Dr. med.
Hans Elsner
1874 - 1935

 “Hans Elsner, son of the merchant Emil Elsner in Berlin, mosaic religion, was born on March 2, 1874, in Breslau. He received his preparatory scientific education at the Magdalen-Gymnasium in Breslau, from Easter 1890 at the Friedrich-Werderschen Gymnasium in Berlin, which he left at Easter 1892 with a certificate in order to study medicine. He completed his entire studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. He passed the preliminary examination (Tentamen physicum) on February 24, 1894, the medical exam (Tentamen medicum) on February 14, 1896, and his oral doctoral examination (rigorous exam) on February 21,” according to Hans Elsner in his dissertation on the “Knowledge of the aetiology of chronic hydrocephalus”.

His mother and father were Dorothea Elsner, née Block, and Emil Elsner. His mother died in Berlin in 1910 and his father in 1920. Both are buried at the Berlin-Weissensee Jewish Cemetery. Hans Elsner grew up in Breslau and Berlin with two brothers (Bernhard and Ernst Simon) and two sisters (Jenny and Elise).

Education and Places of Work

His teachers at Berlin University included the surgeon Ernst von Bergmann, the physiologist du Bois-Reymond, the pediatrician Otto Heubner, the internists Ernst von Leyden, Hermann Senator and Georg Klemperer, the neurologist Emanuel Mendel, the pharmacologist Oscar Liebreich, the pathologist Rudolf Virchow and the anatomist Wilhelm Waldeyer.

Hans Elsner received his license to practice medicine in 1897. His work as an assistant to Ismar Boas in his Berlin Polyclinic for Gastric and Intestinal Diseases had a lasting impact on his further medical activities, his specialization in the new field of gastroenterology and his intensive involvement with the technical development of the gastroscope. Elsner himself dedicated his new textbook on gastric diseases for doctors and students to his mentor Ismar Boas in 1909 and expressly thanked him for his many years as an assistant and for his collaboration.

Elsner marries Betty née Goldschmidt (born September 10, 1880, died September 22, 1976, in the USA) from Posen in 1907. Their sons Kurt and Herbert are born in 1909 and 1914.

Heeding Boas’ advice, Elsner began publishing early on from his special polyclinic for gastric and intestinal diseases, for example in 1903 on the differential diagnosis of diseases of the esophagus and stomach, on the motility of the stomach in achylia gastrica (1904) and on colitis mucosa (1905). In 1906, Boas handed over his outpatient clinic for stomach and intestinal patients to his student Hans Elsner. In 1909, Elsner published the aforementioned textbook on gastric diseases.

In 1911, the then groundbreaking book “The Gastroscopy” (orig. “Die Gastroskopie”) followed with a description of the Elsner gastroscope, which for the next twenty years was the rigid instrument that Rudolf Schindler and others initially worked with. It was not until 1932 that the new semi-flexible device developed by Schindler himself replaced the Elsner gastroscope. Elsner had worked on the technical development together with the Berlin instrument maker Georg Wolf.

1933

Elsner experienced the boycott of medical practices by the National Socialists on April 1, 1933. Precisely how Elsner was subsequently subjected to anti-Jewish attacks is not known. Hans Elsner died at the age of 60 on February 9, 1935, in his apartment at Knesebeckstrasse 70/71 in Berlin. He was buried at the Berlin-Weissensee Jewish Cemetery on February 12, 1935. His burial place can be found in cemetery M7 row 14.

In 1943, he was listed in the Gestapo files as an “enemy of the Reich” and he and his descendants were denied their inheritance in Poznan.

His son Kurt Elsner, born on May 3, 1909, worked for Fried & Alsberg as a correspondent and buyer and was imprisoned from February 28, 1933, to June 30, 1933, and again from September 1, 1933, to December 23, 1933. After his release from prison, it was no longer possible for him to continue working for the company, and it was not possible to find a new suitable job as a Jew. He worked as a bricklayer until his emigration to South Africa on November 2, 1935. He later moved to the USA. He died in January 1995 in Sarasota, Florida.

His son Herbert went to Switzerland in 1936 to study, as he was prevented to attend a university in Germany because of his Jewish descent. After one semester at the University of Winterthur, he had to break off his studies as his mother was no longer able to support him financially due to foreign exchange restrictions. On December 3, 1936, he followed his brother to South Africa via Genoa.

Betty Elsner was still living in Berlin at Pariser Straße 35/36 in May 1939. She left Hamburg on June 29, 1939, on the Dutch ship “Jagersfontein” and arrived in Durban, South Africa.  She later moved to New York and died there on September 22, 1976.

Hans Elsner’s sister Jenny Elsner was first deported from Berlin to the Theresienstadt/Terezin ghetto in August 1942, then transported to the Treblinka concentration camp a short time later where she was murdered by the Nazis. The other sister, Elise Norden, died in the Theresienstadt ghetto on March 31, 1944. Elsner’s younger brother Ernst Simon Elsner (born February 7, 1879) managed to escape in August 1938, initially to London, England; he was able to move to the USA in 1941. He died on July 13, 1958, in Queens, New York.