Gustav Adolf Scheel

Gustav Adolf Scheel (1907 to 1979) was a German physician and Nazi Party official. The son of a Protestant pastor, he studied law, political economy and theology at Heidelberg before turning to medicine, passed his state medical examination in 1934 and received his doctorate in medicine in 1935. His career was political rather than clinical: from 1936 he was Reich Student Leader, he served in the SS and the Sicherheitsdienst, and he was later Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter in Reichsgau Salzburg. He also led an Einsatzgruppe in occupied Alsace in 1940 and organized the October 1940 deportation of Karlsruhe's Jews. His only recorded medical service was as a Luftwaffe medical officer during the battle of France. He is recorded here as a physician by training whose life belongs to political history.