A Soldbuch is a military paybook and identity document. This Soldbuch belonged to Werner Forssmann, who became a medical officer in the German army in 1939, when the war broke out. He eventually rose to the rank of major. Forssmann had joined the Nazi party in 1932 and remained a member until 1945. At the end of the war he was a prisoner of war. After being released, he worked as a lumberjack and then as a district surgeon.
The Soldbuch was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by Werner Forssmann's family in 2014.
In autumn 1922, the then 18-year-old Werner Forssmann was notified that he had been accepted as a medical student at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (now the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). The acceptance letter is in Latin and signed by the university chancellor, Walter Nernst, the Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry in 1920.
Many years later, in 1956, Werner Forssmann was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his pioneering work in cardiology.
The acceptance letter was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by Werner Forssmann's family in 2014.
Werner Forssmann was given this inkwell by a Japanese physician in the 1930s. According to his daughter, he valued the gift highly; why else would he have done his utmost to preserve it throughout the turbulent Second World War?
The inkwell was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by Werner Forssmann's family in 2014.
