Gustav Aschaffenburg

Gustav Aschaffenburg (* May 23, 1866 in Zweibrücken, † September 2, 1944 in Baltimore ) was a German psychiatrist. He is considered one of the pioneers of forensic psychiatry and criminology.

Life and work

Aschaffenburg worked from 1891 as an assistant to Emil Kraepelin in the newly established Psychiatric University Hospital in Heidelberg. In Heidelberg he became a member of the Masonic Lodge to truth and loyalty. After his habilitation in 1895, he followed in 1901 a chair at the University of Halle, and in 1904 to the newly founded Academy of Practical Medicine in Cologne, in 1919 part of the University of Cologne. From 1906 he was a senior doctor of the asylum Linde castle, now University Hospital of Cologne. From 1928 he headed the forensic science institute. Aschaffenburg was, among others, the editor of the monthly magazine for criminal psychology and criminal justice reform. The sudden end of the academic activity of Aschaffenburg in Cologne came in 1933, when the new National Socialist government enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, after which he was discharged as a Jew from the civil service. When his successor was Max de Crinis from Graz, a member of the Nazi Party and staunch anti-Semite, was appointed. His editorial work had to give Aschaffenburg 1935. After his medical work has been restricted, he emigrated in 1939 to the United States. There he worked at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore as a physician and professor.

Gustav Aschaffenburg's major work, The crime and its control (1903, 3rd edition 1923), remained until the thirties of the twentieth century into the relevant German -language criminological textbook.

Works (selection)

• The crime and its control, Heidelberg 1903 (2nd edition 1906, 3rd edition 1923)
• Securing the society against homicidal mental patients: results of a study trip made ​​on behalf of the Holtzendorff Foundation, Berlin 1912
• Psychiatry and Criminal Law, 1928