Prof. Dr. med.
Siegfried Samuel Korach
1855 - 1943

“Author, born in Posen on June 27, 1855, of the Mosaic faith, son of the physician J. Korach, attended the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium, which he left at Easter 1874 with his high school diploma (Abitur / Reifeprüfung) in order to devote himself to the study of medicine. He studied in Berlin until Easter 1875, then moved to the University of Breslau,” according to Siegfried Samuel Korach’s curriculum vitae in his dissertation. His mother was Cäcilie Korach, née Jaffé.

Education and place of work

In Breslau, now Wroclaw, Poland, he passed the state examination in 1878 and received his doctorate in the same year with his thesis “On Delivery after Perforation of the Skull.” He completed his internal medicine training at the Jewish Hospital in Cologne and in the medical department of the Cologne Citizens’ Hospital. In 1882, he moved to the Israelite Hospital in Hamburg (IK), founded by Salomon Heine in 1841, as an assistant physician and initially worked with the surgeon Heinrich Leisrink.

In 1886, Korach married Mathilde Levy, who was born in 1862 into a Hamburg merchant family. In the same year, Siegfried Samuel Korach became head of the Department of Internal Medicine at the IK in Hamburg. Korach and the surgeon Albert Alsberg were the defining personalities of the Jewish Hospital in Hamburg for more than four decades.

Clinically and in his publications, Korach focused on infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis. During the cholera epidemic in Hamburg in 1892, he cared for a large number of patients and was extensively involved in combating the epidemic.

In 1902, he supported the founding of the Israelite Nurses’ Home in Hamburg and actively campaigned for the establishment of a separate Jewish nursing school, which received state recognition in 1908. He taught regularly at this school and was appointed by the Hamburg Senate as a member of the state examination board.

During the First World War, Korach headed a reserve hospital with 60 beds within the IK.

At the suggestion of Bernhard Nocht, the Hamburg Senate awarded Korach the title of professor in 1917 in recognition of his services.

Korach had been a member of the (D)GVS since 1925 and had been a member of the advisory committee of the professional association since that time. Until 1932, he regularly attended the congresses of the (D)GVS as well as those of the German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM). In the Hanseatic city of Hamburg, Korach was a member of the local medical association and, from 1928, an honorary member of the Hamburg Medical Association.

 1933 – 1943

After the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship, he was subjected to the increasing persecution and humiliation of Jews. His membership in the state examination commission for nurse training was revoked in the spring of 1933. Nevertheless, he worked tirelessly against much resistance to preserve the Israelite Nurses’ Home in Hamburg and the Jewish nursing school, having retired in 1930 after 44 years in a leading position at the IK. In this context, Korach asked the then Senator for Health and physician Friedrich Ofterdinger for a personal meeting. Ofterdinger, a member of the NSDAP since September 1, 1929, and co-founder of the Nazi Medical Association in Hamburg in 1930, refused to meet with Siegfried Korach.

For several decades, Korach provided medical care to the residents of the Jewish infirmary, the nursing home at Schäferkampsallee 29, and the retirement home of the German-Israelite Community at Sedanstraße 23.

The Nazi authorities revoked his medical license on September 30, 1938. In the same year, the Nazi authorities placed Korach’s assets under a so-called security order. As a result, he could only dispose of his assets with permission. He, his wife, and a domestic worker were only allowed to dispose of a limited monthly “household allowance” of 900 RM, which was reduced again in 1943.

Deportation to Theresienstadt / Terezin

The elderly Korach couple lived at Hartungstrasse 1 in Hamburg and were cared for by a housekeeper. On June 19, 1943, Korach’s 81-year-old wife died. A few days later, on June 25, 1943 (Transport VI/8), the 88-year-old, nearly blind Siegfried Korach was deported to Ghetto Theresienstadt / Terezin. In the ghetto, he was placed in “closed care” in the infirmary / “Siechenheim” L 206.

Siegfried Korach died in the ghetto on the morning of July 1, 1943. The cause of death was given as “old age and marasmus.” The death notice for Siegfried Korach was signed by Dr. Max Bergmann, the former medical director of the Jewish Hospital in Hanover, who was also imprisoned in the Theresienstadt ghetto and murdered in Auschwitz in the fall of 1944.

Korach’s furnishings and his extensive library were auctioned off by the Nazi authorities in 1944.

A Stolperstein in front of his former home at Hartungstrasse 1 in Hamburg commemorates Siegfried Samuel Korach. A street in Hamburg-Lohbrügge has been named after him since 1965.