Benno Richard Ottow

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Benno Richard Ottow (May 14, 1884 – May 29, 1975) was a Baltic German surgeon, gynecologist and naturalist. He taught obstetrics and gynecology in Berlin and became controversial for his role in the Nazi sterilization policy, deciding which women with hereditary conditions should be sterilized. After World War II, he focused on ornithology.

He was born on Dagö (Hiiumaa) island, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Estonia. He studied medicine at several universities, including Yuryev (Tärtu/Tartu) and Rostock, and earned his general practitioner exam in 1911. He served in the Russian army briefly and left in 1917. He trained in gynecology in Berlin (Charité) and Dresden, then in Kiel and Dorpat (Tartu). In 1928 he completed his habilitation and became a professor at the University of Berlin. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and, in 1933, ran the Brandenburg State Women’s Clinic in Berlin-Neukölln after the previous head was dismissed for Jewish ancestry.

Ottow married twice, first to Helene Ulmann and then to Elisabeth von Mühlendahl. In 1945 he fled to Schleswig-Holstein to avoid Allied denazification and then moved to Sweden, where he worked at the Stockholm National Museum of Natural History. There he studied birds and their bones, publishing in ornithology journals. He also explored embryology, inspired by Karl Ernst von Baer. He retired in 1958 and died in Stockholm.