Otto Nordmann

Otto Nordmann (born September 14, 1876 in Bad Harzburg , † May 26, 1946 in Holzminden ) was a German surgeon. In 1939 he was president of the German Society for Surgery .

Life

Nordmann's parents are the master carpenter and furniture manufacturer Hermann Nordmann (1844–1901) and his wife Marie, b. Engelke (1848-1933).

Otto Nordmann initially studied economics, but after one semester switched to medicine at the universities of Freiburg , Göttingen and Berlin . In Göttingen he became a member of the Brunsviga fraternity in 1895 . At that time he found connection to the liberal movement of pastor Friedrich Naumann . On July 4, 1900, he passed the medical state examination. He then served as a one-year volunteer in Oldenburg (Oldb) . He was licensed as a doctor in 1901 and in 1902 in Göttingen as Dr. med. PhD. From 1901 to 1902 he worked as a volunteer assistant at the Pathological Institute in Göttingen with Johannes Orth .

Berlin

In 1902 he went to Werner Körte in Berlin to do surgery at the Am Urban City Hospital . In 1906 he switched to Walther Kausch , who was medical director at the Auguste Viktoria Hospital in Berlin-Schöneberg , as a senior physician . With effect from April 1, 1909, he was appointed city higher official. Just two years later he became chief physician of the II surgical department there, a position he held until 1933. With the death of Kausch, both surgical departments were merged under Nordmann's direction. In 1908 Nordmann went on a study trip to the United States . In 1918 he was awarded the title of professor.

Party shoving

In the same year, Nordmann joined the left-wing liberal and bourgeois German Democratic Party , to which the orthopedic professor Georg Hohmann also belonged. Nordmann was committed to democracy , which led him to the Berlin city council . From 1919 he was a city ​​councilor . For reasons that were not clear, he did not stand up for a second time in 1926 and left the party. Like Werner Körte , he came up against the fact that the party had no interest in professional competence. “The parties hawked the vacancies among themselves. The party book, which was sometimes only acquired in appearance and used as a figurehead, decided. ” Nordmann met Theodor Heuss at the district assembly in the Schöneberg district . He became a friend for life. After 24 years as chief physician at the Auguste Viktoria Hospital, things became difficult for Nordmann in 1933. His National Socialist interns made him so hard that he gave up the civil service post with the pension claims. He took over the management of the surgical department of the (church) Martin Luther Hospital in Berlin-Grunewald . As an employee, Nordmann was involved in the lexicon of the entire therapy .

At the forefront of German surgery

Despite all the contempt for National Socialism , Nordmann was "almost unanimously" elected President of the German Society for Surgery in 1938 . From 1934 to 1940 he was its treasurer, from 1940 to 1946 its secretary. When he opened the Berlin Congress of the German Society for Surgery in 1939, he pulled himself out of the affair as bold as it was elegant: For the first time the German Society for Surgery in the “Greater German Reich”, which was “our energetic leader with peaceful means, at breathtaking speed created ".

“We all wish that the entire outside world should recognize that this would redress the serious historical injustice that was done to Germany. May the Fiihrer's hope become truth as a blessing for the whole world that a long peace will now break out and that our fatherland will find undisturbed rest for the internal expansion of the great German Empire. At the beginning of our conference today we will sum up all our wishes for our German homeland and its Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler in a triple victory Heil. Our leader: Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil! "

- Otto Nordmann, four months before the start of the war

Holzminden

Ev. Holzminden Hospital

The Evangelical Hospital Holzminden with 107 beds was built in 1932/33 (like the Martin Luther Hospital two years later) with the help of the Association for the Establishment of Evangelical Hospitals and was inaugurated on March 19, 1933. The Allied air raids on Berlin had made Nordmann's house in Berlin uninhabitable and the Martin Luther Hospital unusable. The managing director of the association, Pastor Wilhelm Siegert (1893–1949), considered Nordmann “probably the best surgeon we have in Germany”. Because of the same employer and probably for health reasons ( pleurisy ), Nordmann agreed to take over the surgical department as chief physician "for the duration of the war" in February 1944.

family

Otto Nordmann was married to Elisabeth Molsen (1884–1962) from Flensburg since 1909 . The couple had their daughters Annemarie, Ursula and Ingeborg. Ursula married the art historian Leopold Reidemeister . The heart surgeon Jürgen Christoph Reidemeister comes from this marriage .

memory

The Jewish colleagues Siegfried Ostrowski , Paul Rosenstein and Rudolf Nissen testified to Nordmann's democratic attitude:

"The next secretary, O. Nordmann, who succeeded him after Borchard's death, was a man of tried and stubborn democratic convictions who gave up his position as chief physician of a large city hospital and moved to a denominational hospital during the" upheaval "of 1933 to have nothing to do with the city's Nazi officials, in other words a kind of “inner emigration” which, if you know Nordmann's attitude before and after 1933, really deserves the name. How the government came to terms with the election of Nordmann is a mystery. He has not even made a secret of his rejection of the brown plague in official letters. "

- Rudolf Nissen

According to the denazification files , Nordmann did not belong to any National Socialist organization.

literature

• Michael Sachs, Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach, Rebecca Schwoch : German Society for Surgery 1933–1945. The presidents . Kaden Verlag, Heidelberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-942825-03-0 , pp. 131-150.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Directory of the old men of the German fraternity. Überlingen am Bodensee 1920, p. 95.
2. ↑ Willy Nolte (Ed.): Burschenschafter Stammrolle. Directory of the members of the German Burschenschaft according to the status of the summer semester 1934. Berlin 1934, p. 354.
3. ↑ Dissertation: A contribution to the phagocytic role of giant cells .
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach and Rebecca Schwoch: Reading sample Prof. Dr. med. Otto Carl Wilhelm Nordmann . 2011.
5. ↑ Walter Marle (Ed.): Lexicon of the entire therapy with diagnostic information. 2 volumes, 4th revised edition. Urban & Schwarzenberg, Berlin / Vienna 1935 ( list of employees ).
6. ↑ Landesarchiv Berlin: B Rep. 080, No. 2082, Bl. 1–2 (letter from the Senator for Health to Senator for the Interior of September 19, 1951).
7. ^ Siegfried Ostrowski