Friedrich Wegener (born 1907 in Varel - July 9, 1990, Lübeck) was a German pathologist who is notable for his description of a rare disease... Although this disease was known before Wegener's description, since the 1950s it has been called by the name Wegener's granulomatosis.[1]
Wegener joined the Nazi Party in 1932.[1] As a relatively high ranking military doctor he spent some of World War II in a medical office three blocks from the Lodz Ghetto, a Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland.[1] There is speculation that he participated in experiments on concentration camp inmates.[1]
The American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) awarded Wegener a “master clinician” prize in 1989.[1] After his Nazi past was discovered in 2000, the ACCP rescinded the prize and, separately, a campaign was begun to rename Wegener's granulomatosis to ANCA-associated granulomatous vasculitis.[1] More recently, several journals proposed the name 'granulomatosis with polyangiitis' in a 2011 editorial [2].