Prof. Dr. med.
Imre Bach
1895 - 1966

Imre Bach was born on March 17, 1895, in Szeged, Hungary. His father was Benö Jenö Bach (died 1923), a coal and wood merchant who represented the Jewish community of Szeged as its vice president. His mother was Franciska Bach, née Klein (1869–1956), who was also from Szeged. Imre Bach grew up with six siblings, including Ernö Bach (1904–1945), who later became an internist and radiologist.

Education and career

Imre Bach attended the state high school in Szeged (now Radnoti Miklós High School) and graduated in 1913.

One of his classmates was the artist, painter, and typographer László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), who emigrated to Berlin in 1920, later taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar, fled Germany in 1934, lived initially in England, and emigrated to Chicago in the United States in 1937. The Bach family owned several early works by László Moholy-Nagy.

Bach studied medicine at the Budapest University of Science and Technology and received his doctorate in 1918. He participated in World War I for a short time. Between March and August 1919, Imre Bach was a soldier in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. He then worked as an assistant physician at the 3rd Medical   Department of the University of Budapest, which was headed by the well known internist and physiologist Sandor von Koranyi (1866-1944). From 1920 to 1923, Bach stayed in Germany as a guest researcher. He worked in the chemical laboratory of the Berlin Municipal Hospital Am Urban and in the First Medical Department   of the Charité.

After returning to Hungary, Bach worked at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences from 1924 to 1928, where the pharmacologist Miklós Jancsó was also working at the time, and from 1928 to 1934 at the Institute of Pathology at Ferenc József University in Szeged under József M. Baló. Here, Bach was able to continue his biochemical research in the institute’s chemical laboratory. In July 1933, he received his habilitation with his thesis “A fermentek orvosi vonatkozasai” [The Medical Significance of Enzymes, note H Je] and was appointed private lecturer at the University of Szeged. In 1934, he moved to the department for Internal Medicine and Diagnostics [Belgyógysázati Diagnosztikai Klinika, Szeged], where he worked as an assistant professor in clinical practice and teaching until 1944.

1944 / 1945

After the occupation of Hungary by the German Wehrmacht on March 19, 1944, the Hungarian government initiated the deportation of 440,000 Jews between May and July 1944. Most of them were murdered in Auschwitz. At the end of June 1944, 15,000 Jews from four Hungarian transit camps, including Szeged, were deported not to Auschwitz but to Strasshof an der Nordbahn, a transit camp near Vienna. Most of the deportees were Jews who had lived in towns and villages in southern Hungary. After his deportation to Austria, Imre Bach was forced to perform hard labor in Obersiebenbrunn in the district of Gänserndorf, about 30 km northeast of Vienna (https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/names/15118317, statement by Imre Bach on May 28, 1945). After liberation – the Strasshof camp was liberated by Soviet soldiers on April 10, 1945 – Imre Bach was able to return to Hungary. His mother, Franciska Bach, transported him in a wheelchair from near Vienna to Györ in Hungary (Miklos Julesz in his obituary for Imre Bach, 1966).

Nach 1945

In 1945, Imre Bach faced a completely new start. He took up residence in Budapest and in 1946 became senior physician in the Department of Endocrinology at Medical Clinic B of the City Hospital on Péterfy Sandor Street in Budapest’s 7th district. The hospital had a long tradition. It was founded in 1848 and developed rapidly. The new main building of the clinic dated from 1933. In the 1950s, the hospital had 1,500 beds. Bach worked, researched, and taught here until his sudden death in 1966. In 1947, the University of Szeged, where he had worked between 1924 and 1944, awarded him an honorary professorship. Bach was appointed full professor at the University of Budapest.

Scientific focus

Imre Bach lived in Berlin from 1920 to 1923. There he worked in the laboratory of the well known biochemist Peter Rona at the Municipal Hospital Am Urban (Rona, born as Peter Rosenfeld in 1871 in Budapest to a Jewish family, received his doctorate in medicine and chemistry in Vienna, habilitated in 1920, and was granted the right to teach medical chemistry at the University of Berlin. He had already founded the laboratory at the Urban Hospital together with Leonor Michaelis in 1905 and made it famous beyond Germany’s borders. In 1922, Rona took over the management of the renowned chemical department of the Institute of Pathology at the Charité Berlin. Dismissed by the Nazi authorities in 1933, Rona fled to Hungary in 1939. He did not survive the Holocaust). In Rona’s laboratory in Berlin, Imre Bach dealt with methodological questions of biochemistry, especially enzyme chemistry, and conducted research in particular on the kinetics and function of catalase. Bach published the results of his research, which he continued in Szeged, in the prestigious Biochemical Journal in 1931. During his time in Berlin, Bach also worked at the First Medical Department of the Charité under Wilhelm His Jr.

After 1945, Bach focused on questions in the field of endocrinology, particularly the function of the adrenal cortex. In addition, he conducted experimental research on the pathophysiology of arterial hypertension, especially the influence of monovalent cations on high blood pressure. His research findings attracted international attention, for example in a report in Nature in 1961.

Bach published around 70 papers, many of them in the Hungarian medical journal Orvosi Hetilap, which was founded in 1857 and featured numerous publications in the field of gastroenterology and metabolic pathology.

In 1964, he published his textbook “Practical Endocrinology in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics,” which he co-authored with pediatric diabetologist Lajos Barta, who taught at the First Children’s Clinic of the University of Budapest.

Together with Miklós Julesz, Imre Bach co-founded the Hungarian Society of Endocrinology.

Imre Bach died suddenly at the age of 71 on October 18, 1966, in Budapest. His grave is located in the Farkasrét Cemetery there.

Imre Bach’s brother, Dr. Ernö Bach, an internist and radiologist born in 1904, who worked at the University Medical Clinic in Leipzig in the early 1920s, was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp on June 19, 1944, as a “Hungarian Jew.” He was forced to perform hard labor under catastrophic conditions in the Gusen II satellite camp. He died on January 27, 1945, at the age of 40, as a result of the unspeakable conditions of his imprisonment.

Imre Bach’s brother-in-law, the brother of his first wife Erzsebet Bach, née Venetianer, the composer and conductor Sandor Vandor (born July 28, 1904—he had changed his birth name Venetianer to Vandor), was arrested as a Jew in 1944. He was forced to perform hard labor in a “Jewish camp” in Sopronbanfalva on the Austro-Hungarian border (German: Wandorf) on the so-called Southeast Wall. He died under the conditions of imprisonment on January 14, 1945.

The parents of Imre Bach’s first wife, Erzsebet Venetianer (born 1898), Dr. Jakab Venetianer (born 1874) and Rózsa Venetianer, née Pollacsek (born 1881), were victims of the Holocaust.