Erich Hippke

Erich Hippke (7 March 1888 in Prökuls – 10 June 1969 in Bonn) was a German Air Force General Surgeon.[1]

Life

In the time of the Nazi Germany, from 1937 to December 1943, Hippke was the Chief Medical Officer of Luftwaffe. He was also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research. Hippke was the true source of the ideas for the so-called "freezing experiments" on behalf of the Luftwaffe, conducted at Dachau concentration camp by Sigmund Rascher.[2]

He was succeeded by Oskar Schröder on May 15, 1944.[3]

He was arrested only in December 1946. By that time he was a general practitioner working in Hamburg, Germany. He avoided the Doctors' Trial and left Nuremberg without charge.[4] He was never charged with a crime but American investigators of the Nazi medical atrocities later concluded that he was actually the source of the idea for those deadly experiments on humans.[5][6]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Heller, Kevin (2011). Oxford University Press, ed. The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. ISBN 978-0199554317.
  2. ↑ Moreno, Jonathan D. (2000). Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans. Routledge. pp. 7–17. ISBN 978-0415928359.
  3. ↑ Mackowski, Maura Phillips (2005). Texas A&M University Press, ed. Testing the Limits: Aviation Medicine and the Origins of Manned Space Flight pg.95. ISBN 1585444391.
  4. ↑ Klee, Ernst (2008). The people lexicon to the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Koblenz: Ed. Kramer. ISBN 9783981148343.
  5. ↑ Heller, Kevin (2011). Oxford University Press, ed. The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. ISBN 978-0199554317.
  6. ↑ Hippkes letter to Wolff of 6 March 1943. In at Nuremberg Trials Project. (Nürnberger Document NO-262).