Dr. med.
Harry Cobliner
1884 - 1962

Harry Cobliner was born as the son of Meyer Max Cobliner and his wife Helene, née Brandt, in Posen, now Poznań, Poland, in 1884. The family was part of the Jewish religious community.

Education and Workplaces

“I, Harry Cobliner, was born in Posen on 27 November 1884, where I attended the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium and graduated on Easter 1904. I studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Munich, where I passed the medical state examination in June 1909. I spent my year as a medical trainee at the Psychiatric Clinic in Munich and at the Surgical Clinic and Medical Polyclinic in Heidelberg. I received my licence to practise medicine on 1 July 1910, Cobliner states in his dissertation. He was awarded his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg on 4 September 1911 with the thesis “Experimentelle Beiträge zur Entstehung der Colitis mercurialis im Anschluss an einem Fall von Sublimatvergiftung”. He had written the thesis under the gastrointestinal specialist Wilhelm Fleiner, the medical director of the Heidelberg University Medical Polyclinic. Cobliner was able to publish parts of the doctoral thesis in the Archiv für Verdauungskrankheiten (“Boas Archive”) the same year, no doubt aided by Wilhelm Fleiner, who had been recruited by Ismar Boas as the archive’s co-editor.

Cobliner worked as an assistant physician at the Institute of Pathology of the Nuremberg Municipal Hospitals in 1911; there is currently no information on further training stations. Harry Cobliner had been practising as a specialist for gastrointestinal and metabolic diseases in his hometown of Posen from 1914. He actively participated in the First World War as a military doctor from August 1914 to December 1918.

After the Treaty of Versailles, Posen was assigned to the Polish state in 1919. ” I left Posen in July 1921, as I considered it my duty as a German to preserve my Germanness,” Cobliner said in his application for compensation in 1951 (LArch NRW BR 3000, no. 253, sheet 7). He moved to Cologne, where he opened a specialist practice (private and panel practice) at Salierring 51 in July 1921, which soon became very successful. In addition to X-ray equipment, Cobliner owned two sigmoidoscopes, two rectoscopes, two oesophagoscopes and – after 1932 – a semi-flexible gastroscope (cf. application for restitution Harry Cobliner, LArch NRW Rep 266 no 9350, sheets 5 and 31).

After 1933

The number of his patients decreased continuously from 1 April 1933, when the National Socialists boycotted the practices of Jewish doctors. Cobliner was still listed in the Reich Medical Calendar in 1937 as a specialist for gastrointestinal and metabolic diseases in Cologne and marked as a Jewish doctor. His licence to practise medicine was revoked on 30 September 1938. He gave up his practice shortly afterwards. He had to deposit all his practice equipment in a storage room. “What I had built up so wonderfully and profitably in 17 years of practice was completely destroyed in the end by the practice ban,” Cobliner said in a letter to the district president in Cologne in March 1958 (LArch NRW BR 3000 no. 253, sheet 56).

Escape to the USA

The 56-year-old single Harry Cobliner fled from Germany via France and Spain to Portugal in 1941. He arrived in the USA from Lisbon on 12 June 1941 aboard the S.S. Serpa Pinto. He arrived in New York on 23 June 1941. In New York, he initially worked for facilities that cared for seriously ill long-term patients (at the Beth Abraham Home for Incurables in the Bronx, NY, from November 1941 to March 1943, then at the New York Farm Colony). After a two-year period of study, he passed the American state examination.

He moved to West Virginia on 1 August 1943 and lived in Charleston until his death in 1962. As West Virginia, unlike New York, had different rules for issuing licences to practise medicine, the 59-year-old Cobliner took up a post as assistant physician at the small 67-bed “Staats Hospital” founded by Dr. Harlan H. Staats in 1922, where he practised until he was 74 years old.

Harry Cobliner died in Charleston, West Virginia, at the age of 77 on the second of July 1962. His gravesite is located at the B’nai Jacob Cemetery in Charleston.

Cobliner’s younger brother, Dr. jur. Ludwig Cobliner, had been a lawyer in private practice in Bremen-Blumenthal since 1919. He was first imprisoned by the GESTAPO in August 1944 at the “labour education camp” Bremen-Farge and then deported to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg in November 1944. He did not survive the concentration camp. His older brother, Dr. med. Samuel Cobliner, a practising paediatrician in Frankfurt, fled Germany to Palestine in 1936, where he died in 1946.