Dr. med.
Walter Löwenberg
1892 - 1957

“I, Walter Löwenberg, was born in Berlin on 25 August 1892 as the son of the merchant Caesar Löwenberg and his wife Anna, née Cohn. I attended the Kaiser-Friedrich school in Charlottenburg from Easter 1899, from which I graduated on Easter 1911. I then devoted myself to the study of medicine, studied in Berlin and Freiburg, where I passed the preliminary medical examination in July 1913 with “very good”,” Löwenberg states in the curriculum vitae of his dissertation.

Education and Workplaces

His further medical studies were interrupted by the First World War: “From the beginning of the war I was in the field; in the first months as a medical orderly, then as a field sub and field assistant doctor. I was wounded in June 1918 and returned home. I then resumed my medical studies in Jena, where I passed the medical state examination in June 1919 with “very good”. Taking into account the period of military service for the practical year, I immediately received my licence to practise medicine. I have been working as a volunteer assistant at the Institute of Pathology at the Charité in Berlin since July of this year” [Löwenberg’s curriculum vitae, dissertation text]. Walter Löwenberg was awarded his doctorate in December 1919 with the thesis “Ueber die diffuse Ausbreitung von Gliomen in den weichen Häuten des Zentralnervensystems”, which he had prepared at the Institute of Pathology at the Charité in Berlin.

Löwenberg received his clinical internal medicine training with a focus on gastroenterology as an assistant physician at the I. Medical Clinic of the Rudolf Virchow Municipal Hospital in Berlin under Leopold Kuttner, who, along with Ismar Boas and Hermann Strauss, was one of the leading gastroenterologists in Berlin at the time and who significantly developed the organisation of the Society for Digestive and Metabolic Diseases in 1925. Löwenberg had worked in Kuttner’s department as a senior physician since 1925.

Walter Löwenberg worked closely with the leading bacteriologist Kurt Meyer of the Rudolf Virchow Hospital on the bactericidal effect of gastric and duodenal juice, on which he published in the Klinische Wochenschrift and in the “Boas-Archiv”. He also dealt with pernicious anaemia and the intestinal flora. He gave a lecture on this subject at the 8th meeting of the Society for Digestive and Metabolic Diseases in Amsterdam in 1928.

Löwenberg had a practice as a specialist in internal medicine in Berlin since 1929. His practice was located at Bleibtreustrasse 27 in Berlin from 1932 to 1935. Walter Löwenberg married Anne-Marie Cassirer (born 24 August 1902), who later became a paediatrician, in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1927. She was the daughter of the Berlin neurologist Richard Cassirer (1868 – 1925) and his wife Hedwig (1873 – 1952). Their son Gerhard was born in 1928 and their daughter Marianne in 1930.

After 1933

Walter and Anne-Marie Löwenberg experienced the anti-Semitic attacks after the beginning of Nazi rule. The Löwenbergs were affected by the National Socialists’ boycott of the medical practices of Jewish doctors on 1 April 1933. Walter Löwenberg’s licence to practise medicine was revoked in 1935. “The National Socialist government made it impossible for me to continue my practice and raise my children,” said Walter Löwenberg in his compensation application in 1951.

Walter and Anne-Marie Löwenberg were able to flee from Berlin to Amsterdam in 1935. Their two children, aged 7 and 5, initially stayed with Anne-Marie Löwenberg’s mother, Hedwig Cassirer, in Berlin. The couple reached the USA from Le Havre/France on the S.S. Georgic. They reached New York on 19 December 1935. Five months later, Anne-Marie Löwenberg met her mother and the two children in England and was able to travel with them from Southampton to New York on the S.S. Bremen on 7 June 1936. At the age of 72, Anne-Marie Löwenberg’s mother moved from London to join the Löwenberg family in New York in April 1946.

After language examinations and the American state examination, Walter Löwenberg/Loewenberg worked in private practice in New York from 1937 to 1957. From October 1936 to March 1947, he was able to intern free of charge as a clinical assistant at the medical outpatient department of Mount Sinai Hospital New York. He also worked as an assistant physician at Lenox Hill Hospital New York, the former German Hospital, together with Charles Isaac-Krieger for a while from 1940. Krieger had already been his colleague at the Medical Clinic of the Rudolf Virchow Hospital in Berlin with Leopold Kuttner in 1920. Walter Loewenberg’s health was impaired after he fell ill in 1952. He therefore could only pursue his professional activities to a limited extent.

His wife worked as a paediatrician for over four decades as an attending physician at the New York Infirmary and at the Day Care Division of the Department of Health in New York.

The Loewenbergs were naturalised in the USA in 1943.

Walter Loewenberg died at the age of 64 during a stay at Ormond Beach in Florida as a result of a stroke on 31 March 1957.

His wife survived him for 44 years. She died in New York on 17 October 2001. The gravesite of Walter and Anne Marie Loewenberg is located at Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale, Greenburgh, Westchester County, New York. Walter Loewenberg’s sister, Gertrud Wiesenthal, who was born in 1894, managed to escape to the USA in April 1938. She died in New York in 1961.