Prof. Dr. med.
Leopold Pollak
1878 - 1946

Leopold Pollak was born in Prague in 1878, the son of the merchant Julius Pollak and his wife Anna, née Kohn. His father ran the company Perelis & Pollak in Prague, which was founded in 1860. The family professed the Jewish faith.

Education and Places of Work

After attending a German-language high school in Prague’s New Town, Leo Pollak studied medicine at the German Karl Ferdinand University in Prague, graduating with the state examination and doctorate on 22 May 1902.

From 1903 to 1904, Pollak worked at the Institute of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Strasbourg under Franz Hofmeister and, during this time, observed the work of the internist Bernhard Naunyn at the University Medical Clinic in Strasbourg. Back in Vienna, he spent six months starting in October 1904 as a research assistant at the First University Medical Clinic under Hermann Nothnagel, followed by six months working at the Vienna University Neurological Clinic under Julius Wagner-Jauregg. In 1905–06, Pollak worked for a year as a resident physician at the University Medical Clinic in Munich under Friedrich von Müller. Pollak returned to Vienna once again and began working with Maximilian Sternberg at the Medical Clinic at the Wiedner Spital (district hospital in Vienna’s 4th district of Wieden). Among others, Julius Schnitzler, the brother of the writer Arthur Schnitzler, worked at this hospital as a surgeon and, from 1920, the pathologist Carl Sternberg.

At the same time, Pollak worked and conducted research in the Biochemistry Department of the Institute of Pharmacology at the University of Vienna under the pharmacologist Hans H. Meyer. He habilitated in internal medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna on 12 September 1914. He was appointed professor (extraordinarius) for internal medicine in Vienna on 30 June 1932.

Leo Pollak dealt with questions in the field of metabolic pathology, gout, diabetes mellitus and bronchial asthma. He was one of the first to use insulin in Austria in 1923. He published numerous papers on sugar metabolism and insulin therapy. He lectured on the pathology of the metabolism at the University of Vienna until 1937/38.

After the invasion of Austria by the German Wehrmacht in March 1938, Pollak was deprived of all of his offices and expelled from the University of Vienna by the Nazi authorities on 22 April 1938.

Escape to Great Britaien in 1938

Pollak fled to Great Britain via Switzerland (Zurich) on May 29, 1939. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he was temporarily interned at Enemy Alien and was able to work temporarily in a London clinic. In Newmarket, Suffolk, about 100 km north-east of London, Pollak was able to find work at the White Lodge Hospital there.

He died in Newmarket on 18 September 1946 at the age of 68.

Pollak’s sister, Melanie Pollak-Polacek (born 5.2.1882) and Pollak’s brother-in-law, Dr. Josef Polacek (born 9.8.1874), were deported from Prague to the Theresienstadt / Terezin ghetto in July 1942 and from there to the Auschwitz concentration camp in September 1943 and murdered.

Leopold Pollak’s older sister, Olga Pollak-Glaser, born in 1876, was murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp in October 1942.

Pollak’s niece, Dr. Nelly Polacekova, aged 35, was murdered in October 1942, and his nephew, 34-year-old Julius Polacek, was murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp in September 1944.

Another sister of Leopold Pollak, the art historian Alice Maria Pollak-Fried (born 29.9.1888) was able to flee to Great Britain, where she died in Hampstead, London, in 1946.