Carl-Heinz Rodenberg

Carl-Heinz Rodenberg, sometimes written Karl-Heinz Rodenberg, was a German neurologist and psychiatrist, born in Heide on 19 November 1904 and dead in 1995. The son of a physician, he studied medicine and took his doctorate at the University of Marburg in 1930 with a thesis on combined epileptic and schizophrenic symptoms, then worked at the university psychiatric clinic and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. His record belongs to the history of medicine in the service of the Nazi state, not to its achievements. He joined the Nazi Party and the SA in 1932, held posts in racial and hereditary health policy, sat as a judge on a Hereditary Health Court that ruled on compulsory sterilization, and in 1940 served as an expert in the Action T4 program, deciding from questionnaires which disabled patients would be killed. From 1943 he directed the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion, and from 1941 wrote in medical journals about the castration of homosexual men, articles that Heinrich Himmler praised in 1942. The atlas records him as a documented case of professional complicity in medical crime.