Hugo Merton

Hugo Philip Ralph Merton (born November 18, 1879 in Frankfurt am Main , † March 23, 1940 in Edinburgh ) was a German zoologist and explorer of Jewish descent.

Life

Hugo Merton studied from the winter semester of 1898/99 in Bonn , Berlin and Heidelberg and received his doctorate in natural sciences in Heidelberg on July 21, 1905 . From 1905 to 1906 he did research at the Zoological Station in Naples , and in 1906 he returned to the Zoological Institute in Heidelberg as an assistant. On behalf of the Senckenberg Natural Research Society , he undertook a research trip to the Moluccas in 1907 and 1908 , where, in addition to zoological observations, he also made art historical and archaeological observations. In 1909 he became the deputy director of the Senckenberg Nature Museum in Frankfurt and on November 20 he married Gertrud Pauline Anna Oswalt, with whom he later had two sons. On October 29, 1913 , he completed his habilitation in Heidelberg. From 1914 to 1918 he did his military service in the First World War . In 1920 he was appointed by the Baden Minister of Education as a non-civil servant extraordinary professor. While he was only spared reprisals due to his participation in the war, on December 31, 1935 his license to teach at the University of Heidelberg was revoked on the basis of the Reich Citizenship Act due to his Jewish descent. In 1937 he was invited by FAE Crew to a visiting professorship at the Institute of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh, from where he returned to Heidelberg a little later, as his accounts there had been confiscated on suspicion of " evacuation from the Reich ". In 1938 he was arrested and deported to the Dachau concentration camp , where he became seriously ill. In 1939 he and his wife managed to emigrate to Scotland, where he worked at the Institute of Genetics in Edinburgh. He died there on March 23, 1940, probably due to the long-term effects of the illness he suffered in the concentration camp.

In 1950, his widow applied to the State Office for Reparation in Karlsruhe for compensation, where she was offered a one-off payment of DM 177.92. This decision was revised in 1956 under pressure from the natural science faculty and an objection from the rectorate of Heidelberg University, so that Ms. Merton was subsequently paid the statutory survivor's pension.

Honors

Hugo Merton was a member of the Association for Geography and Statistics in Frankfurt am Main. He was awarded the Knight's Cross with Sword from the Order of the Zähringer Lion and the Iron Plaque from the Senckenberg Natural Research Society . On the building Philosophenweg 16 in Heidelberg, which was built in 1912 for the Merton family and which today belongs to the Institute for Theoretical Physics, there is a memorial plaque for Hugo Merton. The dotted blue eye ( Pseudomugil gertrudae ) was named by Max Wilhelm Carl Weber in honor of his wife.

literature

• Dagmar Drüll: Heidelberger Gelehrtenlexikon 1803-1932 . Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Tokyo 1986, ISBN 3-540-15856-1 , pp. 177 .
• Wolfgang U. Eckart, Volker Sellin, Eike Wolgast (eds.): The University of Heidelberg in National Socialism . Springer, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 978-3-540-21442-7 , pp. 1044, 1195-1196 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Sue O'Connor , Matthew Spriggs, Peter Marius Veth: The archeology of the Aru Islands, Eastern Indonesia . ANU E Press, 2005, ISBN 978-1-74076-113-0 , pp. 97-98 .
2. ↑ James Ritchie: Prof. Hugo Merton: Obituary (obituary) . In: Nature . tape 145 , 1940, pp. 924–925 (English, full text ).