Friedrich Wegener

Friedrich Wegener was a German pathologist, born in Varel, Oldenburg, on 7 April 1907 to a father who was a doctor and a mother who was a Swedish gymnastic director, and he died in Lubeck on 9 July 1990. In 1936 he described a systemic disorder characterized by granulomatous inflammation and vasculitis affecting the upper and lower respiratory tracts and the kidneys; although the disease was known before his description, it was generally called Wegener disease or Wegener granulomatosis from the 1950s and is now called granulomatosis with polyangiitis. His record is contested. Details of his conduct under the Nazi regime became available only from 2006: he joined the Nazi Party in 1932, belonged to the Sturmabteilung, and as a relatively high-ranking military physician spent part of World War II in a medical office near the Lodz Ghetto, where he conducted autopsies on Jewish concentration camp inmates and the facility performed experiments on prisoners. There is no direct evidence that he took active part in the experiments, and he was released without trial because no charges were brought. After his Nazi past was discovered, the American College of Chest Physicians rescinded a master clinician prize it had given him in 1989, and professional societies moved to the neutral name granulomatosis with polyangiitis.