Robert Kudicke

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Heinrich Robert Hellmuth Kudicke (born December 12, 1876 in Preußisch Eylau , East Prussia , † May 8, 1961 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German medical officer. At the time of National Socialism , he was responsible for fatal human experiments as a doctor .

Life

Kudicke studied at the Kaiser Wilhelms Academy for military medical education and was active in the Pépinière Corps Suevo-Borussia in 1895 . As a medical officer in the Prussian Army , he came to German East Africa in 1902 for the colonial authorities . As the long-term and last surviving student of Robert Koch , he took part in his 1904/05 expedition to research African trypanosomiasis and, after Koch's return to Germany in August 1905, continued research at the Imperial Biological-Agricultural Institute in Amani . The main part of this research was the breeding of tsetse flies in order to provide evidence of trypanosomes and their reproduction in the flies. However, the research was stopped in 1906. From November 1906 to February 1907 Kudicke was involved in other expeditions to research sleeping sickness. From 1907 to 1910 he was a camp doctor in Kigarama (in what is now Rwanda ). At the end of 1911 he resigned from the protection force and took over the laboratory management of the imperial government hospital in Dar es Salaam , in 1913 he was director of the Institute for Sleeping Sickness in East Africa. As a senior physician he took part in the First World War. From 1921 he worked in the Georg-Speyer-Haus , from 1925 in the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine . From 1927 to 1933 he was a professor of bacteriology at Sun Yat-sen University (Guangdong) . For a while he was dean of the medical faculty. During his stay in China he met Jost Walbaum . He later worked in Frankfurt am Main .

During the Second World War

When war broke out in 1939, Kudicke volunteered and took part in the attack on Poland as a staff officer . In October 1939 the previously Polish Hygiene Institute Warsaw became part of the Hygiene Institute Hamburg as the (German) State Institute for Hygiene Warsaw . The Polish director Ludwik Hirszfeld was pushed out of office and Kudicke took over management together with Ernst Georg Nauck . The focus of the work and research here was the fight against typhus among the civilian population, but basically only to prevent it from spreading to the German occupying power. In 1940 Kudicke von Walbaum, who in the meantime had risen to the department head and health manager of the Health Office in the Generalgouvernement , was appointed special representative for the fight against typhus. As such, Kudicke had special powers and in all districts he was subordinate to special representatives with appropriate auxiliary personnel and equipment for disinfection.

In his role, Kudicke recognized the desperate supply situation as the reason for the spread of typhus and made it public, for example at the Reich Conference of Doctors of the Public Health Service from October 13 to 16, 1941 in Bad Krynica , the main topic of which was actually the fight against typhus was. Nevertheless, he did nothing to improve the situation, but supported the forced ghettoization of Polish Jews , which was justified by Nauck, among others, with disease-sanitary arguments. Kudicke carried out human experiments with newly developed vaccines on Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto , for example in November and December 1941 with the Behring vaccine based on chicken protein. Of the 228 people who were vaccinated, 24 people are said to have died as a result of this forced treatment. There were also further deaths in the chemotherapy attempts taking place in Warsaw's Jewish hospitals, which were also under Kudicke's responsibility.

As part of the disease control he also took part in meetings and conferences on the subject of typhus . An important typhus conference took place on the occasion of the official opening ceremony of the Lviv Behring Institute on 10/11. December 1942, which Kudicke directed. Also in December 1942 he and his department head Rudolf Wohlrab were awarded the War Merit Cross 1st Class by Governor General Hans Frank for their “merits” in combating typhus . Kudicke was involved in experiments on the infectivity of vaccinated and unvaccinated typhus patients , the results of which were published in 1944 in the Münchner Medizinische Wochenschrift .

After 1945

The Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main appointed him in 1945 as a professor of epidemiology . From October 1945 he was also the managing director of the Frankfurt Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hospital Hygiene. In this position he was replaced by Hans Schlossberger after a year . He remained at the university as an emeritus until his death at the age of 84. After the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany , he was involved in medical development aid in third world countries . He was never held responsible for his crimes during the Nazi era. In 1955 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit by the Federal President .

The son Gunter Kudicke (1912–1994) was a malariologist with the World Health Organization. His granddaughter is Eva Maria Princess of Prussia (born Kudicke in 1951 in Qaem-Schahr ), who is married to Adalbert Prince of Prussia (born 1948).

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 61/289.
  2. ↑ Hiroyuki Isobe: Medicine and Colonial Society: The fight against sleeping sickness in the German "protected areas" before the First World War. LIT publishing house. Muenster. 2009. page 115
  3. ↑ Kudicke, Dr. Heinrich Robert Hellmuth . Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon, Vol. 2 (1920), p. 385
  4. ^ Polish Military Institute for Hygiene and Epidemiology
  5. ↑ a b Klaus-Peter Friedrich (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (source collection) Volume 9: Poland: Generalgouvernement August 1941–1945. Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-486-71530-9 , p. 94
  6. ^ Stefan Wulf: "Nauck, Ernst", in: Neue Deutsche Biographie, Berlin 1997, vol. 18, p. 760.
  7. ↑ Naomi Baumslag: Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation and Typhus. Greenwood Publishing Group. 2005. Page 136 f.
  8. ^ Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 347
  9. ^ Vittorio Klostermann, Guide to the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main , University of Frankfurt am Main, 1953, p. 44
  10. ↑ Karl Max Einhäupl , Detlev Ganten , Jakob Hein : 300 years of Charité - in the mirror of their institutes , p. 211, Verlag Walter de Gruyter 2010
  11. ^ Rudolf Wohlrab : Robert Kudicke . German Medical Wochenschrift 86 (1961), pp. 1882-1883
  12. ↑ Krampitz HE: Professor Dr. Robert Kudicke in memory . Zeitschrift für Tropenmedizin 12 (1961), pp. 217-218
  13. ↑ Almanach de Gotha (2004), Volume 1, page 296
personal data
SURNAME Kudicke, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kudicke, Heinrich Robert Hellmuth (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German medical officer and tropical medicine specialist, responsible for fatal human experiments
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Prussian Eylau , East Prussia
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 1961
Place of death Frankfurt am Main