Outandabout-Magazine-Oct-issue-191

Sir Ludwig Guttmann
OCTOBER 2021 | 31
Sir Ludwig Guttmann CBE FRS (3
July 1899 – 18 March 1980) was
a German-British neurologist
who established the Stoke
Mandeville Games, the sporting
event for people with disabilities
(PWD) that evolved in England
into the Paralympic Games.
A Jewish doctor who
fled Nazi Germany
just before the
start of the
Second World
War, Guttmann
was a founding father
of organized physical
activities for people
with disabilities.
Ludwig Guttmann
was born on 3 July
1899 to a German
Jewish family in Tost
in Upper Silesia in
the former German
Empire (currently
Toszek, Poland), the son
of Dorothy (Weissenberg)
and Bernard Guttmann, a
distiller. His family moved
when he was three years old
to the Silesian city of Königshütte
(today Chorzów, Poland) where he passed
his Abitur at the humanistic grammar school in
1917 before he was called up for military service.
Guttmann encountered his first paraplegic
patient, a coal miner with a spine fracture,
while volunteering at an accident hospital in
Königshütte. The patient later died of sepsis.
[ Guttmann started his medical studies in April
1918 at the University of Breslau. He transferred
to the University of Freiburg in 1919 and received
his Doctorate of Medicine in 1924.
By 1933, Guttmann was working in Breslau
(now Wrocław, Poland) as a neurosurgeon and
lecturing at the university. Guttmann learned
from the pioneer of neurosurgery Otfrid
Foerster at his research institute. Despite having
worked successfully as first assistant to Foerster,
Guttmann was expelled from his
university appointment and his
job in 1933 under the Nuremberg
Laws and his title changed to
“Krankenbehandler” (one who
treats the sick). With the arrival
of the Nazis in power, Jews were
banned from practising medicine
professionally, and he was
assigned to work at the Breslau
Jewish Hospital, where he became
medical director in 1937. Following
the violent attacks on Jewish people
and properties during Kristallnacht on
9 November 1938, Guttmann ordered his staff
to admit any patients without question. The
following day, he justified his decision on a
case-by-case basis with the Gestapo. Out of 64
admissions, 60 patients were saved from arrest
and deportation to concentration camps.
Escape to Britain
In early 1939, Guttmann and his family left
Germany because of the Nazi persecution of the
Jews. An opportunity for escape had come when
the Nazis provided him with a visa and ordered
him to travel to Portugal to treat a friend of the
Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar.
Guttmann was scheduled to return to Germany
via London, when the Council for Assisting
Refugee Academics (CARA) arranged for him
to remain in the United Kingdom. He arrived
with his wife Else Samuel Guttmann and two
children, a son, Dennis, and a daughter, Eva age
6 in Oxford, England, on 14 March 1939. CARA
negotiated with the British Home Office on
their behalf, and gave Guttmann and his family
£250 (equivalent to £16,000 in 2019) to help
settle in Oxford. Guttmann continued his spinal
injury research at the Nuffield Department of
Neurosurgery in the Radcliffe Infirmary. For the
first few weeks after arrival the family resided in
the Master’s Lodge of Balliol College (with the
Master Sandie Lindsay) until they moved into
a small semi-detached house in Lonsdale Road.
] Both children were offered free places by the
headmistress of Greycotes School. The family
were members of the Oxford Jewish community,
and Eva remembers becoming friendly with