Walther Jaensch

File:Walther Jaensch.jpg

Portrait of Walther Jaensch, 1930s

Walther Rudolf Jaensch (5 April 1889 – 3 April 1950) was a German anthropologist, psychologist, and sports physician.

Biography

Walther Jaensch was born in Breslau, the son of physician Rudolf Jaensch and his wife Helene, née von Witten. Jaensch first studied medicine at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Silesia. He became active in the Corps Borussia Breslau in 1908 and proved himself as Subsenior, Consenior and Fuchsmajor. As an inactive he moved to the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1914, he passed the state examination.

During the World War I, he served as undersurgeon on the war front. He was wounded and awarded the Iron Cross II and I Class. After the war, he worked at the Philipps University of Marburg as a volunteer physician under Professor Gustav von Bergmann (1919). In 1920, he received his doctorate in Marburg. At that time he helped the Corps Rhenania Strasbourg to gain a foothold in Marburg. For this he received the ribbon in 1920. He worked at the Psychological Institute headed by his brother Erich Rudolf Jaensch and made a name for himself in experimental psychology. The brothers conducted research in the new fields of sense memory and psychonaturalism. He then worked at the Goethe University in Frankfurt on the performance of the mildly disturbed. In Frankfurt, he habilitated in internal medicine, constitutional and hereditary biology. Jaensch was a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation in the field of hereditary biology.

In 1927, Jaensch moved to the Charité, where he headed the Psychophysiological Laboratory. The one new department was also a counseling center for physical-mental developmental disorders and was supported by private foundations and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1929, he established himself as a specialist in internal medicine and corrective constitutional therapy for developmentally disabled children. He was also allowed to use the title of sports physician. From 1931, he was a part-time lecturer in biopsychology and sports medicine at the German College of Physical Education in Berlin-Grunewald. In 1932, he became director of the private Institute for Constitutional Research and Polyclinic for Constitutional Medicine at the Charité.

In 1933, he received a lectureship at the Charité and in 1934 the title of non-official professor. In 1936, he participated in the II International Congress of Sports Physicians with a contribution on racial politics. In 1940, Jaensch became director of the University Institute and Polyclinic for Constitutional Medicine of the Charité, after this institution of holistic medicine had initially been privately operated by him since 1932 with the support of the National Socialist German Lecturers League and was nationalized in 1940. Therefore, Jaensch was exempted from military service in 1940, having spent the first years of the war at the front as a military doctor. His scientific achievements were considered dubious by his colleagues and the clinic management (Max de Crinis). Jaensch conducted examinations with an autotonograph (blood pressure recorder). He sat on the advisory board of the German Society for Constitutional Research.

Jaensch joined the National Socialist Teachers' Association on February 1, 1933, and the National Socialist German Workers' Party two months later. In November 1933, he signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State. In March 1936, he completed an exercise as Oberarzt d. Res. in Potsdam with the General SS, during which he became Oberscharführer and last held the rank of Hauptsturmführer (Oberstabsarzt) in the SS-Hauptamt's training staff for medical training. For two and a half years Jaensch was deputy leader of the Reich lectureship at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin.

In 1944, Jaensch married Friedel Krockow despite an unfavorable inheritance assessment by the SS. After the end of the war, he was imprisoned by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany and held in several special camps near Berlin. Seven weeks after his release in 1950, Jaensch died of thrombosis sequelae, cardiomyopathy, and pulmonary embolism in his apartment at Alt-Moabit. In the Soviet occupation zone, his books Körperform, Wesensart und Rasse (1934) and Körperformung, Rasse, Seele und Leibesübungen (1936), which he wrote with collaborators, and the book Konstitutions- und Erbbiologie in der Praxis der Medizin (1934) which he edited, were placed on the list of literature to be eliminated.

Works

• Grundzüge einer Physiologie und Klinik der psycho-physischen Persönlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur funktionellen Diagnostik (1926)
• Klinische Rassenhygiene und Eugenik (1934)
• Konstitutions- und Erbbiologie in der Praxis der Medizin. Vorträge eines internationalen Fortbildungskurses in der Berliner Akademie für ärztliche Fortbildung im Frühjahr 1934 (1934; editor)
• Körperformung, Rasse, Seele und Leibesübungen (1936)

References

• Michael Grüttner, Biographisches Lexikon zur nationalsozialistischen Wissenschaftspolitik (= Studien zur Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte. 6). Heidelberg: Synchron (2004).
• Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag (2007).
• Hans-Christian Harten, Rassenhygiene als Erziehungsideologie des Dritten Reiches, Bio-bibliographisches Handbuch. Berlin (2006), p. 155.
• Arne Ristau, Sport und Sportmedizin im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland. Entwicklung und Gestaltung einer Fachdisziplin unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Olympischen Sommerspiele 1936 in Berlin. Diss. Berlin (2013).

External links

• Works by Walther Jaensch at German National Library