Lübben Bernhard

Note: The following report was written by Dr. Udo Lübben, dermatologist in Bremen. It is reproduced in full below.

Lübben Bernhard Dr. med (¤1911 Augustfehn -†1987 Bremen). Grew up in Nordenham, where he also graduated from high school. Studied medicine in Munich, Tübingen and Kiel, where he passed his "emergency state examination" in 1939 and was subsequently drafted "for a short-term exercise", which lasted a total of 12 years. As my father wanted to avoid the compulsory weekend SS service as a student, he interrupted his studies for a year and joined the Reichswehr (manned artillery), which he left with the rank of medical sergeant. Thanks to his uniform, he had his peace and quiet at weekends.

WW2 took him with a medical unit via DK to Rouen, among other places, where he served under Prof. Schürmann in the military hospital for sexually transmitted diseases. Every morning, around 40 go-preparations had to be made, examined and presented to the chief. His unit resided in a "chateau", as the soldiers called it.

Completely unexpectedly, he was then transferred to the Eastern Front as a staff doctor. When he got off the train at a station in the middle of nowhere and was picked up by a motorcyclist, he saw a battery of 8.8 guns pointing in all four directions, which gave him a bad feeling.

In 1944, he was captured by Army Group Center, probably near Vitebsk. He was lying with some soldiers in a trench that the Soviets were shelling, when a ricochet caused a forearm-length splinter from a fence post to pierce his sweater on his back without injuring him.

After a few short stays in several prison camps, he was transferred to a new camp in Uzbekistan near Tashkent. It was located in the middle of the desert with a continental and therefore extreme climate and surrounded by six layers of barbed wire, as he later repeatedly emphasized. It was also remarkable that the camp housed not only German soldiers but also Japanese prisoners of war, whom my father admired for their (self) discipline. The Japanese colleagues kept their medical records in German and were sometimes even able to communicate with him in German. (" Doctor - Russian doctors very bad!")

As he gradually reported to me and my younger brother (a humanities scholar), without us asking him, there were many episodes for him as one of the camp doctors that would make a book of their own. Quote: "Every diagnosis <pneumonia> was a death sentence". A few years before his death, he told me that the Bundeswehr Academy in Hamburg had contacted him with a request to give a lecture there about his experiences as a camp doctor in Uzbekistan, but he had declined. On the one hand, he could not talk about it in public, and on the other, people would not believe him anyway.

In 1950, he was able to return to Bremen in a desolate physical condition, where his mother and sister were still living; his father had died immediately after the end of the war. My father had actually wanted to become a pediatrician, but as he didn't have any specialist qualifications, he decided to become a dermatologist. Nevertheless, he was credited with a year of venereology in Rouen thanks to a letter from Prof. Schürmann, who subsequently certified his work at that time at his request.

In Bremen, as a port city, all positions at the clinics after the end of the war were filled by the navy doctors who had remained on site at the end of the war. When he presented himself at the Bremen Dermatology Clinic (then director Dr. Fölsch), he was turned down because there was no vacancy. When he then left the clinic, the OA came after him, he had managed to convince the boss ("...you can't send this man away again!") that he could at least continue his specialist training as a "guest doctor". So he worked as an assistant doctor in the clinic for a social welfare salary. His participation in one of the chief visits clashed with his obligatory weekly visit to the social welfare office to collect his benefits. The social welfare office was unable to make an appointment at a different time.

There are interesting episodes to tell about his time in the clinic, e.g. about the then - in the truest sense of the word - closed department for prostitutes with a US MP on a stool by the bars in the corridor (Bremen and Bremerhaven were an American enclave). Among other things, he experienced the treatment of venereal infections with penicillin and the administration of glucocorticoids, e.g. for pemphigus.

He wrote his doctoral thesis under Prof. Albin Proppe in Kiel, for which he was sent a box of textbooks from the Göttingen University Library, which he had to return after 4 weeks. Some relatives in Bremen helped him to transcribe important passages. He finally obtained his doctorate in Kiel in 1953 on the subject: "On uremicides with a casuistic contribution of a uremicide with the manifestations of pemphigus vulgaris".

In 1955 he married my mother, whom he still knew from the school they attended together in Nordenham. I was born in 1956 and my brother in 1959.

In the first years of his practice (he initially lived in a back room of the practice), he gave medical lessons to prospective captains at the Bremen Maritime School (now the "College of Nautical Science") once a week before his regular consultation hours due to his strained financial situation. In order to get his already experienced "students" awake at that early hour, he began each lecture with a unique poem or joke from the Temmler calendar ("Pearls of German Poetry", as he called it). This way of beginning lessons was legendary among the course participants, as I was later assured by a captain when he asked me in my office in Bremen about possible connections to the nautical school because of my surname. Each year of training ended with a practical task in which the future captains had to line up in a circle with their trousers down and administer an intragluteal NaCl injection to the person in front of them under my father's supervision.

My father then ran his specialist practice in Bremen for several decades. As a high school student who knew that he would follow in his father's footsteps, I would occasionally visit him in the practice and had to look at the methylene blue-stained go-preparations on display: " Findings? - Negative! - Take a closer look again..."

As he once told me, a patient said to him: "Doctor, were you once in the military? - Yes - but you can tell..."

Due to the ZVS, I didn't get my university place in Tübingen in 1975 (although my first preference), as my father would have liked, especially as I would have become active in his fraternity there, but in Kiel (8th place). Due to the significant age difference, I was unable to take over his practice, which patients had repeatedly asked him about when he handed over his practice.

My passing the state examination in Kiel in 1981 naturally filled him with pride, as did my doctorate under Prof. Enno Christophers in 1983. Unfortunately, he didn't live to see my specialist examination in Bremen in 1987. He died six months earlier after a long and serious illness.