Wolfgang von Nathusius

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wolfgang von Nathusius, 1957

Wolfgang Wilhelm Engelhard von Nathusius (born August 11, 1911 in Gernrode , † July 11, 1986 in Büdingen ) was a German doctor and medical officer who was involved in the development of the use of natural healing and Kneipp procedures in Germany as well as the medical care of those returning from the war and Internees has earned.

Childhood and youth

Wolfgang, also called Wolf, was the third eldest son of David von Nathusius (1864–1919) and Elisabeth, b. Streu (1890-1961). He had five siblings, his grandfather was August von Nathusius , a large landowner in what is now Saxony-Anhalt . Nathusius' father had studied law in Heidelberg, but due to an inheritance he was a privateer who was primarily interested in agriculture and horticulture. His mother, who was widowed at the age of 29, was the daughter of a Berlin cab driver .

Nathusius grew up in a conservative, monarchist parental home in Gernrode in the Harz region. Since the founding of the Bund in 1923, his mother was the head of the Gernröder local branch of this women's organization - until it was banned in 1934 as part of the National Socialist Gleichschaltung . A generous household was run until the end of the war.

After Nathusius' father was no longer called up for front service in World War I due to illness and age , he headed the war relief organization in Ballenstedt and temporarily represented the mayor in Gernrode. He died of cancer in 1919. After his death, the family became impoverished due to the loss of family assets, a large part of which had been invested in the now worthless war bonds . The remaining wealth was wiped out by the hyperinflation that followed the war . From 1919 the family lived in very simple circumstances.

Nathusius had already started school in Gernrode in April 1917. From 1924 to 1928 he was an active member of the Jungdo drum team , and from 1925 to 1930 he was also an active member of the Askania gymnastics club founded in 1909 . He passed his Abitur in 1931 at the old-language Melanchthon grammar school in nearby Quedlinburg .

Study time

Main building of Leipzig University on Augustusplatz around 1900, in the foreground the Mende Fountain

For the summer semester 1931 Nathusius began with the study of human medicine , first in Göttingen and put it at the beginning in the second semester (November, 1931) University in Leipzig on. In June 1933, Nathusius passed the preliminary medical examination in Leipzig. This was followed by an interruption of studies for a stay at the Latvian State University in Riga in the winter semester of 1934/35. On May 31, 1937, he passed the state medical examination in Leipzig.

Since the winter semester 1931/32, i.e. immediately after he started studying in Leipzig, Nathusius was active as a gymnast in the color-bearing and striking association Fridericiana , founded in 1882 and organized in the VC ( representative convention ). He was also a member of the NSDAP and the SA since 1931 . In the course of his studies he held management positions in the self-administration of the Leipzig student body in the National Socialist German Student Union (NSDStB). As part of the initially planned synchronization and the later prohibition of student connections and the increasing conflict of interests of his membership in Fridericiana and his function at the NSDStB, from the late 1930s Nathusius became increasingly alienated from the National Socialist claim to leadership.

Nathusius received his doctorate in autumn 1938 under Bodo Spiethoff (1875-1948) with a dissertation printed in December 1938 with the approval of the medical faculty under the title: Sociological and anthropological studies on prostitutes in Leipzig . In the context of the empirical study, 202 prostitutes and 61 other patients were examined using a method specified in the textbook on anthropology by Rudolf Martin (1864–1925).

Working life

The St. Georg Hospital Leipzig was opened around 1913, here the entrance and administration building

From June 1937 to August 1937 Nathusius worked as a medical intern at the University Dermatology Clinic in Leipzig. This was followed by a three-month assignment in the same function at the University Clinic for ENT Diseases. In December 1937 he began his work in the St. Georg Municipal Hospital , and from June 1938 he received a permanent position there as an assistant doctor .

War and post-war period

Due to a congenital heart defect, Nathusius was not drafted into the Wehrmacht .

During off-duty hours or days, Nathusius worked as a vacation or individual substitute in the Leipzig specialist practice of the later important radiologist Fritz Gietzelt . In 1939 he had opened a private specialist practice for stomach and intestinal diseases as well as a private X-ray institute, after he had previously also been employed in the internal department of the St. Georg Hospital. After Gietzelt's arrest by the Gestapo in June 1944 for resisting the Nazi regime, Hermann Hartmann, head of the Leipzig section of the Reich Medical Association, asked Nathusius to take over the Gietzelt practice for an indefinite period. In a letter dated July 5, 1944, Nathusius informed the chief physician of the St. Georg Hospital about this proposal. On September 8, 1944, he took over the practice for the care of gastric and intestinal patients, but not the affiliated "private X-ray institute". Even if Nathusius no longer practiced in the St. Georg Hospital from then on, he was still listed on the file card of the personnel office of the city administration in the function of senior physician in the St. Georg Hospital until the spring of 1945. Shortly before the end of the war, he was called up as a doctor for the Volkssturm.

On July 1, 1945, the Soviet military took over Leipzig, which the US forces had captured in April. At the end of August 1945, Nathusius - like thousands of other Nazi activists - was arrested on the basis of Order No. 42 of the SMAD (Soviet Military Administration). From a Leipzig prison he was transferred to the Soviet special camp No. 1 in Mühlberg on September 22, 1945 without trial or judgment . There he was immediately employed as a doctor and from December onwards he acted in the camp hierarchy as a so-called "adjutant" of the first camp doctor and former SS-Obersturmbannführer Heinrich Eufinger , who - also a prisoner of the Soviets - was arrested on November 2nd, 1945 in Dresden . For 1945 Nathusius is named as the head of a sick bay with an ambulance in the women's area of ​​the NKVD camp in Mühlberg .

On June 16, 1946, Nathusius was transferred from Mühlberg to the Soviet Union together with around 680 other male inmates, as there was a shortage of workers and German-speaking doctors to treat the sick in the POW camps there. He was employed in camps in the northern Caucasus region (now Georgia ) and in the coal mining area east of the Donets (now Ukraine ), initially as a worker and only later as a doctor. Stays in Shakhty (north of Rostov on the lower Don ), Ordzhonikidze, Novocherkask, Artem and Mostok are documented.

Medical care for prisoners

In 1956, Nathusius described the difficult conditions under which medical care was provided in the prison camps in the specialist journal Ärztliche Praxis : “... In the crumbled camp we found remains of English bandages, broken bandage scissors, remains of moldy ointment of indefinable origin and some wooden spatulas. With this “set of instruments” we opened the first ambulance. Boils were connected to scraps of laundry that had been found and cooked “sterile” and melted down with hot bricks placed over them ... An ileus : an operation was not possible. It was not allowed to be taken to a hospital, about 4 kilometers away in Mühlberg. Enemas, bearings, intestinal tubes with a piece of fragile rubber tube were tried. Neither analgesics nor spasmolytics were present. The doctor from XX. Century, and couldn't help. The criminal prohibition of a transfer to a nearby hospital later cost another 50-year-old man who was ill with ileus symptoms his life in Russia ... In these autumn months we got to know epidemics that were unknown to us in Germany in this extent and this form. Erysipelas , the most severe pleuropneumonia , typhus , dysentery (from which hardly any camp inmate was spared), the most severe forms of diphtheria , tuberculosis with the course of galloping consumption ... Although penicillin was already in the Russian satellite camp at that time, it was refused despite our request to give us some of it To provide ... we let bread mold in damp towels behind the hospital kitchen stove, which we then gave to eat. We had found that this moldy bread apparently helped those suffering from dysentery well. So here we had a drug. We continued to put fly maggots on wounds, which, however, always cost us to overcome ... ”.

In the DDR

On December 17, 1949, Nathusius fell ill and, with a body weight of only 46 kg, was transported back to Germany from the Soviet Union and released from Soviet captivity from a camp near Frankfurt (Oder) . After short visits in the home and with his family he had as a conscript immediately (in 1949) in the Wismut AG in the Erzgebirge to report to an activity as there permanent medical record. In the summer of 1950, he and a colleague were involved in a process in which both were acquitted on July 25, 1950.

Returnees from the Soviet Union arriving at the partially destroyed main train station in Leipzig, 1950

West Germany

When Nathusius learned a short time later that the GDR public prosecutor's office wanted to appeal against the acquittal in the proceedings for political reasons, he decided to flee to West Berlin in 1950. There he initially earned money through substitute services for various Berlin radiologists. Soon he started working for the VOS ( Association of Victims of Stalinism ). On February 8, 1951, he received the certificate for the use of the title "specialist in radiology".

From 1951 to 1955 he worked as a doctor for radiology and radiation medicine at the Dr. Heuser (Heuser was the father-in-law of the later politician Hedda Heuser-Schreiber ) in Bensberg in the Rhineland. On July 1, 1955, he switched to the Hainerberg observation hospital in Koenigstein im Taunus as a medical expert and became a senior physician there on October 1, 1956. This activity was associated with a takeover in the public service at the State Insurance Company Hessen. Since April 18, 1956, he was also allowed to use the title of "Specialist in Internal Medicine".

On September 5, 1957, Nathusius took over the Hillersbach sanatorium, initially as a representative of the official business, from November 21, 1957 as a senior physician and from July 12, 1961 as chief physician and medical director . The institute, which was developing from a rest home to a specialist sanatorium , is located between Lißberg and Hirzenhain in the Büdingen district in Upper Hesse.

The following years were to be the most important in Nathusius' professional life. In addition to the medical management of the sanatorium, he was able to work as a sports doctor, as a Kneipp doctor and as a doctor for naturopathic procedures. For many years he was a company doctor at the Buderus iron works in Hirzenhain. Since Buderus manufactured the armored hulls for the Leopard battle tank (the Buderus subsidiary Krauss-Maffei produced the tank), there was a Stasi file with incriminating material from the Nazi era until Nathusius' retirement . But there was never any attempt at contact. Nathusius led accident assistance courses and accompanied the nurse training of the Johanniter accident assistance in Boppard . He worked as an expert on behalf of the VdH ( Association of Returnees, Prisoners of War and Members of Missing Persons in Germany ) as well as for the organization VVN (Association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime).

After Nathusius reached retirement age as a civil servant at the age of 65 in 1976, he was retired as chief medical director, but continued to be employed by the state insurance company with a private contract in the same position as chief physician in Hillersbach until December 31, 1978.

In the following years, Nathusius continued to be active as a specialist book author and participant in specialist conferences. He regularly attended congresses in Germany and events for returnees. He also performed duties in various specialist medical bodies.

Nathusius died in July 1986, his urn was buried in the Lißberg cemetery.

Functions

Nathusius worked for several decades on the medical-scientific advisory board of the Association of Returnees, Prisoners of War and Members of Missing Persons in Germany eV He held positions at the Kneipp Medical Association, and worked in the Central Association of Doctors for Naturopathic Treatment there, among other things, in the working group for health care and physiotherapy , out.

Appreciation

Nathusius was particularly suitable and helpful for the patients for the expert work on behalf of the Association of Returnees , as he was constantly confronted with the effects of dystrophy (malnutrition and its consequences) through his own imprisonment in the Soviet Union and through his medical work there Later it was all the better to assess which late effects could be attributed to the disease of dystrophy. Together with Ernst Günther Schenck , Nathusius developed into a nationally sought-after capacity in this area. Together with Schenck, he wrote eight books from 1958 to 1965 under the title Extreme Living Conditions and Their Consequences , which are considered the standard work for the assessment of returnees and have been recognized as a guideline by the supply authorities.

In addition, his achievements in sports medicine and in the establishment of naturopathic methods were important as part of preventive medical care. In the laudation on the occasion of the award of the Federal Cross of Merit to Nathusius, particular attention was drawn to his pioneering work in medical prevention .

Finally, Nathusius also dealt with questions of social medicine and published on them. His advocacy for the community of solidarity in social, health and old-age care-related issues followed his credo : "Every state is only as good as it cares for its old, young and sick."

family

On November 14, 1937, Nathusius married Traute Schröter (1909–1989), also a doctor, who initially ran her own practice and after 1945 worked in a polyclinic of the Leipzig utilities. This marriage, divorced in 1951, was the result of daughter Maria (* 1940), a specialist in surgery and married to Horst Hennig , professor of chemistry and rector of the Karl Marx University in Leipzig. Nathusius entered into a second marriage on January 19, 1952 with Almut, b. Gable, widowed Schwarz (1919–2013). Children from this connection are the educationalist and historian Ulrich Engelhard (* 1953) and the bookseller and archivist Jochen Engelhard von Nathusius (* 1957).

Awards

  • 1972: Knighthood of Honor of the Order of St. John
  • 1976: Letter of Honor from the State of Hesse
  • 1977: Knight of Honor Cross of the Order of St. John
  • 1977: Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon (March 21, 1977)
  • 1977: Silver Medal of Honor of the Association of Victims of Stalinism (VOS)
  • 1981: Bernhard Christoph Faust Medal of the Hessian Working Group for Health Education (Hessian Ministry of Social Affairs)
  • 1983: Badge of honor in gold from the Central Association of Doctors for Naturopathic Treatment

Publications

Books

  • Sociological and anthropological studies on prostitutes in Leipzig. Dissertation. Plasnick, Großenhain in Saxony 1938.
  • Doctors Primer. Association of returnees, prisoners of war and members of missing persons in Germany, medical and scientific service, Bad Godesberg 1954.
  • with Ernst Günther Schenck: Extreme living conditions and their consequences. Handbook of Medical Experience from Captivity. 8 volumes. Series of publications of the medical-scientific advisory board of the Association of Returnees of Germany, Association of Returnees, Prisoners of War and Relatives of Missing Persons in Germany, 1961.
  • The practice of preventive treatment and early treatment. Edited by Wolfgang von Nathusius and Walter Groh . Volume 17 of the series. Central Association of Doctors for Naturopathic Treatment, Medizinisch-Literarischer Verlag Blume, Uelzen 1967.

Contributions

  • Have the health problems of returnees from captivity and internment been overcome? In: Berliner Gesundheitsblatt. No. 6, 1955, pp. 206ff.
  • The doctor away from civilization (in Soviet internment camps). In: Medical Practice. Year 8/1956 from November 3rd and 10th 1956 (special print).
  • Causes and combined therapy of neurocirculatory and neurodystonic abdominal disorders. In: Asklepios. Dietetics, physical medicine and rehabilitation in clinics and practices. 6th year, issue 6th Medizinisch-Literarischer Verlag, Uelzen 1965, p. 173ff ( online , PDF file; 3.93 MB)
  • Company doctor and prevention issues. In: Physical medicine and rehabilitation, journal for practical medicine. 15th year, issue 7, July 1974, pp. 162f. ( online , PDF file; 3.33 MB)

Others

  • H. Lottermoser: 10 minutes of gymnastics and self-massage every day. Revision of the new edition by Wolfgang von Nathusius. 16. – 20. Edition. Wilkens, Hanover.

literature

  • Lilly von Nathusius: Johann Gottlob Nathusius (1760–1835) and his descendants as well as his nephew Moritz Nathusius with his descendants. Private printing, Detmold 1964. New edition 2010, p. 134 f.
  • Ernst Günther Schenck: Dr. med. Wolfgang von Nathusius 70 years. In: The homecomer. October 15, 1981, p. 5.
  • Ernst Günther Schenck: Wolfgang Nathusius † obituary. In: The homecomer. July 31, 1986.

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ see Nathusius (1840, 1861), III. Line (Meyendorf), 3) Wolfgang Wilhelm Engelhard. In: Genealogical manual of the nobility . Volume 57 of the complete series, Adelige houses B, Volume XI, Starke, Limburg ad Lahn 1974, p. 316
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Jochen von Nathusius: Comments on the curriculum vitae of Wolfgang von Nathusius. As of July 10, 2006
  3. ↑ a b Change in the leadership of the student body to Wolfgang v. Nathusius. In: Leipziger Tageblatt. dated March 21, 1936
  4. ↑ The NSDStB had already won the elections for the General Student Committee in Leipzig in 1931
  5. ↑ In the foreword of the dissertation it says: “… The underlying investigations were carried out on (202) prostitutes recorded in the University Clinic for Dermatology and Venereal Diseases in the course of 1936/37; the examinations of the comparison group of patients from the clinic and the polyclinic were carried out simultaneously ... "
  6. ^ Gravure printing from the Hermann Ludewig printing house, Leipzig-Stötteritz
  7. ↑ Achim Kilian : Instructing for complete isolation: NKVD special camp Mühlberg / Elbe 1945–1948. Forum, Leipzig 1993, ISBN 3-86151-028-6 , p. 238
  8. ↑ Kilian, Achim: Mühlberg: 1939–1948. Böhlau publishing house. Cologne. Weimar. 200, p. 260
  9. ↑ The activity of Nathusius in Schachty (camp number 7182/6) as camp doctor was confirmed in 1950 by Konrad Piosinski, then a doctor at the Rudolf Virchow Hospital in Berlin
  10. ^ The doctor apart from civilization (in Soviet internment camps). see bibliography
  11. ↑ It was the doctor Peter Lechtken
  12. ↑ Background of the indictment is not known
  13. ^ The defendants were represented by the Chemnitz lawyer Curt Gareis
  14. ↑ This sanatorium was also operated by the LVA Hessen
  15. ↑ Also called the rehabilitation hospital
  16. ↑ Bulletin and organ of the Central Association of Doctors for Naturopathic Treatment, Imprint for the Scientific Advisory Board, p. 2
  17. ↑ Physical medicine and rehabilitation. In: Journal of General and Special Medicine. 13th year, volume 3. ML, Uelzen 1972, p. VI ( online , PDF file; 4.3 MB)
  18. ↑ a b Dr. Wolfgang v. Nathusius was a co-founder of the medical advisory board. Based on his experience from captivity, he was consulted by the pension offices and social courts as a recognized expert and is considered a co-founder of social medicine, which is now a university subject. See Werner Straube: The work of the returnees doctors. In: The homecomer. No. 1/2005
  19. ↑ see bibliography
  20. ↑ Physical medicine and rehabilitation, journal for practical medicine. Volume 18, Issue 7. MLV, Uelzen 1977, ISSN  0031-9287 , p. 309 ( online , PDF file; 3.09 MB)
  21. ↑ Office of the Federal President
personal data
SURNAME Nathusius, Wolfgang von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nathusius, Wolfgang Wilhelm Engelhard von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor and medical officer
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Gernrode , Harz
DATE OF DEATH July 11, 1986
Place of death Büdingen