Karl Haedenkamp

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Karl Haedenkamp (1909)

Karl Haedenkamp (born February 26, 1889 in Hamm , † July 13, 1955 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen ) was a German medic , politician ( DNVP , NSDAP ) and naval officer .

Live and act

As the son of an architect, Haedenkamp attended primary school and the royal high school in Hammonense , where he graduated from high school in 1909. He then studied law and history for one semester , then medicine at the University of Leipzig . In 1909 he became active in the Corps Lusatia Leipzig , where he fought 23 courses and to which he belonged for his entire life. As an inactive , he moved to the University of Rostock in 1911 . He was the last "emperor" of the Bützower Hoftag . He returned to Leipzig in 1912/13 and took the state examination in Rostock in 1914.

marine

Approved as a doctor , he joined the medical service of the Imperial Navy in the summer of the same year at the beginning of the First World War . He fought in the Marine Corps Flanders and experienced the Skagerrak Battle as a ship's doctor on SMS Frederick the Great . In 1917 he was a ship's doctor on the U-cruiser SM U 157 . When he left the Navy in December 1918 with the rank of senior assistant doctor , he was the bearer of the Iron Cross of both classes and the U-Boat Front Badge.

Weimar Republic

Karl Haedenkamp (in the Reichstag Handbook 1925)

From 1919 to 1922 Haedenkamp worked as a general practitioner and obstetrician in Obervellmar near Kassel . In the same year Haedenkamp married for the first time. He also joined the German National People's Party (DNVP) at this time . In 1922 he became General Secretary of the Association of Doctors in Germany . A year later, in 1923, Haedenkamp also took over the editorial office (editor-in-chief) of the association body of doctors in Germany, the Ärztliche Mitteilungen , which he was to exercise until 1939.

In the Reichstag election in December 1924 , Haedenkamp entered the second Reichstag (Weimar Republic) on the DNVP's proposal for the Reichstag , to which he was a member until the 1928 Reichstag election . During his time as a Member of Parliament, Haedenkamp was particularly committed to the interests of the German medical profession. In parliament he stood out above all as a rapporteur during the legislative process for the so-called Sex Diseases Act of 1927. In addition, Hadenkamp stood out in the Reichstag, as the SPD Reichstag deputy Julius Moses repeatedly emphasized, due to his anti-Semitic attacks. After 1933 Haedenkamp used his newfound position of power to ruin Moses as both a politician and a doctor. Rhetorically, he used the old rivalry when he justified the “purge” of the medical profession after 1933 with the statement, among other things, that “the seeds” “that had been sown by those around Moses” had to be removed.

After 1928 Haedenkamp concentrated again on his work in the Hartmannbund . From 1929 he acted as a permanent representative of the leading associations of the German medical profession. From 1930 to 1933 he campaigned in particular for the rapprochement between the Hartmannbund and the National Socialist Medical Association (NSDÄB), whose managing director he was from 1933.

time of the nationalsocialism

Haedenkamp welcomed the day of Potsdam and the victory of the NSDAP in the Reichstag elections in March 1933 with the verdict that "[the] times of dishonor and uncleanliness [...] [finally] are over" and the nation is finally "to ethnic consciousness awakened ". Haedenkamp said in a similar way: “A new world is breaking out of the lap of time. Today it no longer depends on the individual. The doctor's stand is unified and closed. We will not let the Führer down! ” And:“ The defeated party state would never have given the doctor what the doctor is. ”He continued his work in the medical profession until 1939. In addition to the editing of the Ärztliche Mitteilungen , which have now been renamed Deutsches Ärzteblatt , which he retained until 1939 and now campaigned against "parliamentarianism, democracy and materialism", Haedenkamp was appointed by Reichsärzteführer Gerhard Wagner to be responsible for monitoring the elimination of Jewish and socialist groups Doctors appointed. In this capacity he played a key role in the harmonization and Aryanization of the German health system in the first years of Nazi rule, that is, in the ousting of Jewish doctors from their profession as well as from the medical professional representation ("The principle applies in the future, that Germans are only treated by German doctors. ”), a process that Haedenkamp glorified at the time as reparation to“ the pioneers of the national uprising ”. The number of Jewish and socialist doctors, in whose elimination Haedenkamp was involved, is put at around 6,000. In a birthday greeting to Haedenkamp, the Deutsches Ärzteblatt also praised Haedenkamp's important contribution "to the elimination of Jewish and Marxist doctors from the medical practice". He also propagated the need for “ruthless extermination” to “gypsies”, which he justified by stating that they should be attributed to the “characteristically defective elements of the population”.

Haedenkamp joined the NSDAP in December 1934 - as he later claimed, under pressure from Wagner, and only after he had objected to this step in writing. Klee, on the other hand, notes that Haedenkamp only became a member of the NSDAP because of Rudolf Hess's intervention , as there was a freeze on people joining the party at that time . He also became a member of the SA . In addition, Haedenkamp, ​​who also worked in the Reich Ministry of Labor , later became a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS).

The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring July 14, 1933 evaluated Haedenkamp as a "turning point not only in health care, but throughout our state policy." He particularly praised the encroachment on the personal self-determination of the individual in favor of the realization of "one of the most urgent practical tasks of active race care", which will result in the "advancement of our people" by providing "the prerequisites for the eradication of hereditary diseases" create. He warned his colleagues that this "beginning [...] was the [necessary] basis for all further measures of state race care" . It is the "duty of every German doctor to work selflessly in the fulfillment of the tasks that are now approaching him." He also insisted that anyone who tries to evade the obligation to report laid down in the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Offspring" should do one Guilty of professional misconduct. He also supported the Führer principle and the Sterilization Act.

From 1936 Haedenkamp became head of the foreign department of the Reich Chamber of Physicians and foreign officer of the Reichsärzteführer. In this capacity, he encouraged, among other things, the "exchange of German-blooded doctors from abroad" for foreign -blooded doctors living in Germany.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Haedenkamp resigned from the management of the Medical Association due to personal differences with the new Reichsärzteführer Leonardo Conti , Wagner's successor, in order to return to the Navy as a medical officer . As a condition for his departure from the Chamber, he could, however, stipulate that he would be compensated by an office in a German "colony" after the war. As naval chief officer of the reserve , he became chief physician of the naval hospital in Reval in 1942 . Awarded the repeat clasps for both iron crosses, the mine search badge and the destroyer badge, Haedenkamp experienced the end of the war as a squadron doctor. R.

post war period

Immediately after the end of the war, which he experienced in Schleswig , Haedenkamp began to take part in the reconstruction of the medical profession in West Germany . Affidavits from colleagues attested that he had a negative attitude towards National Socialism, so that he could resume his old work without hindrance. As early as the summer of 1945, he submitted proposals to the medical associations for the reorganization of the organization and the Reichsärzteordnung “to adapt to today's conditions” and stated that, above all, the most uniform possible structuring of medical law in the individual parts of the country should be sought in order to avoid obstacles for the To clear the merging of medical bodies.

In 1946 he became managing director of the Northwest German Medical Association Committee. A year later he took over the same position at the working group of the West German Medical Chambers. Most recently he held office from 1949 to 1955 as executive chairman of the presidium of the German Medical Association . Together with Ludwig Sievers and a few others, Haedenkamp played a decisive role in ensuring that traditional medical self-administration was not affected by the three western occupying powers and that the medical profession again had an influential interest group soon after the lost war.

Haedenkamp justified his remaining in the leadership of the Hartmannbund during the Nazi era with the fact that under Wagner he worked “objectively” “and not only did not deny the traditional goals of professional medical policy , but enforced their legal realization”.

In the last years of his life, Haedenkamp received numerous awards for his achievements in the field of medical professional representation: At the German Medical Association in 1954, he was awarded the Paracelsus Medal , the highest distinction of the German medical profession. In the same year he received the Great Federal Cross of Merit .

Evaluation after 1956

At the instigation of the Medical Association, the street on which the German Medical Association had recently built the Federal Medical Center, in which the Medical Association and the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians had their seat, was named by the Cologne City Council in Karl-Haedenkamp-Straße.

1986, thirty years after Haedenkamp's death, research by the Ulm medical historian Walter Wuttke and the traveling exhibition “Healing and Destroying under National Socialism” made a broader public aware of Haedenkamp's career before 1945. In the same year, the district council of Cologne-Lindenthal unanimously accepted a motion from the SPD parliamentary group in the district assembly calling for Haedenkamp-Strasse to be renamed Herbert-Lewin-Strasse. This renaming was intended to honor the Cologne doctor and Holocaust survivor Herbert Lewin . The application followed a suggestion by the Cologne Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, which considered it more appropriate to name a Cologne street after an opponent rather than a supporter of the Nazi system. Hilmar Ankerstein, the chairman of the Christian-Jüdische Gesellschaft, summarized the view of the proponents of the renaming on the occasion of the unveiling of the new street sign with the words: “ The suggestion was therefore to delete the name of a beneficiary and that of an upright and benevolent one Hippocrates' oath, loyal to the public, to bring the following doctor fully into the public eye: Herbert Lewin. “In parts of the Cologne population, and especially in the medical association, there had been strong resistance to the renaming: the medical association insisted that Haedenkamp was not a National Socialist, but rather that he fought“ like a lion ”against the Nazi system and I also protected some Jewish colleagues. Incidentally, the street name only honored an honorable professional representative.

Walter Wuttke takes Haedenkamp into court a little milder. He emphasizes that Haedenkamp should not be put on a par with the doctors who carried out the human experiments in the concentration camps or with the doctors who implemented the " euthanasia " program. Haedenkamp is much more a "prime example of the voluntary delivery of everyday medicine to the National Socialists."

Fonts (selection)

  • For the forensic assessment of psychopathic limit states . Rostock 1916. (Dissertation)
  • The health policy of the empire and the doctors . Leipzig 1928.
  • The reorganization of the German social insurance . Munich 1937.
  • Medical law , 1937.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1930, 93 , 793
  2. ↑ Entry in the Rostock matriculation portal , winter semester 1913/14, No. 226
  3. ↑ a b Wolfgang U. Eckart: History of Medicine , p. 262.
  4. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 , p. 216.
  5. ↑ a b Liberating Act . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1981, pp. 170 ( online ).
  6. ↑ Martin Doehlemann: Who Owns the University? , P. 188.
  7. ^ Andreas Frewer: Medicine and Morals in the Weimar Republic and National Socialism , p. 189.
  8. ↑ Michael R. Hayse: Recasting West German Elites , p. 4.
  9. ↑ Thomas Gerst: Medical professional organization and professional politics in Germany 1945–1955 , p. 28.
  10. ↑ a b c Protests from the medical center . In: Die Zeit , May 30, 1986.
personal data
SURNAME Haedenkamp, ​​Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German medic and medical officer, politician (DNVP, NSDAP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH February 26, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamm
DATE OF DEATH July 13, 1955
Place of death Garmisch-Partenkirchen