Richard Schmincke

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Richard Egidius Schmincke (born October 17, 1875 in Altenritte ; † August 19, 1939 in Berlin ) was a German doctor and politician ( SPD / USPD / KPD ). In the Weimar Republic he was a member of the Saxon state parliament for the KPD .

Origin, medical studies and participation in the war

Schmincke finished his school career at a grammar school in Korbach with the Abitur. He then completed a medical degree at the universities of Marburg, Halle an der Saale and Leipzig from 1897. He was promoted to Dr. med. PhD and approved . He then did research at Robert Koch . Subsequently employed as a ship's doctor, he settled as a spa doctor in Bad Elster in 1905 and also worked in Rapallo from 1913 . In the First World War he took part as a military doctor and ran a hospital train . After participating in the war, he first worked as a doctor in Hamburg , then returned to Bad Elster and finally settled in Leipzig .

Political activity

Influenced by his war experiences, a radical change in political attitudes had taken place: before the war he was an SPD member, from there he switched to the USPD and in 1919 joined the KPD. In November 1921 he was a member of the municipal council in Bad Elster for the KPD. As a delegate, he took part in the 8th party congress of the KPD in Leipzig in 1923. As a doctor of proletarian hundreds in the Vogtland , he was a leader in the resistance against the Reichswehr invading Saxony and Thuringia . In November 1923 he was arrested by members of the Reichswehr and at the end of May 1924 he was sentenced to 20 days in prison for preparing for high treason . From August 1924 he practiced as a general practitioner in Dresden .

In Rapallo , in the course of the contract negotiations between the German Reich and the Russian Federal Socialist Soviet Republic in 1922 , he got to know the foreign politician Georgi Wassiljewitsch Tschitscherin and his deputy Maxim Litvinov . Afterwards he treated party and state officials several times in the Soviet Union and, commissioned by the Comintern , in 1924 the Chinese politician Sun Yat-Sen . For Ernst Schneller, who was elected to the Reichstag , he moved to the Saxon state parliament in 1925, to which he continued to belong after the state elections in 1926. In 1926 he took part in the 12th party congress of the KPD in Berlin-Wedding and gave a lecture at the founding congress of the Working Group on Social Policy Organizations (ARSO).

City Councilor for Health Care in Berlin-Neukölln

At the end of 1927, Schmincke was elected by a majority to the paid city councilor for health in Berlin-Neukölln, with the SPD members voting against him. As a result of the successful appointment, he resigned his state parliament mandate in November 1927. In the 1928 Reichstag election , he ran unsuccessfully for the KPD. In 1932 he was a co-founder of the Communist Club of Spiritual Creators . He was expelled from the Association of Socialist Doctors (VSÄ) in December 1929 because he had previously called on the Berlin Medical Association to “fight the treacherous behavior of the Social Democrats”. Schmincke agreed with the social fascism thesis propagated by the KPD . In the course of his function as city councilor for health care, he came into conflict with Käte Frankenthal , who had been a city doctor in Neukölln since 1928 and thus a subordinate of Schmincke, over health policy issues. His attempt to prevent Frankenthal's appointment was in vain. As an SPD politician, she got caught up in local political disputes between social democrats and communists.

At the beginning of July 1930 Schmincke set up the first sexual and marriage counseling center of the German Committee for Birth Control in Neukölln. In the Calmette trial that was carried out in 1931/32 after the Lübeck vaccination accident , he was an appointed expert. Before that, after the May Day 1929 , he had testified to an investigative committee that all the corpses he had autopsied had gunshot wounds from police ammunition.

Persecution under National Socialism and suicide

On the night of the Reichstag fire , he was taken into protective custody on February 28, 1933 , which he spent in Berlin-Spandau prison until his release in December 1933. During his incarceration, he was given leave of absence by the City Council in mid-March 1933 and was finally released under the Law to Restore the Civil Service . After his release from prison, he was permanently monitored by the Gestapo . Due to forced unemployment, Schmincke temporarily considered emigrating to the Soviet Union in 1935 and tried unsuccessfully to return to Rapallo as a doctor. From 1937 he ran a private practice in Berlin. At the beginning of August 1939, his license to practice medicine was withdrawn from him by the Berlin police chief due to a lack of National Socialist sentiments. There he also treated anti-fascists and Jewish citizens.

The Berlin police chief Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorff initiated proceedings against Schmincke under the Reichsärzteordnung (Reichsärzteordnung) to withdraw his license to practice medicine because of his earlier communist activities. After his license to practice medicine was withdrawn and he was thus subject to a professional ban, he sued for re-admission. However, his objection was rejected in July 1939: “It must therefore continue to be assumed that the plaintiff cannot be regarded as nationally reliable in the sense of the National Socialist worldview even today. Because of this lack of national reliability, it is therefore not possible to remain in the medical profession. ”In December 1938, the University of Leipzig revoked his doctorate. Schmincke, the last on Kurfürstendamm led a private practice and a glaucoma , had committed suicide in 1939 on 15 August suicide .

family

Richard Schmincke was the son of the teacher and cantor Johann Heinrich Schmincke and his wife Martha Elisabeth, née Koch. He had four siblings. From 1920 to 1925 he was married to Doris Ida, née Frömter, when he divorced. His son from this marriage was the social medicine specialist Werner Schmincke (1920–2003). Later he was in a relationship with Änne Tischendorf († 1994). The couple had a daughter, the author Anna Ricarda, married Bethke (* 1939).

His daughter Ricarda Bethke signed “My dear Änne! Feature based on letters and documents from the years 1933 to 1983 ”traces the life of her mother“ Änne ”and also goes into the last years of her father's life during the National Socialist era . Her mother “Änne” met the much older Schmincke in 1929, who was also friends with the Jewish doctor Ruth Lubliner (1886–1960) at times. After separating from his wife Doris, their son stayed with the father. Bethke's mother trained as a nurse and then had difficulties looking for a job due to the relationship with Schmincke, who was ostracized during the Nazi era. After being banned from working, Schmincke tried unsuccessfully on several trips to Italy to settle down as a doctor in Italy. From May 1939 he became increasingly depressed and finally hanged himself in the bathroom of his apartment a few weeks after the birth of his daughter. This feature was broadcast on Deutschlandfunk in 2008 and was awarded the 2008 Radio Prize.

Honors

In Bad Elster, on the former Schmincke house at Richard-Schmincke-Straße 10, there was a plaque with the following inscription: “In this house lived from April 11, 1913 to May 4, 1924, Dr. Richard Schmincke, born on October 17, 1875, died on August 19, 1939. He was a member of the state parliament and community representative of the KPD. His life was a struggle for the rights of the working people - for socialism, for the goal of turning Bad Elster into a public bath ”. The Dr.-Schmincke-Allee is located in Radebeul .

The theater scholar Ernst Schumacher dedicated the “Poem of Unforgettable” to Schmincke. A recitation for Comrade Doctor Richard Schmincke in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution ”(1977).

Fonts (selection)

  • The effects of the mineral springs in Bad Elster , Leopold, Rostock 1913
  • The health system in Neukölln , Berek, Berlin 1929

Journal articles (selection)

In: The Socialist Doctor

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Hermann Weber, Andreas Herbst (Ed.): German Communists . Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online ).
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Alfons Labisch / Florian Tennstedt: The way to the "law on the standardization of the health system" of July 3, 1934. Development lines and moments of the state and municipal health system in Germany , part 2, Academy for public health in Düsseldorf 1985, p. 492f.
  3. ↑ a b Volker Klimpel: Doctors Death: Unnatural and violent death in nine chapters and a biographical appendix. Würzburg 2005, p. 144
  4. ↑ a b c d e Ricarda Bethke: Richard Schmincke (1875–1939) . In: Saxon Biography . Published by the Institute for Saxon History and Folklore
  5. ↑ Gen. Richard Schmincke City Councilor in Neukölln. In: The socialist doctor , 2nd year (1927) issue 4 (March), pp. 42–43 Text archive - Internet Archive
  6. ^ The Reichstagung in Chemnitz on December 7th and 8th, 1929. In: The Socialist Doctor , VI (1930), Issue 1 (February), pp. 16–33, Here: p. 27 Textarchiv - Internet Archive
  7. ^ Bernhard Meyer: A physician in politics: The doctor Käte Frankenthal . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 7, 1999, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 69-70 ( luise-berlin.de ).
  8. ↑ Volker Klimpel: Doctors as members of the Saxon State Parliament from 1832 to 1952 . In: Ärzteblatt Sachsen 6/2008, p. 260
  9. ↑ Henning Grunwald: Courtroom to Revolutionary Stage: Performance and Ideology in Weimar Political Trials , Oxford University press, Oxford 2012, p. 211
  10. ↑ Quoted in: Alfons Labisch, Florian Tennstedt: The path to the “Law on the Unification of Health Care” of July 3, 1934. Development lines and moments of the state and municipal health system in Germany. Part 2, Academy for Public Health in Düsseldorf 1985, p. 493
  11. ↑ Withdrawal of the doctorate after political criminal proceedings. archiv.uni-leipzig.de
  12. ↑ geschichte.charite.de
  13. ↑ deutschlandfunk.de
  14. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from June 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.robert-geisendoerfer-preis.de
  15. ↑ Peter Giersich u. a .: Don't forget us !: Monuments and graves for victims of fascism in the triangle of Saxony, Bohemia and Bavaria = Nezapomeňte! , Circle verb. Vogtland of the IVVdN u. a., Auerbach / Vogtland 1996, p. 34
  16. ↑ Michael Schwartz (Ed.): Ernst Schumacher - A Bavarian Communist in double Germany. Notes by the Brecht researcher and theater critic in the GDR 1945–1991. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58361-8 , p. 409
personal data
SURNAME Schmincke, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmincke, Richard Egidius (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor and politician (SPD, USPD, KPD)
DATE OF BIRTH October 17, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Old rides
DATE OF DEATH August 19, 1939
Place of death Berlin