Erwin Gohrbandt

Erwin Gohrbandt (20 September 1890 to 3 January 1965) was a German surgeon born in Schlawe, Pomerania. He studied medicine at the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy for Military Medical Education in Berlin, received his medical license in 1917, and worked at the surgical university clinic of the Charité, where he habilitated in surgery in 1924. In 1931, with Ludwig Levy-Lenz, he was one of the first surgeons to perform sex reassignment surgery with vaginoplasty on some transgender patients, among them Dora Richter and Lili Elbe. From 1939 he was a consultant surgeon to the army and, from 1940, inspector of medical services in the Luftwaffe. In October 1942 he took part in a secret conference at which the freezing experiments on prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp were discussed, and he later published their results in 1945. After the war he worked in Berlin health administration, headed the surgical department of Moabit Hospital until the end of 1958, and chaired the Berlin Surgical Society in 1950 and 1951.