Acclaimed scientist, murderous colonialist
Five years ago, the ARD history series “Charité” had the best start in the last 25 years with an audience share of 26 percent. The crème de la crème of acting presented the titans of German medical history in this television spectacle: Rudolf Virchow, Emil Behring, Paul Ehrlich, Ernst von Bergmann and Robert Koch.
The names of these men – women will not be found in medicine at that time – are still world-famous today. However, one of these names has been topping everyone and everything for the last two years: Robert Koch. We owe that to the corona virus. Every day there are always new corona bulletins, statistics, press conferences and television appearances from the Robert Koch Institute. The institute belongs to the Federal Ministry of Health. It was founded in Berlin in 1891 as the “Royal Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases”.
Robert Koch was born in 1843 as the third of thirteen children in a family of miners in Clausthal in Lower Saxony and achieved world fame as one of the most successful medical scientists of the late 19th century. He died in Baden-Baden in 1910. In 1876 he succeeded in cultivating the anthrax pathogen, with which he was able to completely present its role in the development of the disease for the first time. In 1882 he discovered the causative agent of tuberculosis and in 1883 the cholera bacterium.
Even a scandal involving the harmful tuberculin he developed did not diminish his fame, but it did result in legal restrictions on human testing. Koch’s discoveries were fundamental to today’s bacteriology, virology, immunology and hygiene. Worldwide veneration is reflected in monuments in Poland, Croatia, Tanzania, Great Britain and Japan. Institutes, moon craters, glaciers and an ICE are named after him, as are countless streets, squares and schools. It can be found on stamps and commemorative plaques. In Berlin there is a Robert Koch Museum with its mausoleum, and the Robert Koch Institute. That is one Robert Koch, the radiant hero in the German science firmament.
But there is another Robert Koch. Between 1883 and 1908 he spent more than half his time traveling, in Egypt and India because of cholera, in South Africa, India and German East Africa (today Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda and parts of Mozambique) because of rinderpest, in Java and New Guinea because of malaria, a second time in German East Africa to study sleeping sickness.
“But out here lies the gold of science on the street,” he wrote home in 1903 from Bulawayo (then Rhodesia), where he felt restricted and controlled. In Africa, however, he was free to do whatever he wanted. When malaria, rinderpest and sleeping sickness increasingly threatened the economic development of the colonies, he was commissioned by the German and British colonial administrations in 1906 to research sleeping sickness in Uganda, which was raging there and claiming tens of thousands of victims. On site, he first ensured that thousands of sick people were crammed together in “research camps” under horrific conditions on the Ugandan Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria. They lived in straw huts, without blankets, without clean water, often fed only flour and salt, sometimes even tied up. He then tested the arsenic-containing arsanilic acid (Atoxyl) in ever increasing doses on the unsuspecting, helpless patient. He accepted thousands of blind people with his injections, every tenth of his victims died – from the human experiments and from being imprisoned in the camps. Atoxyl ultimately proved useless.
Robert Koch abused Africa. He misused the people living there as objects, as material. This is the other Robert Koch, the protagonist of an inhuman tropical medicine that played a key role in the colonization of Africa. Incidentally, lesser-known colonial tropical physicians such as Claus Schilling or Eugen Fischer later continued this type of experimentation in the Nazi concentration camps. And one such “racial hygienist” by the name of Ernst Rodenwaldt even remained an adviser to the German Armed Forces and the Development Aid Ministry until 1965.
One Robert Koch is revered. The other Robert Koch is kept secret. His part in the crimes of the colonial era seems to have succumbed to amnesia, being glossed over or denied. The Robert Koch Institute describes Koch’s atrocities on its website as a “dark chapter”. It doesn’t get any more trivializing for this medicine without humanity.
Read more: Michael Lichtwarck-Aschoff: Robert Koch’s monkey. The grandiose error of the famous plague doctor. Hirzel, Stuttgart 2021. 24.80 euros
