Otto Bickenbach

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Otto Bickenbach (born March 11, 1901 in Ruppichteroth in the Rhineland, † November 26, 1971 in Siegburg ) was a German internist and professor at the University of Strasbourg . He carried out poison gas tests on prisoners in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp .

biography

Bickenbach was born the son of a farmer. He finished his school days in Elberfeld in March 1919 with a secondary school diploma . He then belonged to the Lettow-Vorbeck Freikorps in Berlin and Hamburg . From 1920 to 1925 Bickenbach studied medicine at the Universities of Cologne , Marburg , Heidelberg and Munich . From 1920 to 1923 Bickenbach was a member of the Ehrhardt Freikorps. After completing his studies, Bickenbach was an assistant doctor in Munich at the 1st Medical University Clinic from 1928 to 1934.

time of the nationalsocialism

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, he was the founder of the National Socialist Company Cell Organization (NSBO) for the hospitals of the city of Munich. On May 1, 1933, Bickenbach became a member of the NSDAP and in October 1933 the SA . He was also the head of the "Lecturer" at the University of Munich. He joined the Nazi lecturers' association in 1939.

From April 1934, after Siegfried Thannhauser's discharge, Bickenbach was acting head of the Medical Clinic at the University of Freiburg for six months . According to contemporary witness reports, Bickenbach's administration there was "in the style of a cleansing commissioner who [...] polemicized against remaining employees of the Jew Thannhauser , whose continued presence on duty was intolerable." From October 1934 he was senior physician under Johannes Stein at the University of Heidelberg and deputy director of the Ludolf Krehl Clinic there. From 1937 to 1938 he cooperated with IG Farben . His habilitation took place in Heidelberg in 1938 with the text blood circulation and respiratory correlations as the basis of constitutional performance . In 1939, together with Hellmut Weese , Bickenbach researched phosgene poisoning . After animal experiments, Bickenbach found out that oral or intravenous administration of urotropin had a preventive effect against possible phosgene poisoning.

Second World War

At the end of August 1939, Bickenbach was drafted into the Wehrmacht . Bickenbach did his military service at the Medical Clinic Heidelberg as deputy hospital director. At the same time he carried out research on animals and lectures on the subject of "Pathology and therapy of warfare agent diseases" in Heidelberg.

From November 24, 1941, Bickenbach was associate professor at the University of Strasbourg. There he was director of the medical polyclinic and, together with Rudolf Fleischmann , a physicist, director of the research institute of the medical faculty.

Poison gas experiments on concentration camp inmates

In August 1943, a gas chamber for medical experiments on humans was put into operation in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp . From June to August 1944, after a series of experiments in the summer of 1943, Bickenbach and his assistant Helmut Rühl carried out poison gas experiments with phosgene in this gas chamber . More than 50 prisoners, mainly gypsies who were referred to as such at the time , who had been transferred from Auschwitz to Natzweiler-Struthof for medical experiments , were murdered in the course of these experiments.

After the end of the war

After the end of the war, Bickenbach was arrested on March 17, 1947 and transferred to France . During an interrogation, Bickenbach said that he had carried out the poison gas experiments “with consideration for Himmler's orders”, but that these experiments “ran counter to medical ethics”. A record of the Bickenbach interrogation was recorded as Doc. No. 3848 at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial used. In this document, Bickenbach said that he had been informed that "the people who were supposed to serve as guinea pigs had been sentenced to death on the basis of ordinary court decisions". Together with his colleague from Strasbourg, Eugen Haagen , he was sentenced to life-long forced labor by a French military court in Metz on December 24, 1952 for the "crime of using harmful substances and poisoning" . In January 1954 the judgment was overturned by a Paris military court. In another trial in May 1954 before a military court in Lyon , Bickenbach and Haagen were eventually sentenced to twenty years of forced labor. In the fall of 1955, both were released as part of an amnesty . Bickenbach then ran a doctor's practice in Siegburg as an internist. The professional court for health professions in Cologne came to the conclusion in 1966 that Bickenbach had not violated his professional duties by participating in the experiments in the concentration camps .

literature

  • Michael Grüttner : Biographical Lexicon on National Socialist Science Policy (= Studies on Science and University History. Volume 6). Synchron, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-935025-68-8 , pp. 23-24.
  • Ernst Klee : The personal lexicon for the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
  • Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. 3. Edition. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1997, ISBN 3-596-14906-1 .
  • Florian Schmaltz: Research on warfare agents under National Socialism. For cooperation between Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the military and industry . Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-880-9 .
  • Ralf Forsbach / Hans-Georg Hofer, internists in dictatorship and young democracy. The German Society for Internal Medicine 1933–1970, Berlin 2018, pp. 213–216.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d Florian Schmaltz: Warfare agent research in National Socialism. On the cooperation between Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the military and industry , Göttingen 2005, p. 521f.
  2. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 47f.
  3. ↑ a b Angelika Uhlmann: "Sport is the general practitioner at the sick camp of the German people". Wolfgang Kohlrausch (1888–1980) and the history of German sports medicine . (Dissertation, Freiburg 2004) < urn : nbn: de: bsz: 25-opus-15907 >
  4. ^ A b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. , Frankfurt am Main, 1997, p. 378ff.
  5. ↑ a b Human experiments - Unbridled malice . In: Der Spiegel , issue 46 of November 14, 1983, pp. 86-90
  6. ↑ Patrick Wechsler: La Faculté de Medecine de la "Reichsuniversität Strasbourg" (1941–1945) a l'heure nationale-socialiste (dissertation, Strasbourg 1991)
  7. ^ A b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. , Frankfurt am Main, 1997, p. 385f.
  8. ↑ Quoted in: Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, the Nazi medicine and its victims. , Frankfurt am Main, 1997, p. 380
  9. ↑ File number IT 15/62, see Ernst Klee: Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 48.
personal data
SURNAME Bickenbach, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German internist, carried out poison gas tests on prisoners in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Ruppichteroth
DATE OF DEATH November 26, 1971
Place of death Siegburg