1959 deaths

Günther Tamaschke (26 February 1896 – 14 October 1959) was a Nazi German SS-Standartenführer and commandant of the Lichtenburg and Ravensbrück concentration camps. He was never tried for his role in the Holocaust.

Johannes Riemann (31 May 1888 – 30 September 1959) was a German actor and film director. Riemann was a member of the Nazi Party.

Ulrich Ewald Berthold Bettac (2 May 1897 – 20 April 1959), was an Austrian actor and theatre director. He was especially well known for his work as a character actor at the Burgtheater in Vienna; he also had a fairly extensive film career.

Hans Grimm (22 March 1875 – 29 September 1959) was a German writer. The title of his 1926 novel Volk ohne Raum became a political slogan of the expansionist Nazi Lebensraum concept.

Harald Ernst Malmsten Schering (November 25, 1880 – April 10, 1959) was a German physicist born in Göttingen. He is best known for his work in high voltage electricity and the Schering Bridge used in electrical engineering. Schering was the son of Ernst Schering, mathematician at the Göttingen Observatory. His mother came from a family of Swedish academics who worked with Ernst to translate works from French and Italian. Harald grew up with his two siblings in Göttingen and studied physics at the University of Göttingen. In 1903 he worked at the Geophysical Institute and obtained a Ph.D. in 1904 under Eduard Riecke with work on the Elster-Geitel dispersal apparatus. Beginning in 1905 he was a scientific assistant at the Physics and Technology Institute in Berlin Charlottenburg; today known as the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). His work at the PTB under Emil Warburg primarily dealt with high voltage/high current research and development, and in 1914 he developed a measurement methodology for examining current transformers. In 1914 he was drafted into the First World War and was injured in 1916. In 1918 he became head of the high-voltage lab, succeeding Karl Willy Wagner. In 1919 he attained the title of professor at PTB with an annual salary of 4500 Marks and 1500 Marks as housing allowance. In 1924 he wrote a book on insulators in high voltage. A new institute was established in Hannover, buts construction was delayed by the war. Beginning in 1927, Schering was a professor of electrical engineering and high voltage technology at the Technical University of Hannover (today known as the Leibniz University Hannover). In 1933, he signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State. He retired in 1949 but continued to work at the PTB until 1954 when Gerhard Pfestdorf took up a position to head the institution.Schering is remembered for invention of the Schering Bridge, which he developed along with Ernst Alberti is an AC bridge circuit used to measure capacitance and the dissipation factor of capacitors. Schering received a Golden Doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1954 and an honorary doctorate from Braunschweig. He was awarded the Great Cross of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957.

Lucien-Marie Pautrier (2 August 1876, in Aubagne – 9 July 1959, in Strasbourg) was a French dermatologist.

Georg Lockemann (17 October 1871, in Hollenstedt – 4 December 1959, in Hollenstedt) was a German chemist.

Paul Marie Alfred Lebeau (19 December 1868 – 18 November 1959) was a French chemist. He studied at the elite École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris (ESPCI). Together with his doctoral advisor Henri Moissan he was working on fluorine chemistry discovering several new compounds, like bromine trifluoride, oxygen difluoride, selenium tetrafluoride and sulfur hexafluoride.
In 1899 he was able to obtain pure beryllium by electrolysis sodium fluoroberyllate (Na2[BeF2]).
In World War I he improved the gas mask design used by the French army.

Samuel James Cameron (7 January 1878 – 29 October 1959) was Regius Professor of Midwifery at the University of Glasgow from 1934 until 1942. The son of Caesarean Section pioneer Prof Murdoch Cameron, S.J. Cameron was a foundation Fellow of Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1929, and for many years a member of the Gynaecological Visiting Society. A lifelong champion of the reputation of the founder of professional midwifery in the British isles, William Smellie, Cameron both named a maternity hospital at Lanark, Scotland, after him and saved Smellie's library from permanent loss.

Karl Erich Andrée (10 March 1880, in Münder am Deister – 18 August 1959, in Göttingen) was a German geologist and paleontologist.
He studied chemistry at the Technical University of Hannover and mineralogy, geology, paleontology and zoology at the University of Göttingen, receiving his doctorate in 1904. At Göttingen, he was encouraged by Adolf von Koenen to write his dissertation-thesis on the geology of Iburg. Later on, he worked as an assistant at the Mineralogical-Geological Institute of the Bergakademie in Clausthal (1906–08) and at the Technical University of Karlsruhe (1908–10).
In 1910 he obtained his habilitation from the University of Marburg, and five years later, became an associate professor of geology and paleontology at the University of Königsberg. In 1921 he attained a full professorship, and in 1930/31 he served as university rector. At Königsberg, he was also director at the Geological-Paleontological Institute and in charge of the amber collections. From 1946 onward, he taught classes on geology at the University of Göttingen. He was the author of over 125 scientific papers.