Rudolf Kaufmann

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Stumbling block for Rudolf Kaufmann in Greifswald

Rudolf Kaufmann (born April 3, 1909 in Königsberg , † probably summer 1941 ) was a German geologist and paleontologist .

Life

Kaufmann was the son of physics professor Walter Kaufmann and a brother-in-law of Curt Teichert . Kaufmann was baptized as a Protestant. He studied with Serge von Bubnoff in Munich , Königsberg and at the University of Greifswald and received his doctorate. Since he had Jewish ancestors, he left Germany in 1933 and went to Copenhagen . He could not find a job as a geologist, so he worked as a photographer and gave lessons in athletics. However, he was unable to gain a foothold in Denmark or shortly afterwards in Italy or Gdansk and returned to Germany, where from October 1935 he was a teacher at a Jewish school (Hermann Hirsch's boarding school at Hohe Straße 30 Coburg ).

Rudolf Kaufmann was arrested at the end of July 1936, shortly before a planned vacation in Sweden, for “ racial disgrace ”. After a brief affair with an “Aryan” young widow, he had had to be treated for a sexually transmitted disease in May 1936 and had been reported by the attending doctor. In 1936 the Coburg Regional Court sentenced him to three years in prison . His dedicated defender was Thomas Dehler , who was heavily attacked in the press for this mandate. The National Socialist weekly newspaper " Der Stürmer " wrote: "Lawyers [...] who manage to defend for money what the state has declared a crime by law are of an inferior character and should be removed from the list of lawyers."

In October 1939 Rudolf Kaufmann was released after years of hard labor in road construction and went to Kaunas in Lithuania . Originally he wanted to go to London, for which his brother had already obtained a visa. He planned to meet his girlfriend in Stockholm afterwards and emigrate with her to Australia. The war prevented them from leaving. In Kaunas he lived with a Jewish bookseller family, married in 1941 and from 1940 worked at the geological survey. He was recognized by German soldiers in 1941 (or afterwards) (a relative of one of the soldiers had been a domestic servant for the merchants in Königsberg) when he was cycling across the country as part of his geological field work, and shot as a Jew. His fiancée Inge Magnusson died unmarried in Stockholm in 1972.

plant

Kaufmann is known for his research on trilobites . In Sweden, he succeeded in detecting the individual stages of species formation through spatial separation in alum slates from the late Cambrian (profile Andrarum in Skåne , which Anton H. Westergård examined), which were completely preserved there, using the trilobite fossils of the genus Olenus contained there ( Allopatric speciation ). He continued his research on Cambrian trilobites in Bornholm . The evolutionist Niles Eldredge later saw Kaufmann as a forerunner of punctualism . Kaufmann's observations in the Andrarum profiles were later confirmed by Euan Clarkson .

He also dealt with Quaternary geology , using statistical analysis of guide debris for stratigraphic classification in Lithuania and investigating Jurassic debris in East Prussia, and dealt with the structural geology of granite in his work on the tectonics of Bornholm. He also published on the regional geology of Sweden.

Honors

Stumbling blocks in Coburg in front of Hohe Straße 30 and in Greifswald in front of the University's Pharmacological Institute in Friedrich-Löffler-Straße 23d remind of Rudolf Kaufmann. The memorial stone, which was laid in Greifswald in 2008, was broken and stolen from the pavement by strangers on the anniversary of the Reichspogromnacht on November 9, 2012, together with 10 other stumbling blocks , but was relocated on May 23, 2013.

In 2012, Kaufmann became an honorary member of the Paleontological Society .

literature

  • Thomas Kaemmel: The Bubnoff student Rudolf Kaufmann (1909-1941?). A necessary reminder , Z. geol. Wiss., Berlin, Volume 37, 2009, p. 373
  • Antoni Hoffmann, Wolf-Ernst Reif : Rudolf Kaufmann's work on iterative evolution in the upper cambrian trilobite Genus Olenus: a reappraisal , Paläontologische Zeitschrift, Volume 68, 1994, p. 71
  • Richard Fortey : Trilobites! , Flamingo, 2000, p. 159ff
  • Reinhard Kaiser : Königskinder - A true love , Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt, 1996, ISBN 3-89561-064-X (also published several times as paperback and audio book). The book deals with and reconstructs the relationship between Rudolf Kaufmann and his Swedish friend Ingeborg Magnusson based on letters.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary Dansk Geolog. For. 1946.
  2. ↑ http://www.stadtgeschichte-coburg.de/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-4/3_read-742/
  3. ↑ Reinhard Kaiser: Königskinder - A true love , p. 54
  4. ↑ Digitasles City Memorial Coburg: Rudolf Kaufmann born, 1909 / Hohe Strasse 30 . Reinhard Kaiser was able to provide further details in 1991, who discovered Rudolf Kaufmann's correspondence with his Swedish friend Inge Magnusson and edited it in a book published in 1996. (Reinhard Kaiser: Königskinder - A true love )
  5. ↑ Carl-Christian Dressel : Notes on the judiciary in Coburg from the establishment of the Coburg Regional Court to the denazification. In: Yearbook of the Coburg Regional Foundation 1997. ISSN  0084-8808 , p. 60
  6. ↑ Quoted from the BLLV short biography of Rudolf Kaufmann, 1909 to 1941
  7. ^ Hubert Fromm The Coburg Jews. History and fate. Published by the Evangelisches Bildungswerk Coburg and the initiative Stadtmuseum Coburg. Neustadt near Coburg. Patzschke 2001.
  8. ↑ Kaufmann Variation-statistical studies on species modification and transformation in the Upper Cambrian trilobite genus Olenus , Abh. Paläont. Geolog. Institute University of Greifswald, Heft 10, 1933, pp. 1-54, Kaufmann The classification of the Olenus species from Bornholm , Paläontologische Zeitschrift, Volume 15, 1933, pp. 57-63. Kaufmann Exactly proven tribal history , natural sciences, Volume 22, 1933, pp. 803–807. Kaufmann Exact statistical biostratigraphy of the Olenus species from southern Öland, Geol. Fören. Stockholm Förhandl., 1935, pp. 19-28.
  9. ↑ About Jura boulder in East Prussia , Journal of attachment research, Volume 8 1932, pp 73-75.
  10. ↑ Kaufmann on the tectonics of the Bornholm basement , Geologische Rundschau, Volume 24, 1935, pp. 379–389.
  11. ↑ Kaufmann The rift tectonics of the Kambrosilur of Gotland, Oeland and the Kalmar region , Geologische Rundschau, Volume 21, 1931, pp. 292–306.
personal data
SURNAME Kaufmann, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geologist and paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 3, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Koenigsberg
DATE OF DEATH after June 1941