Naab, Jakob Paul
Doctor
Born: January 4, 1872 in Nierstein
died: March 6, 1954 in Stuttgart

Jakob Paul Naab attended elementary school in Nierstein from 1878 to 1882. He then transferred to the Realschule Oppenheim, which he attended between 1882 and 1884. From 1884, Naab was a pupil at the humanistic grammar school in Mainz, where he graduated in 1892. Jakob Naab then studied medicine in Heidelberg and Berlin.

From 1901 until the beginning of the First World War, Jakob Naab worked as a doctor for the German Orient Mission in Diyarbakır in present-day Turkey. From 1914 to 1918, Naab was deployed as a troop doctor on the Western Front. He left the army in 1918 with the rank of colonel surgeon in the reserve. After the war, he worked as a general practitioner in Biebrich.

In 1922, he founded the garden and home association "Selbsthilfe" in Biebrich (opens in a new tab) with fellow campaigners. The aim of the association was to build eight to ten homes each year, all on the members' own initiative. Naab withdrew from the association in 1934.

In 1931, Naab became director of the German hospital in Istanbul. The hospital was formally owned by the German Reich and was run by the German Welfare Association in Constantinople. Naab became head of this hospital at the request of the Foreign Office. The hospital's budget was largely funded by the Foreign Office. Naab's contract ended at the end of 1935 and he left the office in disagreement with his successor, Dr. Hermann Quincke, who had probably moved to Turkey from the German Reich as a "non-Aryan" doctor. Naab had also made himself unpopular by assigning the mandate to a Turkish lawyer for a patient's compensation dispute without agreeing the amount of the fee in advance, which the latter then tried to exploit.

On his return to Germany in 1936, Naab joined the Nazi Doctors' Association. He also became a member of the National Socialist People's Welfare Organization. Three years before the "seizure of power" in 1930, he had already made a donation to the Wiesbaden SA.

During the Nazi era, Naab received the Cross of Merit of the Red Cross in 1934, the Cross of Honor for Frontline Combatants in 1935 and the War Merit Cross II Class in 1943. At the end of the war, Naab had two places of residence: on the one hand, he was registered in Wiesbaden-Biebrich, and on the other, he had the center of his life and his practice in Stuttgart. Due to this constellation, he went through two trial chambers. Both trial chambers classified Naab as "not affected by the Law for the Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism".

A street in the Biebrich district, Naabstraße, was named after Jakob Paul Naab following a decision by the Committee of Elders on August 2, 1973.