1953 deaths

Étienne Balsan (February 11, 1878 – 1953) was born in Paris, France, as Fulcran Étienne Balsan.

Hulda Martha Arendsee (29 March 1885 – 22 May 1953) was a German politician (KPD) and women's rights activist.

David Katz (1 October 1884, Kassel – 2 February 1953, Stockholm) was a German-born Swedish psychologist and educator who specialized in Gestalt psychology and phenomenology. He was a professor Emeritus at the University of Stockholm. Prior to the establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany, he served as the chair of psychology and education at the State University of Mecklenburg in Rostock.

Rahel Hirsch (15 September 1870 – 6 October 1953) was a German physician and professor at the Charité medical school in Berlin. In 1913 she became the first woman in the Kingdom of Prussia to be appointed a professor of medicine.

Ernst Karchow (1892–1953) was a German stage and film actor.

Pierre Dupong (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ dypɔ̃]; 1 November 1885 – 23 December 1953) was a Luxembourgish politician and statesman. He was the 16th prime minister of Luxembourg, serving for sixteen years, from 5 November 1937 until his death, on 23 December 1953, and was also responsible at different times for the ministries of finance, the army, agriculture, labour and social matters. He founded the Christian Social People's Party (CSV) as the main conservative party after the Second World War, having been a founding member of the Party of the Right (PD) in 1914.
He was one of the founding members in 1914 of the Party of the Right, and was elected to the legislature in 1915. He served as Director-General for Finance from 1926 to 1937 and as Minister for Social Security and Labor in 1936 and 1937.
His first government was the Dupong-Krier Ministry (1937–1940). Between 1940 and 1944, Dupong then led the Luxembourgish government-in-exile, after Luxembourg had been occupied by Nazi Germany. He fled the country along with the rest of the Luxembourg government and the Grand Ducal Family of Luxembourg, settling in France. Once in Bordeaux, they were granted transit visas from the Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes, in June 1940. Pierre Dupong, along with his wife Sophie, and their children Marie Thérèse, Lambert Henri, Henriette and Jean, followed the Grand Ducal family through Coimbra and Lisbon, settling at Praia das Maçãs after the Grand Ducal family had moved to Cascais. By August, the entire entourage had moved to Monte Estoril. The Dupong couple stayed at Chalet Posser de Andrade until 26 September 1940, while their children remained there until 2 October 1940. On 26 September, the couple boarded the S.S. Excalibur headed for New York City, arriving on 5 October 1940. Georgette and Betty Bech, the wife and daughter of Joseph Bech, the Foreign Minister of the Luxembourg government-in-exile, traveled with them.
Between 1940 and 1944, he led the government in exile in Montreal.He then presided over the Liberation Government, the National Union Government, and the Dupong-Schaus and the Dupong-Bodson governments. He is also notable for sending Luxembourgish soldiers in the UN mission during the Korean War, as part of the Belgian United Nations Command.
He was the father of Jean Dupong, who became a minister and CSV deputy himself.

Pierre Nolf (Ypres, 26 July 1873 – Brussels, 14 September 1953) was a Belgian scientist and politician.
In 1940, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, but the prize was not granted that year. In 1940 he received the Francqui Prize for Biological and Medical Sciences.

Friedrich Meggendorfer (June 7, 1880 – February 12, 1953) was a German psychiatrist and neurologist.

Charles Lalo (24 February 1877, Périgueux – 1 April 1953, Paris) was a French writer on aesthetics.

Robert Eugen Gaupp (3 October 1870 – 30 August 1953) was a German psychiatrist and neurologist who was a native of Neuenbürg, Württemberg.
Gaupp was an assistant to Carl Wernicke (1848–1905) and Karl Bonhoeffer (1868–1948) at Breslau, and afterwards worked with Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) at the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich. From 1908 to 1936 he was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Tübingen. One of his assistants was Ernst Kretschmer. Following World War II, he was departmental head of health and welfare for the city of Stuttgart (1945–48).
Gaupp performed numerous investigations of psychological disorders, and is remembered for his case studies of mass-murderer Ernst August Wagner (1874–1938). He was particularly interested in correlations between personality and psychosis, and was an advocate of "pastoral psychology". For a period of time, he was also editor of the Zentralblatt für Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie.
Sometime shortly after the passage by decree, on 15 September 1935, of the "Nuremberg Laws"(officially "Laws for the Protection of German Blood and Honor"), Gaupp came to the support of a local physician, Albrecht Schroeder (pictured at left in image below), a collegiate fraternity brother in a non-fighting order, die Igel (the Hedgehogs), to which Gaupp also belonged. With the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and the preemption of organizational authority to permit Jewish membership in non-dueling fraternal orders (Jews had never been permitted to join German dueling orders), Schroeder's status was made precarious because he was married to a Jew, née Felicia Rosenstein of Bad Cannstatt, an outer district of Stuttgart. At a meeting convened of the general membership to decide upon Schroeder's suitability for membership given Schroeder's marital status and his "Mischling" (mixed race) children, Gaupp, otherwise unaffiliated with Schroeder (Gaupp was 65 at the time, Schroeder 44; and the two had never before met), declared before those assembled: "Wenn der Schroeder raus muss, dann geh ich auch." (If Schroeder goes, then I go, too.) Schroeder withdrew his petition sometime before final disposition by the fraternity towards his case, and Gaupp himself left the organization voluntarily around the same time, as he had pledged doing on behalf of Schroeder. The two men remained close friends until Gaupp's death in 1953.