Karl Horneck

Karl Georg Horneck (born July 5, 1894 in Graz-St. Leonhard ; † April 23, 1974 in Rodalben , Pfalz ) was an Austrian doctor and racial hygienist . During the Second World War he carried out criminal human experiments on "colored" prisoners of war in order to develop a serological race test.

Life

Before 1936

Horneck took part in the First World War with the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger and took part in the Carinthian defensive battle in 1919 . He obtained his doctorate in 1920. med. and worked between 1920 and 1924 as an assistant doctor at various Austrian hospitals. In 1924 he settled as a general practitioner in Feldbach and in 1927 also took over the management of the small military hospital that was maintained during the construction of the Feldbach – Bad Gleichenberg regional railway .

In 1927 Horneck joined the Styrian Homeland Security and the Austrian National Socialists and became an SA storm doctor. In 1931 he found a job at the Medical Clinic of the University of Graz , but since 1932 as an unpaid assistant. In 1933 and 1934 Horneck applied for various positions as a hospital or company doctor, but was apparently rejected because of his membership in the NSDAP . Max de Crinis campaigned for a promotion of Horneck in the German Reich , because he had difficulties at the Graz Medical Clinic because of his attitude.

Race hygienist in Koenigsberg

When Lothar Loeffler took over the race hygiene institute at the University of Königsberg in 1936 , he brought Horneck with him. Horneck became the medical director of the municipal advice center for genetic and race care at the Königsberg Polyclinic and senior physician at the Institute of Racial Biology at the University of Königsberg. He was not employed because of his academic qualifications, but for political reasons. Horneck received a research grant from the DFG and was habilitated in Königsberg in 1939 and appointed lecturer for human heredity and racial hygiene, although he had hardly published. The faculty gave him credit for his political past and practical experience.

When the Second World War broke out, Horneck was drafted into the Wehrmacht . As a medical officer in a Wehrmacht hospital, he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class for his work in Poland and in front of Dunkirk .

Human experiments during World War II

As a member of the Wehrmacht, Horneck continued to research. On the mediation of Loeffler, who was just moving to the University of Vienna , he went to see Werner Fischer , who was in charge of the serological department of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin . Fischer had already presented studies on serological racial differentiation in 1938. His method was similar to the serological detection of diseases such as typhoid . Horneck offered to carry out control experiments to confirm Fischer's theses. The quick German success in the western campaign opened up unimagined possibilities for him. He collected blood samples from prisoners of war members of the French colonial troops, from two Moroccans , an " Annamite " and a " Senegal Negro ". Horneck examined these and other blood samples while on vacation in the serological-bacteriological laboratory of the Hospice Général du Havre . He made blood sera and injected the sera into rabbits to make them develop antibodies . He obtained antiserum from her blood , which he in turn allowed to react with the human sera ( precipitin test ). He concluded from his observations that the determination of the protein content and the analysis of this protein are the indispensable prerequisites for a serological breed test.

At Fischer's urging, Horneck began human-to-human immunization experiments . According to his own statements, he carried out the first experiments on himself. This is doubted by the historian Hans-Walter Schmuhl , since Horneck, as an experienced general practitioner, must have known the risks of these experiments.

Due to his relocation to the Eastern Front , Horneck had to break off his experiments in 1941. In 1943 he published an essay on his research. Shortly before, Loeffler had applied for material aid to the DFG in order to allow Horneck to continue his research. In this context, Fischer agreed to give Horneck a job at his institute. Schmuhl suspects that Loeffler wanted to join a scientifically and politically promising field of research, while Fischer hoped to benefit from Loeffler's far-reaching relationships in the Nazi power apparatus. Fischer and Günther Just wrote the reports on Horneck's research project, Loeffler let his connections with the DFG play out and de Crinis served as a personal reference. In 1942, the Reich Research Council approved grants of RM 2,600.00 .

In January 1943 Horneck resumed his research. At that time he was working in the special colonial medical hospital in St. Médard near Bordeaux . He now wanted to find out whether the differently strong precipitin reactions of human blood sera from members of different “races” would be influenced by factors such as disease. This should first be tested on members of very different “races” such as whites and blacks. Horneck therefore first checked the precipitation reactions of the sera of sick and healthy blacks and whites as a control group. He suggested that differences in the optimum flocculation of the samples could only be due to racial differences between whites and blacks.

Horneck then resumed the immunization experiments on humans. Black people of different blood groups were initially blood drawn in order to obtain a "species serum" before they were injected intravenously with a "white serum " . Twenty-four hours later, and again a week later, Horneck took another blood test. He sent some of the serums to Fischer in Berlin for check-ups.

With these experiments on prisoners of war, Horneck carried out criminal human experiments in which he exposed his victims to serious health risks. When injecting foreign serums, there was a risk of allergic shock , hemolysis , intravascular coagulation disorder and thromboembolism . Not only Fischer and Loeffler showed keen interest in the experiments; Ernst Rodenwaldt personally visited Horneck in the colonial hospital.

In the course of 1943 Horneck was transferred to Italy , which initially put a stop to his urge to research. In November 1943 he announced that he had received a command through which he could continue his scientific work. In February 1944 he applied for further material resources and announced in November 1944 that he had finished the work “On the possibility of serological racial differentiation”, but that he wanted to discuss it with Fischer before it was published. This is the last information about the project, which, according to Schmuhl, probably fizzled out.

Schmuhl compares the research project run by Fischer and Horneck with a competing project, for which Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics had Josef Mengele send blood samples from the Auschwitz concentration camp . A major difference between the projects is that Verschuer referred explicitly to Abderhalden's reaction.

In February 1945 Horneck was appointed associate professor at the University of Königsberg. Nothing is known about his whereabouts after the end of the war.

Publications

• On the evidence of serological differences in human races. In: Journal of Human Heredity and Constitutional Science . 26, pp. 309-319 (1942).

literature

• Hans-Walter Schmuhl: Crossing borders. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927–1945 . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-799-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Death register of the Rodalben registry office No. 82/1974.
2. ^ Ernst Klee: German Medicine in the Third Reich. German careers before and after 1945 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt / Main 2001, p. 163.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Schmuhl, Grenzüberreitungen , p. 512.
4. ↑ Schmuhl: Border Crossing , p. 514.
5. ↑ Schmuhl, Border Crossing , pp. 516f.
6. ↑ ^{a b} Schmuhl, Grenzüberreitungen , p. 519.
7. ↑ Schmuhl, Grenzüberreitungen , pp. 520-522.