Rodenwaldt was born in
Berlin to college professor Robert and Katharina Luther. His brother
Gerhart became a famous archaeologist. After studies at the
Köllnisches Gymnasium and a one-year service in the Guard Fusilier Regiment during 1897–98, he went to study medicine at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Academy in Berlin from 1897 and became a military doctor in 1903. Among his inspirations he counted
Siegfried Passarge. He received a doctorate from the
Friedrichs University, Halle in 1904 and conducted research on tropical
nematode parasites and worked in Hamburg before being posted to
German Togo in 1910. Here he examined
tropical infectious diseases and discovered a connection between the closing and opening of the
Anecho lagoon and malaria outbreaks. In 1915 he became a staff physician with the army and worked on
malaria,
typhus and
cholera in Turkey and
Asia Minor during
World War I. He habilitated in
Heidelberg in 1919 with studies on malaria. From 1921 he worked with in the Dutch East Indies and in 1928 he was an inspector of public health. He was informed of
filariasis in the delta of the Serajoe river in
Java by . He then examined the intensity of infection and identified that the parasites were spread by mosquitoes that liked the backwaters of the flood plains following the rains. The washoff from the deforested hills led to the formation of new channels and the creation of stagnant pools where the mosquito larvae bred among the roots of
Pistia stratiotes. He noted that just a few kilometers from the delta the people did not suffer from any infection. He became a foreign member of the
NSDAP in 1933 and when he returned to Germany, he joined the
Christian Albrechts University in
Kiel as a head of hygiene in 1934. In 1934, he attended the conference of the
International Federation of Eugenic Organizations held in
Zurich along with
Ernst Rüdin and . He gave lectures on racial hygiene and purity both at the university and to the public. He served in the during World War II and headed its Institute for Tropical Medicine and Tropical Hygiene from 1940. He took an interest in race and
anthropology and was an editor for the journal
Archiv für Rassen und Gesellschaftsbiologie. At the end of the war he was held prisoner of war in
Windermere. There, he became the head doctor of a German
prisoner of war hospital after a few months. In early 1946, at the insistence of his English colleagues, he was released to Germany, where he learned that he had already been dismissed from his position as a professor of hygiene by the
American military government at the end of 1945 due to his involvement with the National Socialists. After being classified as a "lesser offender" (
Minderbelasteter) in the first instance of the
denazification process, he was finally acquitted in a second trial in 1948. He made use of his publication on anthropological studies in Java on the
Mestizos of
Kisar to support the idea that he appreciated
mixed race people. In 1951 he became head of
geomedical research at the
Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and published a textbook on hygiene along with
Richard-Ernst Bader. A major work was his three volume atlas of epidemic diseases, Welt-Seuchen-Atlas (1952, 1956, 1961), coauthored with
H.J. Jusatz. In 1957 he published an autobiography,
Ein Tropenarzt erzählt sein Leben ("A tropical physician relates his life"). In 1963 he also contributed to
Weltkarten zur Klimakunde ("World Maps of Climatology"). Until his death in 1965, he continued to serve as a consultant for various organizations. He influenced the medical service of the
Bundeswehr, was an advisory board member in the
Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, and was involved in
development aid. His biography of
Leon Battista Alberti as a renaissance hygienist was published posthumously. == References ==