Erwin Ackerknecht

Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht (1 June 1906 – 18 November 1988) was an active and influential Trotskyist in the 1930s who had to flee Germany in 1933 after Hitler’s rise to power.

Together with Robert Soblen and Otto Schüssler he founded in 1928 a small oppositional group at Leipzig called the Bolschewistische Einheit (Bolshevik Unity).

Ackerknecht closely co-operated with Sedov, Grylewicz and other prominent activists of the Trotskyist movement and became a co-editor and staff writer of the LO using the pseudonym Bauer.

He fled Germany in June 1933, spent a short time in Czechoslovakia and paid a visit to Leon Trotsky in exile in Turkey.

While in exile in Paris he earned his living as a translator and began to study ethnography at the Musée de l'Homme with Marcel Mauss, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Paul Rivet.

His A short history of medicine, was published in 1955 but the most active years of his academic life was when he moved to the University of Zurich (Switzerland), a position he kept until his retirement in 1971.