Hellmuth Simons

Hellmuth Carl Rudolf Simons , also HCR Simons (born April 17, 1893 in Düsseldorf , † 1969 ) was a German biologist and bacteriologist .

Life and activity

Hellmuth Simons, son of a Düsseldorf banker, attended the Städtische Realgymnasium on Rethelstraße and passed the school leaving examination there at Easter 1912. He then studied natural sciences, in particular zoology and chemistry, at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau . In March 1914 he attended a parasitological course with Theodor von Wasielewski in Heidelberg, after which he stayed two and a half months to study at the Villefranche zoological station. When the First World War broke out , Simons was drafted, but later dismissed from active duty for health reasons and in October 1915 sent to the Pathological Institute of the Academy for Practical Medicine in Düsseldorf. There he was with JG Mönckeberg worked as a research assistant and wrote his dissertation on the nagana in dogs, due to which he at Freiburg University doctorate was. At the beginning of November 1916 he was transferred to the Biochemical Institute of the Düsseldorf Academy, where he continued to study trypanosomes . From 1920 to 1925 he was a researcher at the Biebrich-Amöneburg Laboratory, then from 1925 to 1933 at the IG Farben concern . Parasitology and microbiology were his specialties .

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Simons emigrated . From 1936 he worked as a researcher at Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel. From 1936 he lived in Great Britain, where he worked in the library of the British Museum and at the Molteno Institute at Cambridge University . Around 1937 he went to Paris , where he researched tropical diseases as a guest at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

As an emigrant Simons was actively involved in the fight against the National Socialist regime : in 1934, through the British journalist Wickham Steed , he came into contact with Helmuth Klotz , one of the leading opponents of National Socialism who had worked against the Hitler state from an emigration point of view. At Klotz's mediation, he worked as a scientific advisor to Heinz Liepmann on his book on chemical and bacteriological warfare Death from the Skies. A Study of Gas and Microbial Warfare , with which he warned the other European powers of the dangers of rearming the National Socialist regime. He also worked with Klotz in this area. As a result, after falling into the violence of the National Socialists during the Second World War , when he was charged with high treason before the National Socialist People's Court in 1942 by the presiding judge Roland Freisler u. a. it was accused of having worked with Simons (who had used the code name "Wilhelm" for this).

After his emigration, Simons himself was classified as an enemy of the state by the National Socialist police: in the spring of 1940 the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people who would be killed by the occupation forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Subsequent SS special commands were to be identified and arrested with special priority. His brother Arthur Simons , a neurologist in Berlin, was murdered in 1942 as part of the Holocaust .

After the beginning of the Second World War, Simons, who was formally still a German citizen, was interned by the French authorities as a "member of an enemy power" together with his son in Marseille . After the German occupation of France, he managed to get into neutral countries.

Simons has been researching at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute since 1943 at the latest . At this time he was in contact with Allen Welsh Dulles , the representative of the American foreign intelligence service OSS in Switzerland, whom he provided with information about the possibilities of the German state in the field of biological and chemical warfare. From this time Dulles' report of December 1943 has been preserved in which he states that Simons had expressed his fear that the German Reich might resort to bacteriological warfare in the given situation, in which case he, Simons, assume that the German military would use the poison bacillus botulinus as probably the most effective weapon it possesses in this area. He named the IG Farben works, the research laboratory of the Heereswaffenamt in Berlin and the Behring factory in Marburg as facilities that were able to produce this poison on a large scale. However, Simon's view was based only on conclusions that he had drawn on the basis of the expert knowledge that he had as one of the leading bacteriologists within the Reich until 1939 with regard to the fundamental structures and development potential of research there and its adaptation for military purposes concrete new information about actual plans and activities in the field of bacteriological warfare.

From 1947 Simons taught biology at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science.

The bacterial genus Simonsiella is named after him.

Fonts

• Contributions to the knowledge of the experimental Nagana , in: Journal for Hygiene and Infectious Diseases , Volume 87, Issue 1 (1918), pp. [1] –60. (Dissertation)
• with R. von den Velden: On the clinic of experimental Nagana in dogs together with some radiation therapy experiments , in: Journal for Hygiene and Infectious Diseases , Vol. 87, Issue 1 (1918), pp. [61] -76.
• with Johann Georg Mönckeberg: On the pathological anatomy of the experimental Nagana in dogs , in: Journal for Hygiene and Infectious Diseases , Vol. 87, Issue 1 (1918), pp. [77] –118.

literature

• Displaced German Scholars. A Guide to Academics in Peril in Nazi Germany During the 1930s , The Borgo Press, San Bernardino, California 1993 (reprint of the List of Displaced German Scholars , London 1936), p. 15.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} curriculum vitae in contributions to the knowledge of the experimental Nagana , dissertation Freiburg i. B., Buchdruckerei A. Bonz 'Erben, Stuttgart 1918 (special reprint from: Journal for Hygiene and Infectious Diseases , Vol. 87, 1918).
2. ^ 9th annual report of the municipal secondary school with secondary school on Rethelstrasse. School year 1911/12 , Düsseldorf 1912; P. 15.
3. ↑ Observatoire océanologique de Villefranche-sur-Mer, see the Wikipedia entries in French and English .
4. ^ Neal H. Petersen (Ed.): From Hitler's Doorstep. The Wartime Intelligence Reports of Allen Dulles, 1942-1945 , Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, p. 173.
5. ↑ Herbert Linder: From the NSDAP to the SPD. The political life of Dr. Helmuth Klotz (1894-1943) , 1998, p. 328f.
6. ↑ [1] .
7. ^ Zosa Szajkowski: Jews and the French Foreign Legion , 1975, p. 161.