Helmut Poppendick

Helmut Poppendick (6 January, 1902-11 January, 1994;) Internist. Medical Doctorate, Chief of the Personal Staff of the Reich Physician SS and Police. Defendant in the Doctors' Trial.

He studied medicine from 1919 to 1926 in Gottingen, Munich, and Berlin. Poppendick received his medical license on 1 February, 1928. Then, he worked for four years as a clinical assistant at the First Medical Clinic of Charité in Berlin. From June 1933 to October 1934 he was the assistant medical director at Virchow Hospital in Berlin.

In 1935, he completed training as an expert for "race hygiene" at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics. After this, he became the adjutant of the ministerial director Arthur Gutt at the Reich Ministry of the Interior. He was also the chief of staff at the SS Office for Population Politics and Genetic Health Care, which in 1937 became the SS Main Race and Settlement Office. Poppendick was departmental head and staff leader of the Genealogical Office.

At the beginning of the World War II, he was drafted as an adjutant to a medical department of the army and took part in the attack on Belgium, France and the Netherlands. In November 1941, Poppendick was accepted into the Waffen SS. In 1943, Ernst-Robert Grawitz of the Reich Physician SS appointed him to lead his personal staff. Poppendick joined the NSDAP in 1932 (party member No. 998607) and the SS (No. 36345). He reached the rank of Colonel in SS.

Poppendick was implicated in a series of medical experiments done on concentration camp prisoners, including the medical experiments done in Ravensbrück. He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment by the American Military Tribunal No. I on August 20, 1947. He was released from the prison on January 31 1951. Later on, Poppendick managed to get his medical services paid by insurance, in Oldenburg.