Peter Mühlen

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Peter Mühlens (born May 12, 1874 in Bonn , † June 7, 1943 in Hamburg ) was a tropical medicine and hygienist . From 1933 to 1943 he was head of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Ship and Tropical Diseases .

Life

Mühlens studied medicine and was then a medical officer in the Imperial Navy . From 1901 he worked at the newly founded Hamburg Institute for Ship and Tropical Diseases . Dismissed from the service of the Imperial Navy in 1911 , he was permanently employed at the institute. Mühlens traveled to the Ottoman Empire from 1912 to 1914 and did research a. a. on malaria in Jerusalem . During the First World War he was again a soldier and a member of the Asian Corps . After Bulgaria entered the war in 1915, Mühlens was sent there to work in the Bulgarian army as an army hygienist , especially in the fight against malaria. After the war, Mühlens was temporarily the representative of the Royal Yugoslav government for the fight against malaria in Dalmatia .

In 1916, Carl Mense Mühlens handed over the editorial management of the “Archives for Ship and Tropical Hygiene”, Germany's first independent tropical medicine journal. Other editors were Mühlens' colleagues from the Hamburg Tropical Institute Friedrich Fülleborn and Martin Mayer .

Since 1919 Mühlens has also headed the clinical department of the Hamburg Institute for Marine and Tropical Diseases in collaboration with Bernhard Nocht . During the hunger winter of 1921/22 in Russia , he was a representative of the German Red Cross and participated in an aid expedition. It should help to alleviate hunger and contain the typhus epidemic that has broken out . From 1925 he was honorary professor for tropical medicine at the medical faculty of the University of Hamburg . After the death of Friedrich Fülleborn in September 1933, he was appointed the new head of the Hamburg Institute for Marine and Tropical Diseases, which he remained until his death.

Mühlens became a member of the Nazi teachers 'association in 1933 and on November 11, 1933 was one of the signatories of the professors' commitment to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist state at German universities . In 1935 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . In 1936 he became chairman of the German Tropical Medicine Society . In 1937 he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party . In October 1940 he became President of the NSDAP's Colonial Medical Academy .

Researches

On Mühlen's initiative, since the Tropical Institute lacked important research opportunities when the German Colonies ceased to exist in 1918, new synthetic anti-malarial drugs were tested on Hamburg patients from the Langenhorn psychiatric hospital who suffered from progressive paralysis , a late stage of syphilis . First, in 1926, Bayer tested Plasmochin (the first synthetic antimalarial drug, developed by Werner Schulemann , Fritz Schönhöfer , August Wingler , Wilhelm Roehl ), with the head of the psychiatric sanatorium in Düsseldorf-Grafenberg Franz Sioli working alongside Mühlens . For this purpose, selected patients were infected with malaria as part of the malaria therapy . It was hoped that the fever caused by malaria would have a healing effect . Means against malaria could now be tested on these infected patients. This procedure was risky, as the malaria-induced fever attacks were sometimes fatal. Initially, patients and relatives were informed and their consent obtained, a practice that was gradually abandoned until around 1925. During the time of National Socialism , this practice was continued and expanded under Mühlens. Other patients from the Langenhorn psychiatric hospital were infected with malaria and experiments were carried out. Problems for the researchers at the Tropical Institute only emerged when in 1941, as part of Action T4, the patients they had abused as “guinea pigs” were prematurely killed.

During the war in 1939 a typhus research station was set up at the Institute for Ship and Tropical Diseases. On the initiative of Mühlen, this set up a branch in occupied Warsaw . Employees of the institute were jointly responsible for the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto . In November 1941, typhus broke out among forced laborers in the Port of Hamburg . The majority of the Warsaw employees then returned to Hamburg. In this context, Mühlens was appointed "Representative of the Reich Governor ( Karl Kaufmann ) for disease control" with far-reaching powers in Hamburg. As a result, typhus research was intensified in Hamburg. After a typhus epidemic broke out in Neuengamme concentration camp in December 1941 , Mühlens sent a letter to Heinrich Himmler in January 1942 to conduct human experiments on inmates in Neuengamme for research into drugs against typhus. The application was granted and doctors from the Tropical Institute carried out experiments on prisoners in Neuengamme and later on prisoners who had been transferred to Langenhorn.

Others

With Reinhold Ruge and Max zur Verth, he published the textbook Diseases and Hygiene in Warm Countries. The street, which has existed since 1945 as “Peter-Mühlens-Weg” in Hamburg-Langenhorn , not far from the former “state insane asylum” or what is now the Ochsenzoll section of the North Hospital , was renamed “Agnes-Gierck-Weg” in January 1997. Agnes Gierck (1886-1944) was a worker and a Communist, as active Nazi opponent from Long Horn in 1935 to a prison sentence was convicted.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Olaf Brethauer: The tropical medicine specialist Carl Mense (1861-1938), life and work , archive of the University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg 2000
  2. a b c Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 418.
  3. Weß, Ludger: Menschenversuche und Epuchenpolitik - two unknown chapters from the history of German tropical medicine. In: 1999 issue 2 1993 p. 26

literature

  • Ludger Weß : Tropical Medicine and Colonial Policy: The Hamburg Institute for Ship and Tropical Diseases 1918-1945. In: 1999 issue 4, 1992, p. 38 ff.
  • Stefan Wulf, Jerusalem - Aleppo - Constantinople. The Hamburg tropical medicine specialist Peter Mühlens in the Ottoman Empire on the eve and at the beginning of the First World War (Hamburg Studies on the History of Medicine 5), Münster 2005, ISBN 3-8258-7941-0

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