Else Kienle

The daughter of the secondary-school teacher Otto Konrad Kienle of Heidenheim, she came on her mother’s side from the Zeller family, which had produced generations of doctors. One of the first girls at the grammar school in Esslingen, she stayed top of her class, and her grandmother overcame her father’s objections so that she could start medicine at Tübingen in October 1918. After Kiel and Heidelberg she passed the state examination in December 1923 and took her doctorate at Heidelberg in 1924. Surgery being still a male preserve, she worked in the dermatology and venereal disease department of the Stuttgart municipal hospital and became assistant doctor on the “police ward” of the Katharinenhospital, the closed ward where prostitutes reported as infected were treated. In July 1929 she married the banker Stefan Jacobowitz and opened a practice in Stuttgart for skin and urinary complaints and cosmetics, with a small ward where she performed reconstructive operations on scars and cleft palates. She ran a free counselling centre of the Reich League for Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene and lectured on its themes. Denounced anonymously in December 1930, she was arrested on 19 February 1931 with the doctor and writer Friedrich Wolf on charges of performing illegal abortions for profit. Held in solitary confinement, she was questioned for hours every day about 210 cases; on 21 March she began a hunger strike, on the 27th she fell into a long faint, and the next day she was released as unfit for detention. The KPD tabled a motion for her release but, objecting to her feminism, gave her far less support than Wolf, while the Nazis backed the detention of both because they were Jewish. Once free, she and Wolf spoke for the “action committee” at meetings across the country; the largest, in the Berlin Sportpalast on 15 April 1931, drew well over 10,000 people. In May the Soviet doctors’ and writers’ organisation invited them to the Soviet Union, and on her return she opened a new practice in Frankfurt and went on performing abortions. In 1932 she published Women: From a Woman Doctor’s Diary, arguing that it was immoral to force births on a society without gender equality or social security. After a young Jewish woman on whom she had performed an abortion in March 1932 died in hospital in April of unexplained causes, she was warned in the autumn of a new arrest and fled via Saarbrücken to France. The Stuttgart proceedings were provisionally dropped in January 1933, but she remained wanted until 1940. She married the American George LaRoe, moved to New York, requalified as a doctor and made her name as a dermatologist and plastic surgeon on Park Avenue. The escape of her first husband Jacobowitz from France became Franz Werfel’s play Jacobowsky and the Colonel. She published her autobiography Woman Surgeon in 1957 and died in New York on 19 July 1970.