14Robert Rössle
August 19, 1876 in Augsburg –
November 21, 1956 in Berlin
Robert Rössle is considered one of the most important German pathologists of the early twentieth century. His lifetime of scientific achievements led to numerous honors. Today, however, his reputation has come under critical scrutiny, primarily because of his activities during the National Socialist era.
Robert Rössle was born on August 19, 1876 in Augsburg. From 1895 onwards he studied medicine in Munich, Kiel and Strasbourg; In 1900 he received his doctorate in Munich. He then returned to Kiel; starting in 1904 he worked at the Pathological Institute as a lecturer in general pathology and pathological anatomy. In 1906 he returned to head the Pathological Institute in Munich; upon the death of Otto von Bollinger he headed the institute as Professor of Pathology. From 1911 and 1921 he took over the Professorship for General Pathology and Pathological Anatomy at the University of Jena, then at the University of Basel and until 1929.
In that year he was appointed to the Chair of Pathology at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Berlin. He remained as director of the Institute for Pathology at the Charité until his retirement in 1948. Between 1932 and 1942 he was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch. Robert Rössle was not a member of the NSDAP, so he was able to continue teaching at the Humboldt University in Berlin after the end of the Second World War.
Today it is impossible to say for certain how far Rössle went in adapting to the National Socialism system, and the extent to which he profited from it. It is clear that the Institute of Pathology adapted to political conditions under his leadership, and that Rössle used the dissolution of departments to increase his influence. He had an authoritarian and power-oriented style of leadership that was common at the time, even among self-confessed opponents of National Socialism. But Rössle cannot be counted among them.
Like many of his contemporaries, he never spoke out publicly or took action against the expulsion and persecution of his own colleagues who were German Jews. On the contrary, he carried out the 1933 decree of the Nazi government to dismiss all persons of Jewish faith or Jewish origin from positions in public institutions. In interviews conducted by the Allies after 1945, Rössle described his attitude towards the fascist system as ”negative“. And it is true that to date, research has turned up no evidence or documents in which Rössle expressed either support or enthusiasm about the seizure of power by the National Socialists or their later policies, as many of his colleagues did. It has been shown that Rössle supported colleagues who were persecuted under the Nazi racial laws.
In his scientific work, originally Rössle mainly dealt with questions of tumor pathology and inflammatory processes. Later he turned his attention to questions of growth, constitutional theory and aging. He also became known for his work on allergies, which he interpreted as a pathological increase of normal cellular processes. He also coined the term ”pathergy“ for the pathologically increased sensitivity of an organism to subtle external stimuli. The Rössle syndrome is named after him; in this condition, an alteration in sex chromosomes leads to an absence of female germ cells in ovaries.
After the end of the war in 1945, Rössle remained in Berlin, where he tried to reorganize the Pathological Institute and set up a medical-biological institute in Buch. He was a member of the founding board of the Institute for Medicine and Biology of the German Academy of Sciences, which was founded in Buch on July 25, 1947. Robert Rössle made a great contribution to the development of science and clinics on the Campus Berlin-Buch. He died in Berlin in 1956.
This short text cannot adequately reflect the role of Robert Rössle during the National Socialist period. A more detailed version can be found here: www.berlin.de/museum-pankow/ (PDF, german only).
In summary, it can be said that Rössle should assume some blame for work carried out from 1933 to 1945, during which he adapted to the National Socialist regime, somewhat opportunistically. Rössle was neither a resistance fighter nor a hero. He made mistakes and took actions or allowed things that we condemn today. As a figure, Robert Rössle should remind us that the border between science and atrocity is not a solid one, but rather a transitional zone into which research and medicine can very easily pass, or at least pave the way for others to carry out barbaric acts.
Gerhard Thieme, Bronze, 1960
