Benno Wolf, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetBenno Wolf
German judge, speleologist and holocaust victim
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Dresden, Saxony, Germany
About Benno Wolf
- Benno Wolf (26 September 1871 - 6 January 1943) was a German judge and a pioneer speleologist.
- He was a co-founder of the German Society for Mammalogy and a pioneer conservationist.
- He died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Wolf was born in 1871 in Dresden.
- He was baptized Protestant but came from a well-known Jewish physician family.
- He studied law at Freiburg, Munich and Berlin and earned a doctorate from the University of Leipzig.
- After work as a legal clerk, he became a judge at Elberfeld and became a District Judge at Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1912.
- He was involved in amending conservation laws and in strengthening laws to protect wilderness.
- He worked with the Brandenburg Commission for Nature Preservation but he was removed from all position in 1933 due to his Jewish background. Wolf was also a keen speleologist and was a member of the Hauptverband Deutscher Höhlenforscher (Association of German Speleologists), serving as its founding president.
- Wolf began to maintain a database of all the world's caves and for this he had amassed numerous books and documents in his library.
- After being removed from work, he was aided by Julius Riemer to continue to serve as an editor of the speleologists newsletter, "Mitteilungen über Höhlen- und Karstforschung." The Nazi research wing, the SS Ahnenerbe, became interested in caves as potential bomb shelters and on July 6, 1942, they arrested Wolf and deported him to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
- He died on January 6, 1943.In 1955, the Dr.
- Benno Wolf Prize was established in speleology.
- A memorial plaque was placed on his former home at Hornstraße 6 in Berlin-Kreuzberg in 2005 along with a paving stone in his memory.
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