Friedrich Joseph Haass

Friedrich Joseph Haass (1780 to 1853), known in Russia as Fyodor Petrovich Gaaz, was a physician born in Bad Münstereifel who spent his working life in Moscow and became known there as the holy doctor of Moscow. As a member of the governmental prison committee of Moscow he devoted some twenty-five years, until the end of his life, to humanizing the penal system. In the last nine years before his death he spent all of his own assets on running a hospital for homeless people. He died in Moscow in 1853, and some twenty thousand people attended his funeral at the Vvedenskoye Cemetery, which the state paid for because he had no money left. The Catholic Church observes a remembrance day for him on the sixteenth of August. A school in his name and an entry in the ecumenical lexicon of saints keep his memory.