Ernst Rodenwaldt
{{Short description|German racial hygienist, university teacher and military physician (1878–1965)}}
File:Ernst Rodenwaldt. Photomechanical print. Wellcome V0028014.jpg
{{Eugenics sidebar|pre-war academics}}
Ernst Robert Carl Rodenwaldt (August 5, 1878 – June 4, 1965) was a German hygienist, eugenicist, medical officer, and malariologist who worked in German colonies in Africa and in the Dutch East Indies. He had a special interest in geography and the distribution of diseases which made him interested in what he called geomedicine.
He also served as surgeon for the Wehrmacht during the Third Reich. He researched and wrote on the anopheline mosquitoes of Indonesia and, later in life, edited an atlas of epidemic diseases, Welt-Seuchen-Atlas or World Atlas of Epidemic Diseases which was published in three volumes.
Life and work
Rodenwaldt was born in Berlin to college professor Robert and Katharina Luther. His brother Gerhart became a famous archaeologist. After studies at the Köllnisches Gymnasium and a one-year service in the Guard Fusilier Regiment during 1897–98, he went to study medicine at the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy in Berlin from 1897 and became a military doctor in 1903. Among his inspirations he counted Siegfried Passarge.{{Cite journal |last=Jusatz |first=Helmut J. |date=1971 |title=Geomedical research in Ernst Rodenwaldt's scientific work |url=https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/0016718571901667 |journal=Geoforum |language=en |volume=2 |issue=3 |pages=95–100 |doi=10.1016/0016-7185(71)90166-7}}
He received a doctorate from the Friedrichs University, Halle in 1904 and conducted research on tropical nematode parasites and worked in Hamburg before being posted to German Togo in 1910. Here he examined tropical infectious diseases and discovered a connection between the closing and opening of the Anecho lagoon and malaria outbreaks.
In 1915 he became a staff physician with the army and worked on malaria, typhus and cholera in Turkey and Asia Minor during World War I. He habilitated in Heidelberg in 1919 with studies on malaria. From 1921 he worked with in the Dutch East Indies and in 1928 he was an inspector of public health. He was informed of filariasis in the delta of the Serajoe river in Java by {{ill|Steffen Lambert Brug|ru|Бруг,_Стеффен_Ламберт}}.
He then examined the intensity of infection and identified that the parasites were spread by mosquitoes that liked the backwaters of the flood plains following the rains. The washoff from the deforested hills led to the formation of new channels and the creation of stagnant pools where the mosquito larvae bred among the roots of Pistia stratiotes.
He noted that just a few kilometers from the delta the people did not suffer from any infection. Along with Nicolaas Swellengrebel he published on the anopheline mosquitoes of the region.{{cite journal |author=Rodenwaldt, E. |year=1938 |title=Die nicht gemeinsamen Rasseelemente der Balischen Kasten |journal=Archiv für Rassen und Gesellschaftsbiologie |volume=32 |pages=111–142}} He became a foreign member of the NSDAP in 1933 and when he returned to Germany, he joined the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel as a head of hygiene in 1934.
In 1934, he attended the conference of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations held in Zurich along with Ernst Rüdin and {{ill|Lothar Tirala|de|Lothar_Gottlieb_Tirala}}.{{cite book |author=Kühl, Stefan |title=The Nazi connection. Eugenics, American Racism, and German national socialism |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1994 |place=New York |pages=27-28}} He gave lectures on racial hygiene and purity both at the university and to the public. He served in the {{ill|Berlin-based Military Medical Academy|de|Pépinière}} during World War II and headed its Institute for Tropical Medicine and Tropical Hygiene from 1940.
He took an interest in race and anthropology and was an editor for the journal Archiv für Rassen und Gesellschaftsbiologie.{{Cite journal |last=Sysling |first=Fenneke |date=2015-09-10 |title=Faces from the Netherlands Indies: Plaster casts and the making of race in the early twentieth century |url=http://journals.openedition.org/rhsh/2595 |journal=Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines |issue=27 |pages=89–107 |doi=10.4000/rhsh.2595 |issn=1622-468X}} At the end of the war he was held prisoner of war in Windermere. There, he became the head doctor of a German prisoner of war hospital after a few months.
In early 1946, at the insistence of his English colleagues, he was released to Germany, where he learned that he had already been dismissed from his position as a professor of hygiene by the American military government at the end of 1945 due to his involvement with the National Socialists. After being classified as a "lesser offender" (Minderbelasteter) in the first instance of the denazification process, he was finally acquitted in a second trial in 1948.{{Cite book |last=Kiminus |first=Manuela |url=https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/3215/1/zusammenfassungdoktorarbeitmanuelakiminus.pdf |title=Ernst Rodenwaldt – Leben und Werk |language=de |trans-title=Ernst Rodenwaldt - Life and Work}}
He made use of his publication on anthropological studies in Java on the Mestizos of Kisar to support the idea that he appreciated mixed race people.{{Cite journal |last=Pols |first=Hans |last2=Anderson |first2=Warwick |date=2018 |title=The Mestizos of Kisar: An insular racial laboratory in the Malay Archipelago |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0022463418000358/type/journal_article |journal=Journal of Southeast Asian Studies |language=en |volume=49 |issue=3 |pages=445–463 |doi=10.1017/S0022463418000358 |issn=0022-4634}} In 1951 he became head of geomedical research at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and published a textbook on hygiene along with Richard-Ernst Bader.{{cite book|author=Kutzer, Michael|chapter=Rodenwaldt, Ernst|title= Neue Deutsche Biographie 21 |year=2003|pages= 697–698|url= https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd116579277.html#ndbcontent |language=de}}{{Cite journal |last=Jusatz |first=H. J. |date=1966 |title=Ernst Rodenwaldt Zum Gedächtnis 5. 8. 1878 4. 6. 1965 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/27816707 |journal=Geographische Zeitschrift |volume=54 |issue=3 |pages=235–237 |issn=0016-7479}}
A major work was his three volume atlas of epidemic diseases, Welt-Seuchen-Atlas (1952, 1956, 1961), coauthored with H.J. Jusatz. In 1957 he published an autobiography, Ein Tropenarzt erzählt sein Leben ("A tropical physician relates his life"). In 1963 he also contributed to Weltkarten zur Klimakunde ("World Maps of Climatology").
Until his death in 1965, he continued to serve as a consultant for various organizations. He influenced the medical service of the Bundeswehr, was an advisory board member in the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, and was involved in development aid. His biography of Leon Battista Alberti as a renaissance hygienist was published posthumously.
References
{{reflist}}
External links
- [https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/AICTOQ2IOLD2CXMUEEES47I2QCOBPU4M Ein Tropenarzt erzählt sein Leben] (1957, autobiography)
- [https://www.atlaseum.com/atlases/welt-seuchen-atlas-atlas-of-epidemic-diseases Samples from the Welt-Seuchen-Atlas]
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rodenwaldt, Ernst}}
Category:German Army personnel of World War II
Category:German prisoners of war in World War II held by the United Kingdom