Lucie Adelsberger

Lucie Adelsberger (born April 12, 1895 in Nuremberg ; died November 2, 1971 in New York ) was a German specialist in pediatrics and internal medicine with a research focus on allergology and a survivor of the Holocaust . Because of her Jewish origins , she was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp , where she worked as a prisoner doctor in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp .

Life

Lucie Adelsberger, daughter of the Nuremberg wine merchant Isidor Adelsberger and his wife Rosa, née Lehmann, had a younger sister and a younger brother. She attended the town's secondary school for nine years and then went to the “Privat-Real-Gymnasium Dr. Uhlemayr ”. From 1914 she began studying medicine at the University of Nuremberg , which she completed in 1919 at the University of Erlangen . She then worked as an assistant doctor in the Cnopf'schen Children's Hospital (today Cnopf'sche Children's Hospital ) in Nuremberg, where she also did research for her dissertation . She received her license to practice as a doctor in 1920 and in 1923 in Erlangen with her dissertation The Verdauungsleukocytose the infant to Dr. med. PhD . From 1921 to 1923 she worked in the children's department of the municipal hospital in Berlin-Friedrichshain , from 1924 and 1925 in the Berlin children's and orphan asylum, and from 1926 to 1927 as a consultancy for the child and infant welfare in Berlin-Wedding . From May 1925 she acted as a resident doctor and successfully completed her training as an internist (1925) and pediatrician (1926). In addition, Adelsberger worked as a research assistant at the Berlin Robert Koch Institute (RKI) from November 1927, where, together with the serologist Hans Munter, she put her research focus on allergology in the "Observatory for Hypersensitivity Reactions". By December 1930 she had examined around 1,000 patients as part of her allergy research at the RKI and her own practice. She was the author of numerous scientific publications, a member of the German Society for Pediatrics and an active participant in several medical congresses.

time of the nationalsocialism

After the seizure of power by the Nazis ended because of their Jewish origins already on 31 March 1933 her employment at the Robert Koch Institute and in 1935 its membership in the German Society for Pediatrics. Until 1938 she worked as a resident doctor in her own practice, which she had to close at the end of September 1938. She then moved several times within Berlin, tried unsuccessfully to reopen a practice, and then finally worked as a nurse in Charlottenburg. After a ten-day stay in the USA at Harvard University for academic purposes, however, she returned to Berlin in the early autumn of 1938. In 1939 she tried unsuccessfully to emigrate to the USA with her mother in need of care . On May 6, 1943, her mother had died a few months earlier, Adelsberger was arrested and sent to the assembly camp on Grosse Hamburger Strasse. From there she was deported on May 17, 1943 with the 38th Osttransport to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she arrived on May 19, 1943. Adelsberger received prisoner number 45,171 in Auschwitz and was employed as a prisoner doctor in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the gypsy and women's camps. She later also reported on the living conditions of the children in the gypsy camp :

“Like adults, the children were only skin and bones without muscles and fat, and thin parchment-like skin chafed through the hard edges of the skeleton (...). But the plight of these worms cut even more to the heart. Perhaps because the faces had lost everything childlike and looked out of hollow eyes with senile features (...). Scabies covered the undernourished body from top to bottom and deprived it of its last strength. The mouth was eaten away by noma ulcers that dug into the depths, hollowed out the jaws and perforated the cheeks like cancer (...). Because of hunger and thirst, cold and pain, the children could not rest even at night. Her moans swelled like a hurricane and echoed throughout the block. "

After the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, she ended up on a death march through several stations to the Ravensbrück concentration camp . After laying in the satellite camp Neustadt-Glewe , she was there on May 2, 1945 US troops freed .

post war period

Adelsberger came to Amsterdam as a displaced person via the British Red Cross , but as a stateless person there was no work permit. Between 1945 and 1946 she wrote the Auschwitz script . A factual report. which was first published in a revised version in 1956. In March 1946 she published an article in The Lancet about the medical conditions in Auschwitz. In October 1946 she emigrated from the Netherlands to New York. There she worked at the Montefiore Hospital, Country Sanatorium, Bedford Hills from 1947 to 1949, received her Medical License in 1949 (comparable to the German license) and from August 1949 worked again as a scientist at the Montefiore Hospital. In addition, she published again in the field of medicine and ran a private practice specializing in allergology to finance her research activities. Adelsberger had a serious heart attack in 1952 and she also suffered from depression . In June 1964 she was diagnosed with cancer. On November 2, 1971, she died of breast cancer .

Works

• Eduard Seidler (ed.): Auschwitz: A factual report; the legacy of the sacrifices for us Jews and for all human beings. Bonn: Bouvier 2001 ISBN 978-3-416-02986-5 , 2nd edition 2005

literature

• Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 .
• Hermann Langbein : People in Auschwitz . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Nuremberg 1980, ISBN 3-548-33014-2 .
• Christine von Oertzen: Review of the emigration: The academics Erna Barschak (1888–1958), Susanne Engelmann (1885–1963?) And Lucie Adelsberger (1895–1971) , in: Angelika Schaser (Ed.): Memories cartels. For the construction of biographies after 1945 . Bochum 2003, pp. 169-195.
• Eduard Seidler : Jewish paediatricians 1933–1945. Entrechtet / Geflhen / Ermordet , S. Karger-Verlag, Basel 2007, ISBN 978-3-8055-8284-1 .
• Berlin's Memorial Book of the Jewish Victims of National Socialism, 1995, p. 19.
• Leo Baeck Institute / AR 10089, Lucie Adelsberger collection

Web links

• Literature by and about Lucie Adelsberger in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lucie Adelsberger Papers
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Eduard Seidler : Jewish paediatricians 1933-1945 - Disenfranchised / Fled / Murdered , p. 130 f.
3. ↑ Wolfram Fischer (Ed.): Exodus of Sciences from Berlin: Questions, results, desiderata, developments before and after 1933. Research report / Academy of Sciences in Berlin, de Gruyter, Berlin; New York: 1994, ISBN 3-11-013945-6 , pp. 401f.
4. ^ Paul Saenger: Jewish Pediatricians in Nazi Germany: Victims of Persecution (pdf)  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , in: IMAJ: Volume 8, May 2006, pp. 325–327  
5. ↑ Lucie Adelsberger on the life of the children in the Birkenau gypsy camp , quoted in: Hermann Langbein: Menschen in Auschwitz , 1980, pp. 271f.
6. ↑ Adelsberger (lit.), p. 184
7. ↑ Heidrun Kämper: The Debt Discourse in the Early Post-War Period - A Contribution to the History of the Linguistic Change after 1945. , Gruyter, 2005, ISBN 9783110188554 , p. 31
   H. Schott: Medicine in National Socialism-Auschwitz (pdf) , in: Deutsches Ärzteblatt , Vintage. 103, issue 18 of May 5, 2006, A 1232
8. ↑ Lucie Adelsberger: Medical Observations in Auschwitz Concentration Camps , in: The Lancet of March 9, 1946, pp. 317-319
9. ^ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 14