Ernst Rodenwaldt

Ernst Robert Carl Rodenwaldt (1878 to 1965) was a German hygienist, medical officer and malariologist who worked in German colonies in Africa and in the Dutch East Indies, and who was also a eugenicist. Born in Berlin, he studied medicine at the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy, became a military doctor in 1903, took a doctorate at Halle in 1904 and was posted to German Togo in 1910, where he linked the closing and opening of the Anecho lagoon to malaria outbreaks. He worked on malaria, typhus and cholera in Turkey and Asia Minor in the First World War, and from 1921 in the Dutch East Indies, where he studied filariasis in the delta of the Serajoe river on Java and published with Nicolaas Swellengrebel on the anopheline mosquitoes. He developed an interest in what he called geomedicine and later edited the three volume Welt-Seuchen-Atlas, an atlas of epidemic diseases published between 1952 and 1961. The source also records that he joined the Nazi party from abroad in 1933, lectured on racial hygiene as head of hygiene at Kiel, was dismissed in 1945 and was acquitted at a second denazification trial in 1948.