Hans Conrad Julius Reiter

Hans Conrad Julius Reiter (February 26, 1881 – November 25, 1969) was an infamous German physician who was convicted of war crimes for his medical experiments at the Buchenwald concentration camp. He wrote a book on "racial hygiene" called Deutsches Gold, Gesundes Leben - Frohes Schaffen.

Reiter was born in Reudnitz, near Leipzig in the German Empire. He studied medicine at Leipzig and Breslau (now Wrocław), and received a doctorate from Tübingen on the subject of tuberculosis. After receiving his doctorate, he went on to study at the hygiene institute in Berlin, the Pasteur Institute in Paris and St. Mary's Hospital in London, where he worked with Sir Almroth Wright for two years. Reiter was also known for implementing strict anti-smoking laws in Nazi Germany.

During World War I, Reiter worked first as a German military physician on the Western Front in France. While there, he cared for several soldiers suffering from Weil's disease, and made his first notable discovery that one of the causative bacteria were Leptospira icterohaemorrhagica, which had eluded culture methods and identification by other scientists ever since that disease had been recognized in 1886. Later, after being transferred to the Balkans, where he served in the 1st Hungarian Army, he reported a German lieutenant with non-gonococcal urethritis, arthritis, and uveitis that developed two days after a diarrheal illness and had a protracted course with relapses over several months. The combination of two of the elements, urethritis and arthritis, had been recognized in the 16th century, and the triad had first been reported by Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, an English surgeon who lived from 1783 to 1862. Separately from Reiter, the triad was also reported in 1916 by Fiessinger and Leroy. Reiter thought he saw a spirochete which he called Treponema forans, related to but distinct from Treponema pallidum, the causative agent of syphilis, and erroneously thought it was the cause, calling the disease Spirochaetosis Arthritica. The error probably was influenced by his previous discovery of Leptospira icterohaemorrhagica, and by his work on Treponema pallidum that later enabled others to develop the "Reiter Complement Fixation Test" for syphilis. Nevertheless, the eponym Reiter's syndrome was used for the disease he described, and the syndrome became widely known by that name.

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