Wilhelm Pfannenstiel

Wilhelm Hermann Pfannenstiel (1890 to 1982) was a German physician and professor of hygiene at the University of Marburg, born in Breslau in Lower Silesia, now Wroclaw in Poland. He was the son of the gynecologist Hermann Johannes Pfannenstiel and studied medicine at the universities of Oxford, Heidelberg and Munich. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and the SS in 1934, and in Marburg he founded a chapter of the German Society for Racial Hygiene. As an SS hygiene inspector during the Second World War he visited concentration and extermination camps, and in August 1942 he witnessed, together with Kurt Gerstein, a gassing of Jews at the Belzec camp, an episode recorded in the Gerstein Report and later given in his own testimony before the Darmstadt court in 1950. He may also share responsibility with other SS officials for criminal medical experimentation on unwilling prisoners at Dachau.