Carl Coerper

Vocation

German physician and hygienist who co-founded the German Society for Social Hygiene in 1928. He habilitated in 1932 on the relationship between social hygiene and social biology and sociology. Coerper remained in office after 1933, as he welcomed the new racial hygienic laws of the National Socialists (Nazis). He joined the NSDAP and the Nazi Teaching Association as well as the NSD Medical Association. Coerper organized the health care system in Cologne according to racial hygiene aspects and established a genetic health file of around 400,000 people in Cologne. Of these, more than 3,000 people were compulsorily sterilized. After the end of the war, Coerper was dismissed from his offices as deputy of the City of Cologne and lecturer at the University of Cologne. Coerper then headed the "Health Services" unit owned by entrepreneur Karl Pawlowski. Coerper used old contacts in the health care sector to collect large amounts of medicines worth several million reichsmark for the Protestant Relief Society of Westphalia. Until 1948, Coerper founded thirty hospitals and homes for his new employer. Coerper's relationship with his friends Richard Siebeck and Viktor von Weizsäcker enabled Karl Pawlowski to found the first psychosomatic specialist clinic in West Germany, the Wittgenstein clinic in Bad Berleburg. From 1954 he was deputy chairman of the federal committee for health education. He died on 4 January 1960 in Wuppertal, aged 73. Link to Wikipedia biography (German)