Julius Hallervorden

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Julius Hallervorden (after 1935; ID issued by the Military District Command II Berlin)
Walther Spielmeyer and his work group in 1927, Julius Hallervorden second from the left in the back row

Julius Hallervorden (born October 21, 1882 in Allenberg , Wehlau district , East Prussia ; † May 29, 1965 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German doctor and brain researcher . During the Nazi era he worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch . After the end of the war he worked at the successor institute, the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research .

Life

Julius Hallervorden was the son of the psychiatrist and later director of the Provincial Sanatorium and Nursing Home Kortau Eugen Hallervorden (1853-1914), his younger sister was the teacher and politician Margarete Hallervorden (1887-1972).

He studied medicine from 1902 to 1907 at the University of Königsberg and received his doctorate in 1909. He then worked in a hospital and made the district medical exam in 1918. In 1922 Hallervorden and the Berlin neuropathologist Hugo Spatz first described a disease that was now called Hallervorden-Spatz Syndrome (HSS). The disease, now also known as NBIA, involves destruction in the area of ​​the brain that controls body movements. Characteristic symptoms include a. progressive movement disorders of the patient. The disease is considered incurable.

In 1929 Hallervorden became the prosector of the Brandenburg State Agencies. He was employed at the Potsdam State Institute from 1936 to 1937. In 1938 he became honorary professor and was until 1956 a scientific member, deputy director and head of the histopathologic section of the Kaiser Wilhelm / Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Berlin, which in the last two years of the war after Dillenburg finally and after the war by pouring relocated has been. In 1940 he was appointed provincial chief medical officer and honorary doctorate from Giessen. In 1960 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

In the time of National Socialism

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , he became a sponsoring member of the SS in 1933 . In March of the following year he took part as a speaker in a hereditary biology course at the Berlin Charité . Although he was not qualified as a professor, Adolf Hitler appointed him professor on January 30, 1938. In 1939 Hallervorden became a member of the NSDAP and head of the external department of the Military Medical Academy .

In 1939, Hitler issued a permit that from then on allowed doctors to use the “death by grace”. This resulted in a - today estimated - number of about 185,000 murdered psychiatric patients in the territory of the German Reich, plus the victims in Polish, Soviet and French institutions. In the so-called Aktion T4 alone , around 70,000 psychiatric patients were killed between January 1940 and August 1941. Doctors had complained that the cremation of the corpses was a "loss" for medical research. The brains of killed patients were therefore sent to various laboratories for examination purposes.

Between 1940 and 1945, around 700 brains were examined at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin . They came from mentally ill and mentally handicapped people. In at least one case, Hallervorden took a victim's brain himself.

On April 29, 1940, Hallervorden and other professors were officially informed about the T4 campaign . The Deutsches Ärzteblatt writes in retrospect that Hallervorden was probably informed about the "euthanasia" program earlier by Hans Heinze .

On May 15, 1940 Hallervorden received the first brains from children gassed in the Brandenburg-Görden prison . These deliveries continued into autumn. On October 28, 1940, the last 56 children and young people were gassed in the Nazi killing center in Brandenburg , with Heinze and Hallervorden as witnesses, who then had their brains dissected. The brains of around 40 children from this transport can be found in the Hallervorden collection.

After autumn 1940, brains from "euthanasia" victims from various institutions were delivered to Hallervorden and Spatz: from the prosecution in Brandenburg-Görden, from the Bernburg and Sonnenstein killing institutions, from the Leipzig-Dosen institution and other institutions. With the beginning of the so-called Action T4, adult brains were among them.

Hugo Spatz presented in November 1940 an informal application for a grant of 10,000  RM at max de crinis : for investigations conducted by the department head Professor Julius Hallervorden on the organic bases of congenital imbecility (due to a large material from cases of idiocy) . The application was forwarded to the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the DFG provided financial support for the prosecution in the Brandenburg killing center.

Around May 1941 Hallervorden gave a four-week training course to doctors who had received an emergency license . One of his students was the young Heinrich Bunke , whom he taught to select and prepare medically interesting brains.

On December 8, 1942, Hallervorden wrote in an annual report: Furthermore, in this summer course (sc. 1942) I was able to prepare 500 brains of mentally handicapped people and prepare them for an examination.

On May 8, 1944, the Hallervordens department was closed because of the bombing raids on the capital. The department was moved to Dillenburg. Hallervorden stated that up to this point he had “received 697 brains”, “including those that I once took out myself in Brandenburg”.

A memo from the State Office in Görden in July 1945 shows that Hallervorden still received material from Friederike Pusch from the prosecution in Brandenburg-Görden. The Red Army had long since occupied the institution and the land. His assistant Werner-Joachim Eicke , who worked there until the end of January 1945, did military service from February 1945.

After 1945

Hallervordens name was already mentioned in 1946 at the Nuremberg Doctors Trial and in 1947 it was in the list of names in the second edition of the report of the German Medical Commission at the American Military Court I in Nuremberg . Regardless, Hallervorden worked as a department head at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Giessen from 1949 . In 1956 he was awarded the Great Federal Cross of Merit, in 1962 he received an honorary doctorate. He died of bladder cancer on May 29, 1965 at the age of 82 .

In an article from September 15, 2007 (p. 17), the Süddeutsche Zeitung writes :

“Even after 1945 Hallervorden never saw his actions as a mistake. In a letter to the President of the International Court of Justice in Nuremberg on February 11, 1946, it says: 'I have never had anything to do with the euthanasia procedure, I have always condemned it and, if I had been a psychiatrist at the time, I would have resigned my office, in any case I believed that I was morally no worse off than an anatomist who cares about the body of an executed person because he needs the freshest possible examination material. "

Hallervordens test samples, including the brains, were used in the brain research institute in Frankfurt for research. They were only buried in a cemetery in Munich in 1990.

today

Between 1939 and 1944, 1179 brains were examined in the departments of Hallervorden and Spatz. In 2000, Jürgen Peiffer came to the conclusion that 707 brains definitely or probably came from victims of Nazi euthanasia .

From April 2000, Carola Sachse was head of the Max Planck Society's research program on the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism . The historian says of the late confrontation with the past:

“Some feared for the reputation [...] This is especially true when the professional connections of a Julius Hallervorden or Hugo Spatz to the euthanasia murders were discussed; both worked as neuroscientists in the Max Planck Society until 1956 and 1960. The conviction that society is better off in the international public when it unconditionally grapples with its past instead of keeping silent about it has only recently been gaining ground. "

On May 10, 2017, the Justus Liebig University in Giessen announced that it would posthumously revoke Hallervorden's honorary doctorate from the university. This step is considered long overdue, since Hallervordens involvement in euthanasia is historically clearly documented (see above).

Fonts

  • Collection of section reports and some medical histories. Photos and correspondence (1933–1944).

See also

literature

  • Heinz Faulstich : Death from hunger in psychiatry 1914–1949. With a topography of Nazi psychiatry. Lambertus, Freiburg im Breisgau 1998, ISBN 3-7841-0987-X , p. 582.
  • Ernst Klee : Medical criminals spared. Professors Heinze and Hallervorden. In: Dachauer Hefte. 13, 1997, ISSN  0257-9472 , pp. 143-152.
  • Hans-Peter Kröner: From Racial Hygiene to Human Genetics. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics after the war. G. Fischer, Stuttgart et al. 1998, ISBN 3-437-21228-1 ( Medicine in History and Culture 20), (At the same time: Münster, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 1995).
  • Heinz Wässle : A Collection of Brain Sections of “Euthanasia” Victims: The Series H of Julius Hallervorden , in: Endeavor, Volume 41, Issue 4, December 2017, Pages 166–175 DOI: 10.1016 / j.endeavor.2017.06.001
  • Carola Sachse , Benoit Massin: Life sciences research at Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and the crimes of the Nazi regime . Information about the current state of knowledge. Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Berlin 2000 ( research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism 3, ISSN  1616-380X ).
  • Jürgen Peiffer : Brain Research in the Twilight. Examples of seducible science from the time of National Socialism. Julius Hallervorden - H.-J. Scherer - Berthold Ostertag. Matthiesen, Husum 1997, ISBN 3-7868-4079-2 ( Treatises on the history of medicine and natural sciences 79).
  • Jürgen Peiffer: Neuropathological research on "euthanasia" victims in two Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. In: Doris Kaufmann (Ed.): History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism. Inventory and prospects for research. Volume 2. Wallstein, Göttingen 2000, ISBN 3-89244-423-4 , pp. 667-698 ( History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism 1, 2).
  • Götz Aly : The burdened. "Euthanasia" 1939–1945. A history of society . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-000429-1 .
  • Jürgen Dahlkamp: Contemporary history: deep idiots . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 2003 ( online - 27 October 2003 ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Source: Max Planck Society ID: 62278.0, archive on the history of the Max Planck Society, inventory overview: III. Department
  2. ↑ ZDF report ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , heute.de.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.heute.de
  3. ^ Disease names used by Nazi doctors
  4. ^ Association of NBIA victims and their families , page accessed January 2007.
  5. ↑ a b c d e Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd updated edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 221.
  6. ^ A b c d e f Hans-Walter Schmuhl: Medicine in the Nazi era: brain research and the murder of the sick . In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt . Volume 98, Issue 19, May 11, 2001, Page A-1240 / B-1058 / C-988.
  7. ↑ a b USHMM United State Holocaust Memorial Museum ( Memento of the original from October 3, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , ushmm.org.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ushmm.org
  8. ↑ Jürgen Peiffer: Brain research in the twilight: Examples of seductible science from the time of National Socialism. Julius Hallervorden - HJ Scherer - Berthold Ostertag. Matthiesen, Husum 1997, p. 37.
  9. ↑ Federal Archives [hereinafter: BA] Berlin, 4991 - old R 21 - 11065.
  10. ↑ interesting in terms of National Socialism and its racial hygiene
  11. ↑ Four-week training course ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), zeitstrahl.bildung-lsa.de.
  12. ↑ In addition, during the course of this summer, I have been able to dissect 500 brains from feeble-minded individuals, and to prepare them for examination. In: Science . quoted according to humanitas-international.org ( memento of the original from October 31, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.humanitas-international.org
  13. ↑ memo Hallervorden, BA Berlin, R 96I / 2.
  14. ↑ Hans-Walter Schmuhl : Brain research and the murder of the sick. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research 1937-1940. Issue, state of research and scope of interpretation . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , issue 4/2002, Oldenbourg, Munich 2002, ISSN 0042-5702, p. 605 ( PDF )
  15. ^ Jürgen Peiffer: The prosecution of the Brandenburg state institutions and their involvement in the killing campaigns . In: In: Kristina Hübener (Hrsg.): Brandenburg sanatoriums and nursing homes in the Nazi era (= series of publications on the medical history of the state of Brandenburg. 3). Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-89809-301-8 , p. 167
  16. ↑ a b giessener-allgemeine.de: Research in the Nazi era: University of Giessen revokes honorary doctorate. May 10, 2017. Retrieved May 12, 2017 .
  17. ^ Hugo Spatz: Julius Hallervorden (1882-1965) . News from the Giessen University Society, Schmitz Verlag, Giessen 1966.
  18. ^ Jürgen Peiffer: Neuropathological research on "euthanasia" victims in two Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. In: D. Kaufmann (ed.): History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism. Inventory and prospects for research. Wallstein, Göttingen 2000, pp. 667-698.
  19. ↑ Interview. In: Ärzte Zeitung , June 7, 2001.
personal data
SURNAME Hallervorden, Julius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor and neuroscientist
DATE OF BIRTH October 21, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Allenberg , Wehlau district , East Prussia
DATE OF DEATH May 29, 1965
Place of death Frankfurt am Main