Joachim Mrugowsky

Joachim Mrugowsky (1905 to 1948) was a German bacteriologist and SS physician who coordinated human experimentation on prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and he is recorded here as part of the history of medical crimes committed under National Socialism. The son of a doctor, he studied natural sciences and medicine at the University of Halle from 1925 and took a medical doctorate and a doctorate of natural sciences in 1930 and 1931, then worked at the Hygiene Institute of the University of Halle. He joined the SS in 1931 and rose to colonel in both the General SS and the Waffen-SS, serving as chief of the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS, and in 1944 he became an associate professor of hygiene at the University of Berlin. The experiments he coordinated included tests of typhus vaccines and of biological warfare agents such as poisoned bullets. He was convicted at the Doctors' Trial, sentenced to death in August 1947 and executed on 2 June 1948.