Robert Wetzel (anatomist)

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Robert Wetzel (born September 30, 1898 in Tübingen ; † April 3, 1962 there ) was a German anatomist , paleontologist , prehistorian and university professor.

Life

Wetzel, son of a lawyer, took part in the First World War from 1916 to 1918 after graduating from high school . After the end of the war he studied medicine at the universities of Heidelberg and Munich . After graduation received his doctorate in 1923 he at the Munich histologist Friedrich Wassermann Dr. med. From 1924 he was assistant to the anatomists Hermann Braus (1868-1924) and Hans Petersen at the University of Würzburg , where he completed his habilitation in 1926 and was then a prosector . Due to a serious illness in May 1928 ( paraplegia and blindness ), Wetzel was unable to work for half a year until he had fully recovered. In February 1932 he was appointed adjunct professor at the University of Würzburg.

In the course of the transfer of power to the National Socialists , Wetzel joined the NSDAP and SA in 1933 . He became a shop steward of the SD and in 1937 switched from the SA to the SS , where he rose to SS-Sturmbannführer in 1943.

After a six-month deputy chair for anatomy at the University of Giessen , he accepted the call to the University of Tübingen , where he held the chair for anatomy from October 1936 and was director of the anatomical institute (prehistory, paleontology). His appointment to Tübingen was not for political reasons, but because of his scientific achievements and publications. In Tübingen, however, he turned more and more to politics and took on influential university political leadership positions. From 1937 to 1940 he was Vice Rector of the University of Tübingen (with interruptions). Above all, however, he officiated from November 1938 to 1944 as the local director of the Nazi lecturers 'association and the Nazi lecturers' body. In addition, he became president of a scientific academy of the National Socialist Lecturer Association that he had initiated. In the function of the local lecturer union leader, disputes with the Reich Ministry of Education followed from 1940 . In 1940 he also became editor of the magazine Deutschlands Erneuerung .

During the Second World War he headed the local student company . Towards the end of the war he carried out target practice with his assistants in the institute basement. From December 1944 he was a member of the Volkssturm , where he soon became a company commander . During this time he only attended courses sporadically, but was represented by the associate professor Walther Jacobj .

After the war ended in 1945 Wetzel was suspended from the professorship in Tübingen and was in Allied internment. His resumption of membership in the teaching body failed due to resistance from the Medical Faculty of Tübingen.

At the end of February 1952, the former National Socialist wrote to the historian Hans Rothfels, who emigrated to the United States during the Nazi era, on the occasion of his writing on the German opposition and wrote of his “individual case as an example”, “that a - certainly inadequate - German opposition to far into the party, SS, SD, and that it spoke in the name of one of its (its own) National Socialists, but not for the party ”. From 1953 he held teaching positions at the Technical University of Stuttgart and the medical faculty of the University of Tübingen ( tomographic anatomy).

Robert Wetzel was the brother of the architect and town planner Heinz Wetzel and was related to the Würzburg hygienist Karl Bernhard Lehmann .

Act

During the excavations in the Stadel Cave, Robert Wetzel and his team could not have suspected that these remains, found in 1939, would be put together appropriately 74 years later: as a lion man
At the Hohlensteinstadel, Robert Wetzel worked as an archaeological excavation manager for decades

In Würzburg, Wetzel, encouraged by Braus, who worked in the field of experimental embryology, carried out research on the primitive development (embryonic development) of the chick and on brain ventricles from 1924 as an assistant until 1936 as an associate professor . In Würzburg and Tübingen he had cut entire bodies into two cm thick frozen sections, which was unique in this totality. He had these cuts displayed on educational boards, but there was no planned publication.

In addition, Wetzel's research interests were in prehistory . In the 1930s and - after a war-related interruption - until 1962, Wetzel led excavations in the Lone Valley on the Swabian Alb . He also published on it. During these excavations, the geologist Otto Völzing found the fragments of mammoth ivory in 1939 in the Stadel cave on the Hohlenstein rock massif as excavation manager. In his will, Robert Wetzel donated all of his excavation finds from the Lone Valley to the Ulm Museum .

However, their great importance there was only recognized after an initial composition in 1969 by Joachim Hahn to the lion man . The Lion Man has been a central exhibit of the Ulm permanent exhibition since it was first composed, and even more so after its fundamental re-composition in 2013.

Awards

Fonts (selection)

  • The Tübingen scientific academy of the National Socialist German Lecturer Association . In: Robert Wetzel / Hermann Hoffmann (Hgg): Wissenschaftliche Akademie Tübingen des NSD-Dozentbundes, Volume 1: 1937, 1938, 1939 , Tübingen: Mohr 1940, pp. 17–32.
  • Lontal work as community research . In: Robert Wetzel / Hermann Hoffmann (Hgg): Wissenschaftliche Akademie Tübingen des NSD-Dozentbundes, Volume 1: 1937, 1938, 1939 , Tübingen: Mohr 1940, pp. 79-93.
  • Lively unity and organic structure . In: Robert Wetzel / Hermann Hoffmann (Hgg): Wissenschaftliche Akademie Tübingen des NSD-Dozentbundes, Volume 1: 1937, 1938, 1939 , Tübingen: Mohr 1940, pp. 140–158.
  • The Bocksteinschmiede with the Bocksteinloch, the fire plate and the slope as well as the Bocksteingrotte, Part I , W. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 1958.
  • The Bocksteinschmiede in the Lonetal, Part I: Text, Part II: Tafeln , Verlag Müller & Gräff Kommissionsverlag Stuttgart 1969, Ed. Gerhard Bosinski .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Klaus D. Mörike, Geschichte der Tübinger Anatomie , Tübingen 1988, p. 103 f.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 673.
  3. ↑ Michael Grüttner : Biographical Lexicon for National Socialist Science Policy (= Studies on Science and University History. Volume 6). Synchron, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-935025-68-8 , pp. 182-183.
  4. ^ Robert Wetzel on February 29, 1952 to Hans Rothfels. Quoted from: Jan Eckel : Informal Transformation in the Mirror of Resistance Interpretations . In: Ulrich Herbert (Ed.): Change processes in West Germany. Burden, integration, liberalization, 1945 to 1980. Göttingen 2002, p. 155f.
  5. ^ Richard Kraemer: Würzburg physicians 50 years ago. In: Würzburg medical history reports. Volume 5, 1987, pp. 165-172, here: p. 166.
  6. ^ Theodor Heinrich Schiebler: Anatomy in Würzburg (from 1593 to the present). In: Four Hundred Years of the University of Würzburg. Edited by Peter Baumgart, Degener & Co., Neustadt an der Aisch 1982, pp. 985-1004, here: p. 998.
  7. ^ City of Ulm, Ulmer Museum: The Lion Man. History - Magic - Myth
personal data
SURNAME Wetzel, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German anatomist, paleontologist, prehistoric scientist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH September 30, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Tübingen
DATE OF DEATH April 3, 1962
Place of death Tübingen