Ludwig Stumpfegger

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Ludwig Stumpfegger (born July 11, 1910 in Munich , † May 2, 1945 in Berlin ) was a German surgeon and, after Theo Morell, the second personal physician of Adolf Hitler .

Life

Stumpfegger's father was a postal secretary. After attending school, Ludwig Stumpfegger began studying medicine in Munich in 1930 , where he received his doctorate on August 11, 1937. med. PhD . During his studies, after the handover of power to the National Socialists , he joined the SS on June 2, 1933 (SS-No. 83.668), and on April 20, 1943 he held the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer of the reserve in the Waffen-SS . On May 1, 1935, he also became a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 3.616.119). From 1936 he worked as an assistant doctor under Karl Gebhardt in the Hohenlychen sanatorium . First as a convalescent home for TBC built -Kranke, the clinic from 1933 was mainly used for the treatment of labor and sports accidents.

The ski instructor and successful fistball player (German championship) belonged to the medical team under Gebhardt in 1936, which was responsible for the medical care of the Olympic Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin . From 1939 the Hohenlychen Clinic was subordinated to the SS and partially converted into a hospital. From November 1939 to April 1940, Stumpfegger served in the SS-VT regiment and was the chief doctor of the surgical department in the SS hospital in Berlin. He then represented Gebhardt as Heinrich Himmler's attending physician and was appointed leader of the surgeon group at the command staff of the Reichsführer SS in September 1941 .

During the Second World War, under the leadership of Gebhardt, Fritz Fischer and Herta Oberheuser in Hohenlychen, he took part in human experiments (war surgery experiments in the field of transplant surgery ), mainly on Polish women from the Ravensbrück concentration camp . Stumpfegger personally transplanted bones and muscles and used these human experiments for his habilitation in autumn 1944 at the Medical Faculty of the University of Berlin . The title of his habilitation thesis was: The Free Autoplastic Bone Transplantation in Restorative Surgery of the Limbs .

After Karl Brandt was disempowered , he was posted on October 9, 1944 at Himmler's suggestion as an attending physician to the staff of the Reich Chancellor ( Führer headquarters Wolfsschanze near Rastenburg ). He then stayed in the Führerbunker in Berlin until May 1, 1945 , where Hitler promoted him to SS-Standartenführer and colonel of the police on April 20, 1945 .

According to unconfirmed information, he is said to have killed Magda Goebbels ' children with hydrogen cyanide at the request . During the interrogation by the Soviets on May 7, 1945, the SS dentist Helmut Kunz stated that Magda Goebbels had poisoned the children and that he was merely a witness to the crime. On May 19, 1945, he corrected his statement to the effect that Stumpfegger had participated in the killing of the children. On the evening of May 1, 1945, he initially injected the children with morphine , but Magda Goebbels was not able to kill her children. He then had to fetch Ludwig Stumpfegger, who went into the children's room with Magda Goebbels.

On the afternoon of April 30, 1945 he was present next to Joseph Goebbels , the head of the NSDAP party chancellery Martin Bormann , Hitler 's personal servant Heinz Linge , Hitler's driver Erich Kempka , Hitler's personal SS adjutant Otto Günsch and some members of the Führer Accompanying Command when in the garden of Reich Chancellery the corpses of Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva , b. Brown, doused with gasoline and burned.

Ludwig Stumpfegger committed suicide on May 2, 1945 with a hydrogen cyanide poison capsule together with Martin Bormann. Before that, both had tried to break through with other inmates of the Führerbunker from the highly competitive city center of Berlin. He and Bormann were allegedly separated from the escape group. The two are said to have committed suicide at Lehrter Bahnhof , exhausted and demoralized . The Reich Youth Leader Artur Axmann stated at later interrogations that he and his adjutant Günter Weltzin had seen the bodies of Stumpfegger and Bormann there. On 7./8. December 1972 two skeletons were found during underground cable work by the post office. Upon closer examination, forensic doctors, dentists and anthropologists were able to assign them to Ludwig Stumpfegger and Martin Bormann. Splinters of glass from hydrocyanic acid vials were found between the teeth of both skulls. As one of four doctors from Hohenlychen, Stumpfegger should have been indicted alongside Karl Gebhardt, Fischer and Oberheuser in the Nuremberg doctors' trial . Ludwig Stumpfegger left a widow, Gertrud Stumpfegger (née Spengler). After both deaths, they were buried in a shared grave in Munich's north cemetery, where the grave is still located today.

Publications

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans-Joachim Neumann, Henrik Eberle: Was Hitler sick? A final finding. Bergisch Gladbach 2009, p. 105.
  2. ↑ Hans-Joachim Neumann, Henrik Eberle: Was Hitler sick? A final finding . Bergisch Gladbach 2009, p. 105 ff.
  3. ↑ Dominik Groß , Mathias Schmidt, Alexander Heit, Helmut Kunz and the murder of the Goebbels children , Zahnärztliche Mitteilungen, Issue 8/2020, pp. 72–74, April 16, 2020. Retrieved on May 1, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Stumpfegger, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physician, attending physician on the staff of the Reich Chancellor
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH May 2, 1945
Place of death Berlin