Friedrich Wegener (born 1907 in Varel – July 9, 1990, Lübeck) 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 Lodz Ghetto, a Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland. There is speculation that he participated in experiments on concentration camp inmates.
The American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) 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 After his Nazi past was discovered in 2000, the ACCP rescinded the prize and, separately, a campaign was begun to rename Wegener's granulomatosis to ANCA-associated granulomatous vasculitis.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.
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“The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state.... It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.”
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