Miron Kantorowicz

Miron Kantorowicz (from 1945 Myron Kantorowicz Gordon) (born July 18, 1895 in Minsk , † after 1977) was a Russian-German-American social hygienist .

Life and activity

From 1915 to 1918 Kantorowicz studied law at the Universities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. After the Russian October Revolution he emigrated to Germany, where he studied political science, history and philosophy from 1919 to 1923 and then from 1923 to 1926 medicine at the Berlin University. In 1930 he received his doctorate from the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Berlin.

From the winter semester of 1921/1922 he regularly took part in social hygiene exercises with Alfred Grotjahn . From 1929 to 1933 he worked as a research assistant and librarian at the Social Hygiene Seminar at the Friedrich Wilhelms University.

A few weeks after the National Socialists came to power , Kantorowicz was given a leave of absence from his work at the Social Hygiene Seminar on May 13, 1933 due to his Jewish descent at the instigation of the Ministry of Science, Art and Education. In July, his position as a research assistant was transferred to the previous secretary and librarian from Franz Schütz , Ilse Millenet. A few months later, the social hygiene seminar was converted into a so-called race hygiene seminar.

In 1934 Kantorowicz emigrated to Great Britain after trying in vain for other activities in Berlin. There he worked on a scholarship as a statistician at the Jewish Health Organization and at the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine . His main research interests in the following four years were medical statistics and epidemiology.

In 1938 Kantorowicz went to the United States, where he became a Research Fellow at the Milbank Memorial Fund in New York in 1940 . He later became a Research Fellow at the University of Washington. During the Second World War he turned, u. a. Using his Russian language skills, he did translation work and studies on population-political and epidemiological issues in the Soviet Union.

In Germany he was asserted as an enemy of the state - apparently in ignorance of his relocation to the United States - in the spring of 1940 by the Reich Security Main Office on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who were automatically and in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the German Wehrmacht should be arrested as a matter of priority.

In 1945 Kantorowicz was naturalized in the United States and changed his name to Miron Kantorowicz Gordon. In the same year he became a research analyst at the US State Department , in which capacity he headed the Department's Population Division. In 1946 he moved to the Preventive Medicine Division of the Surgeon General's office in the US Army. From 1954 to 1963 he headed the Army's Eurasian Medical Information Department. In 1963 he retired.

Fonts

• Tuberculosis mortality and its social causes , 1930.
• Alfred Grotjahn as theoretician of reproductive hygiene , in: Archiv für Frauenkunde 17 (1931), pp. 289–294.
• Estimate of the Jewish Population of London in 1929-1933 , 1936.
• The foundation of social hygiene as a science , in: Erna Lesky (Ed.): Social medicine. Development and Self- Understanding, Darmstadt 1977, pp. 250–265.

literature

• Displaced German Scholars: A Guide to Academics in Peril in Nazi Germany , 1936.
• Wolfram Fischer Exodus of Sciences from Berlin Questions - Results - Desiderata: Development before and after 1933 , Berlin 1994, p. 503f.
• Mark Tols: For Him London was a Fruitful Transitory Stop: The Migrant's Destiny of Miron Kantorowicz , in: Jewish Journal of Sociology , in: Jewish Journal of Sociology (London), 2014, Vol. 56, No. 1–2, pp. 99-117.
• Heinrich Weder: Social hygiene and pragmatic health policy in the Weimar Republic: using the example of the social and industrial hygienist Benno Chajes (1880–1938) , 2000, p. 419.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Miro Kantorowicz on the special wanted list GB at the Imperial War Museum