Ludwig Ascher

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Ludwig Ascher (born December 26, 1865 in Posen ; † May 24, 1942 in the Litzmannstadt ghetto ) was a German social hygienist who was a victim of the Holocaust .

Life

Memorial event in Frankfurt
Newspaper clipping, FR, August 1, 1945

Ascher came from a humble background; his ancestors were Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain in the 15th century. His father owned a shoe shop and a small shoe repair shop in Poznan. Ascher studied medicine in Berlin, Marburg and Munich and obtained his license to practice medicine in Leipzig in 1889 , where he received his doctorate in the same year ( appendicitis , unpublished). He was initially a general practitioner in Neuchâtel in West Prussia and then started a civil service career as a medical advisor in the public health system. He worked as a royal circle doctor in Bomst and Königsberg and as a district doctor in Hamm, Berlin and Harburg. During the First World War he was a police doctor in German-occupied Liège and a city doctor in Antwerp . In 1918 he settled in Frankfurt am Main . In addition to his work as a district doctor for the Frankfurt-Nord district, he had his own practice and founded the Social Hygiene Investigation Office in Frankfurt, which he took over as head. From 1920 he held lectures in social hygiene and work physiology at the University of Frankfurt as part of a teaching assignment . After his retirement in 1931, he kept his teaching post at the university, which he returned on January 18, 1933 at his own request, the exact circumstances are not known. When the National Socialists came to power, the medical advisor Ascher, who had been highly regarded in Frankfurt up to that point, was gradually disenfranchised. He became increasingly involved in the liberal Jewish community in Frankfurt am Main, of which he became chairman in 1939/40. In addition, since December 1938 he was a member of the founding board of the forcibly established Reich Association of Jews in Germany , district office Hessen-Nassau. In September 1941, Ascher had to move into one of the so-called Frankfurt “ghetto houses” (Gaußstrasse 14), where Jews were concentrated before their deportation . On October 19, 1941, at the age of 76, he was deported to the Litzmannstadt ghetto as part of the first Frankfurt deportations. He died there on May 24, 1942, probably of malnutrition and typhus .

Ascher published numerous studies in the field of health care and social hygiene, including the harmful effects of smoke on the respiratory system and the living conditions of workers in rural areas. Before 1933 he was recognized as an important statistician in the field of social medicine and occupational physiology.

On January 3, 1900, he married Johanna Strauss (1876–1940) in Frankfurt. The Aschers had two daughters, Mathilde (born November 1, 1900, emigrated to Palestine in 1936 ) and Marie Anna (born March 13, 1904–1932; her husband emigrated to the USA with their daughter in 1937).

A stumbling block in Liebigstrasse reminds of Ludwig Ascher . 27c and a memorial stone on Neuer Börneplatz in Frankfurt am Main.

literature

  • Udo Benzenhöfer : The University Medicine in Frankfurt am Main from 1914 to 2014. Münster 2014, p. 112.
  • Gine Elsner : Persecuted, driven away and forgotten. Three Jewish social hygienists from Frankfurt am Main: Ludwig Ascher - Wilhelm Hanauer - Ernst Simonson. VSA, Hamburg 2017.
  • Renate Hebauf: Frankfurt am Main, Gaußstr. 14, A house and its Jewish residents between 1941 and 1945. In: Monica Kingreen (Ed.): After the Kristallnacht. Frankfurt 1999, pp. 289-317.
  • Renate Heuer , Siegbert Wolf (ed.): The Jews of the Frankfurt University . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-593-35502-7 , p. 21st f .

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