Erich Hippke

Erich Hippke (7 March 1888 in Prökuls – 10 June 1969 in Bonn) was a German Air Force General Surgeon.

Life
In the time of the Nazi Germany, from 1937 to December 1943, Hippke was the Chief Medical Officer of Luftwaffe. He was also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research. Hippke was the true source of the ideas for the so-called "freezing experiments" on behalf of the Luftwaffe, conducted at Dachau concentration camp by Sigmund Rascher.

He was succeeded by Oskar Schröder on May 15, 1944.

He was arrested only in December 1946. By that time he was a general practitioner working in Hamburg, Germany. He avoided the Doctors' Trial and left Nuremberg without charge. He was never charged with a crime but American investigators of the Nazi medical atrocities later concluded that he was actually the source of the idea for those deadly experiments on humans.