacological Institute and volunteered at the Hygiene Institute a. a. with Carl Flügge and Bruno Heymann. Before Reiter accepted a position as an assistant at the Hygiene Institute at the University of Rostock in 1911, he had his own laboratory for the production of vaccines for a short time. In 1913 he took over the management of the Medical Examination Office in Königsberg. In 1913 he completed his habilitation on the subject of antibody formation in vivo and in tissue cultures for bacteriology and hygiene in Königsberg under Karl Kisskalt . As a doctor and senior physician, he took part in the First World War from 1914 , most recently as an advisory hygienist for the German troops of the 1st Bulgarian Army. In 1918 Reiter was appointed adjunct professor in Berlin.

From 1919 to 1922 Reiter was First Assistant and Head of Department at the Institute for Hygiene at the University of Rostock and was appointed Associate Professor for Social Hygiene in 1920. In addition, from 1923 to 1925 he took over the deputy head of department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Experimental Therapy (KWI), which at that time was headed by August von Wassermann and one of his most important employees was Reiter. After Reiter was not taken into account in the reorganization of the KWI, he took over the position of Director of the State Health Office of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1926. During the entire period, Reiter continued to teach with lectures on social hygiene and was appointed full professor in 1928; since 1923 he also read increasingly on topics of race hygiene.

Reiter was also increasingly politically active, initially from 1920 to 1923 as a city councilor in Rostock for the DVP and temporarily chaired the DVP local group in Rostock. After Gustav Stresemann's death, Reiter turned to the National Socialists. After joining the NSDAP in the Mecklenburg-Schwerin local group on August 1, 1931 ( membership number 621.885), Reiter became a member of the state parliament of the Free State of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1932 , to which he belonged until 1933. Reiter was one of the signatories of the election appeals “German university teachers for Hitler” of November 1932 and the appeal “The German Spiritual World for List 1” of March 1933. From 1932 he headed the Nazi leader and advanced training school in the Mecklenburg-Lübeck district. Reiter belonged to the Nazi teachers' association, for which he acted as chairman of the Reichsfachschaft university lecturers and scientists, as well as the Nazi medical association . Reiter fought vehemently for the implementation of fascist university policy. In addition to providing financial support for fascist students, he also drove the expulsion of Jewish scientists from the universities and changed the curriculum according to National Socialist guidelines.

After the previous President of the Reich Health Office, Carl Hamel , had to resign in March 1933, Reiter was initially offered the provisional management of the office at the suggestion of the Reichsärzteführer Gerhard Wagner . On October 1, 1933, Reiter was then appointed President of the Reich Health Office and was supposed to guarantee the implementation of the National Socialist maxim in the most important German health authority. Reiter expanded the areas of responsibility of the office, introduced the leadership principle into the authority and ensured that National Socialist guidelines were safely implemented. For cooperation with party committees, he was active in the "Advisory Board for Public Health in the Reich leadership of the NSDAP and head of the Hess staff". In 1935 the Robert Koch Institute and the Prussian Institute for Water, Soil and Air Hygiene were incorporated under the umbrella of the Reich Health Office. Reiter belonged to a large number of Nazi organizations and associations, including B. the "Expert Advisory Board for Population and Racial Policy" in the Reich Ministry of the Interior , he was President of the Reich Health Council, head of the Reich Working Group for National Nutrition and was a member of the Reich Committee for Public Health. At the International Health Office in Paris he acted as a delegate from Germany and headed the office in trust after the partial occupation of France. From 1934 he headed the working group of the scientific societies , which was significantly involved in bringing medical organizations into line, and was a member of the leadership council of the German Red Cross . Reiter was chairman of the German Society for Hygiene and the German Society for Social Hygiene. From 1934 he also worked as an honorary professor for hygiene at the University of Berlin, where he gave lectures on genetic and racial studies . From 1935 he was a member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina and was a member of the board of the Forensic Biological Society and the Reich Center for Health Management in the Reich Ministry of the Interior . He participated in the magazine for human inheritance and constitutional theory, published by Günther Just and Karl Heinrich Bauer from 1935 onwards . Reiter was a member of the medical committee of the German Society for Industrial Hygiene , the German Society for Public Health Care , the German Society for Hygiene and the German Society for Nutritional Research and was appointed extraordinary member of the Scientific Senate of Army Medical Services in 1942. Reiter joined the SA on July 21, 1941 and received the rank of Standartenführer in honor of the party committees.

In his celebratory speech on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Reich Health Office in 1936, he said among other things: " Every premature death of a person [before the age of 65] does not allow the full utilization of his birth value ". Furthermore, the saying comes from him that the doctor "fights as a biological soldier for the health of his people". As President of the Reich Health Office, he unreservedly represented the racial hygiene ideology of National Socialism. On June 18, 1945, Reiter was discharged from the public health officer of the Berlin magistrate, Otto Lentz .

After a brief house arrest, Reiter was arrested by the Americans in Berlin in August 1945 and was interned in the United States from 1945 to 1947. During the Nuremberg Trials , he was imprisoned in the Nuremberg cell prison. Reiter himself - who was not directly involved in the crimes of the National Socialists - was not charged himself, but was only heard as a witness in Nuremberg. Due to his exposed position and activity in various committees and organizations, he undoubtedly had knowledge of many Nazi crimes. After his remarriage in 1942, Reiter was related by marriage to the co-organizer of the T4 euthanasia killing campaign and head of the main branch in the office of the Führer, Richard von Hegener . As a participant in a conference on typhus experiments on humans in December 1941, Reiter himself was at least informed about the plans, even if he did not agree to the experiments and this may have weakened his position in the years up to the end of the war.

After his release from prison, Reiter succeeded through personal connections in 1949 to find a job as a doctor in the Queen Elena Clinic in Kassel for rheumatism and Parkinson's disease. When he retired in 1952, Reiter received a pension after his assets had been confiscated as a Nazi victim. In the following years Reiter - who had published over 200 scientific publications by 1942 - was able to publish again on a modest scale in German journals. Internationally, he was successful with lectures on Reiter's disease at congresses in London and Rome. Reiter himself hardly commented on his role in National Socialism and also saw a preliminary investigation that ended in 1960 without charge as characterized by pure objectivity and scientificity.

“In summary, it can be said that before 1933 Reiter dealt intensively and successfully with questions of immunity research. [...] During the Nazi era he was primarily active as a political propagandist, and from today's perspective it is incomprehensible how a scholar with international experience could engage in such a primitive argument. "

Reiter syndrome

In 1916, Reiter described reactive arthritis , which is still known in international parlance as Reiter's syndrome , although the clinical picture has been described earlier. It is a reactive inflammatory systemic disease, which manifests itself primarily in the so-called Reiter triad of conjunctivitis , urethritis and arthritis .

Due to Reiter's role in National Socialism and the previous descriptions of the disease, there were several attempts to replace the term “Reiter's Syndrome” with the term “reactive arthritis”, but ultimately all of them failed.

Fonts (selection)

  • Nephritis and tuberculosis , dissertation, University of Leipzig, 1906.
  • Antibody Studies: Formation In Vivo and In Tissue Culture. In: Journal of Immunology Research and Experimental Therapy. Vol. 18 (1913), Issue 1, pp. 5-61.
  • Vaccine therapy and vaccine diagnostics , Stuttgart 1913.
  • Coming healing art , Stuttgart 1934.
  • Goals and ways of the Reich Health Office in the Third Reich. For the 60th anniversary of the Reich Health Office , Leipzig 1936.
  • The Reich Health Office 1933–1939. 6 years of National Socialist leadership , Berlin 1939.
  • ed. with Bernhard Möllers: Carl Flügge's outline of hygiene. For students and general practitioners, medical and administrative officials , 11th edition, Berlin 1940.
  • ed. with Johannes Breger: German Gold. Healthy life, happy work , Munich 1942.

literature

  • Michael Buddrus , Sigrid Fritzlar: The professors of the University of Rostock in the Third Reich. A biographical lexicon. Saur, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-598-11775-6 .
  • Robin Maitra: "... who is able and willing to serve the state with top performance!" Hans Reiter and the change in the concept of health as reflected in the textbooks and handbooks of hygiene between 1920 and 1960. Matthiesen Verlag, Husum 2001 (Treatises on the history of Medicine and the natural sciences 88), ISBN 978-3-7868-4088-6
  • Reiter, Hans, Dr. med. In: Alfons Labisch / Florian Tennstedt : The way to the "Law on the Unification of Health Care" of July 3, 1934. Development lines and moments of the state and municipal health system in Germany , Part 2, Academy for Public Health in Düsseldorf 1985, ISSN  0172 -2131 , pp. 477-479.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Armin E. Good: Obituary: Hans Reiter 1881-1969 . In: Arthritis and Rheumatism, Vol. 13, No. 3 (May-June 1970), pp. 296-297.
  2. ^ Hans Reiter: Nephritis and Tuberculosis. Medical dissertation . Leipzig 1906, p. 35 (CV) .
  3. ^ Berthold Ohm and Alfred Philipp (eds.): Directory of addresses of the old men of the German Landsmannschaft. Part 1. Hamburg 1932, p. 75.
  4. ^ Federal Archives Potsdam, Zehlendorf branch: SA personnel questionnaire Reiter = .
  5. ↑ Michael Engel: History of Dahlems . Berlin 1984, p. 199 .
  6. ↑ Personnel and course directories of the University of Rostock . Rostock 1923.
  7. ^ Günter Heidorn, Gerhard Heitz: History of the University of Rostock 1419-1969. Commemorative publication for the university's five hundred and fifty anniversary . VEB, Berlin 1969, p. 258-259 .
  8. ↑ Manfred Stürzbecher: tasks and services of public health care. The heads of authorities of the Reich Health Office in Berlin 1876–1945 . In: The Bear of Berlin . 25th episode. Berlin 1976, p. 247-250 .
  9. ↑ Robin T. Maitra: "... who is able and willing to serve the state with top performance!" Hans Reiter and the change in health conception as reflected in the teaching and handbooks of hygiene between 1920 and 1960. In: Treatises on the history of medicine and of the natural sciences . Issue 88. Husum 2001, p. 178-210 .
  10. ↑ Hans Reiter: Ways and goals of the Reich Health Office after the takeover of power. For the sixtieth anniversary of the Reich Health Office. In: Reichs-Gesd.bl. tape 11 , 1936, pp. 506-509 .
  11. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Nikol Verlag, Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-86820-311-0 , p. 490.
  12. ^ Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin: Course catalog summer semester 1934 . Berlin 1934, p. 28-29 .
  13. ↑ http://www.leopoldina.org/de/lösungen/lösungen/member/4548/
  14. ↑ Michael Buddrus, Sigrid Fritzlar: The professors of the University of Rostock in the Third Reich. A biographical lexicon. Munich 2007, p. 328.
  15. ^ A b Hans Reiter: The Reich Health Office 1933–1939. Six years of National Socialist leadership . J. Springer, Berlin 1939, p. 286.
  16. ↑ State Archives Nuremberg: War Criminals-Anklage-Interrogations . No. 552, 765, 1093, Rep. 502 IV R 68.
  17. ↑ Eugen Kogon: The SS State. The System of the German Concentration Camps . 2nd Edition. Berlin 1947, p. 159-169 .
  18. ↑ Eugen Kogon: The SS State . 7th edition. Munich 1979, p. 191 .
  19. ↑ Robin Maitra: W ... who is able and willing! "... Hans Reiter . Husum 2001, p. 197-200 .
  20. ↑ Robin T. Maitra: "... who is able and willing to serve the state with top performance!" Hans Reiter . Husum 2001, p. 208-210 .
  21. ↑ Manfred Stürzbecher . Quoted from: Alfons Labisch , Florian Tennstedt : The way to the "Law on the Unification of the Health System" of July 3, 1934. Lines and moments of development of the state and municipal health system in Germany. Part 2. Academy for Public Health in Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf 1985, ISSN  0172-2131 , p. 479.
  22. ^ MA Waugh: Benjamin Collins Brodie 1783. 1862 . In: J Roy Soc Med . tape 82 , 1989, pp. 318 .
  23. ^ Disease names used by Nazi doctors
  24. ↑ RT Maitra: Comments Regarding Hans Reiter's Role in Nazi Germany. In: J Clin Rheumat . tape 7 , 2001, p. 127-129 .
personal data
SURNAME Reiter, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Reiter, Hans Conrad Julius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German bacteriologist and hygienist
DATE OF BIRTH February 26, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Reudnitz
DATE OF DEATH November 25, 1969
Place of death Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe