Wilhelm Starlinger

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Wilhelm Starlinger (born December 22, 1898 in Vienna , † October 4, 1956 in Oldenburg (Oldenburg) ) was a German internist, Gulag prisoner and political writer.

Life

As the son of the psychiatrist and neurologist Josef Starlinger visited (1862-1943) Wilhelm Starlinger that of Benedictine monks led Stiftsgymnasium Seitenstetten . From 1917 he studied medicine at the University of Vienna . A poliomyelitis suffered in 1915 made him unfit for the military in the First World War. After graduating doctorate he 1922 Dr. med.

Starlinger completed his internist training in Vienna and with his compatriot Eppinger in Freiburg im Breisgau , where he qualified as a professor in 1927 . In 1928 he became senior physician , in 1931 associate professor . In July 1933 he took over the management of the St. Elisabeth Hospital of the Gray Sisters in Königsberg i. Pr. At. At the same time he taught internal medicine as an adjunct professor at the Albertus University in Königsberg .

After the Battle of Königsberg , Starlinger was commissioned as a civilian prisoner of the Red Army in April 1945 to set up and manage epidemic hospitals for the remaining German population in Königsberg / Kaliningrad. The German disease hospitals in the former garrison hospital at Yorck-Strasse and St. Elisabeth had a maximum occupancy rate of 2,000 beds in September 1945 and a number of 13,200 patients by March 1947. It dominated typhus (8000) and typhus (1200), this came dysentery , malaria and tuberculosis . The treatment (without medication) took place “under elementary conditions not yet observed in the West”. Nevertheless, according to Starlinger, the epidemic mortality rate of 20% was much lower than the “murderous general mortality” in the same period from April 1945 to March 1947 (especially due to hunger, exhaustion and the resulting diseases, but also manslaughter, murder and suicides). They fell victim to 75% of the German civilian population, which mainly consisted of women, children and the elderly. Starlinger was medical director of the German epidemic hospitals until August 1946, then consultant doctor under a Soviet chief physician. He was arrested and sentenced to ten years of forced labor in the Gulag on charges of “fascist enforcement of the hospital” during a three-month show trial after one year of pre-trial detention “because of counter-revolutionary attitudes and attitudes” . Starlinger suspects the real reason that he should disappear forever as a witness to what happened in Königsberg. In February 1948 he had to go to a “regime camp” at the amber factory Palmnicken , then he was a camp doctor in Dubrowlag in Potma in the Mordovian ASSR in the European part of the Soviet Union .

In the two years that Starlinger stayed in West Germany after his release in January 1954 , he wrote political books based on his personal experiences, especially on the Soviet Union, its oppressive apparatus and its people. He died at the age of just 58.

Starlinger had three children from his first marriage to Maria Rendulic , including his son Peter Starlinger , who was born in Freiburg in 1931 and who later became a geneticist and molecular biologist in Cologne. In December 1944 he married the daughter of the landowner and later CDU politician Ursula geb. Keitzke .

Works

  • Continued research on the so-called reversion of hemolysis . Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1926
  • The limits of Soviet power as reflected in a West-East encounter behind palisades from 1945–1954. With a report by the German Disease Hospitals Yorck and St. Elisabeth on life and death in Königsberg from 1945–1947; at the same time a contribution to the knowledge of the course of coupled large epidemics under elementary conditions . Supplements to the yearbook of the Albertus University Königsberg vol. IX., Holzner-Verlag, Kitzingen-Main 1954 (Paris 1956)
  • Russia and the Atlantic Community . Marienburg-Verlag, Würzburg 1957
  • Behind Russia China . Marienburg-Verlag, Würzburg 1957
  • Derrière la Russie: La Chine . Édition Spes, Paris 1958
  • Stalin and his heirs . Marienburg-Verlag, Würzburg 1957

Contemporary witness

A detailed report on the first post-war years at Starlinger in the German-Russian hospital was written by Dr. Margarete Siegmund on April 15, 1983.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Habilitation thesis: Continued research on the so-called reversion of hemolysis
  2. ↑ Federal Archives
  3. ^ Cabinet minutes of the Federal Government (1955)
  4. ↑ My time from June 1945 to October 1947 in Königsberg / Pr. , edited by Axel Doepner. Königsberger Bürgerbrief, No. 78 (2011), pp. 24–33
personal data
SURNAME Starlinger, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German internist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH December 22, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 4th October 1956
Place of death Oldenburg (Oldb)