Friedrich Wegener

Who was Friedrich Wegener?

Friedrich Wegener was a German pathologist who is notable for his description of a rare disease. Although this disease was known before Wegener's description, since the 1950s it has been called by the name Wegener's granulomatosis.

Wegener joined the Nazi Party in 1932. As a relatively high-ranking military doctor, he spent some of World War II in a medical office three blocks from the Łódź Ghetto, a Jewish ghetto in Łódź, Poland. There is speculation that he participated in experiments on concentration camp inmates.

The American College of Chest Physicians awarded Wegener a “master clinician” prize in 1989. After his Nazi past was discovered in 2000, the ACCP rescinded the prize and, separately, a campaign was begun to rename Wegener's granulomatosis to ANCA-associated granulomatous vasculitis. More recently, several journals proposed the name 'granulomatosis with polyangiitis' in a 2011 editorial.