In the Biebrich district of Wiesbaden, a street was named after the doctor and university professor Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch (1875-1951) by resolution of the city council on December 3, 1964.

Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch was born on July 3, 1875 in Barmen (now Wuppertal-Barmen). In 1895, he graduated from the Realgymnasium Elberfeld. Between 1895 and 1901, Sauerbruch studied natural sciences and medicine in Marburg, Göttingen, Jena and Leipzig. After completing his studies, he worked briefly as a country doctor in Thuringia in 1901, before working as an assistant doctor in Kassel, Erfurt, Berlin and Breslau between 1902 and 1903. He completed his habilitation in Breslau in 1905.

In 1905, Sauerbruch went to Greifswald, where he worked as a senior physician at the university hospital there. Three years later, he became first senior surgeon and associate professor of surgery in Marburg. In 1910, he moved to Zurich, where he became a full professor and Director of the Surgical University Clinic. After the end of the First World War in 1918, Sauerbruch returned to Germany and became full professor and director of the Surgical University Hospital in Munich. In 1927, Sauerbruch moved to the Charité hospital in Berlin, where he was full professor and director of the surgical clinic until 1949.

During the Weimar Republic, Sauerbruch publicly articulated a German nationalist stance. In the "Neue Züricher Zeitung", he described the First World War as a necessity, as "an event" like "great forces of nature", in whose great events "human considerations and human publications" could change nothing. He rejected the capitulation and revolution in Germany in 1918 just as vehemently as the Munich Soviet Republic of 1919. Sauerbruch had been involved in events organized by nationalist circles since 1920. Due to his sympathies for national-folk politics, Sauerbruch also had his first contacts with the NSDAP in 1920, which had been founded in Munich in February of that year. He also got to know Hitler personally.

The contact between Sauerbruch and Hitler was very close during the so-called Hitler Putsch in November 1923. The later dictator also sought medical advice from Sauerbruch in January 1923. After the failed putsch and the temporary ban on the NSDAP, Sauerbruch's contact with the party apparently diminished. However, Sauerbruch continued his medical career at the end of the 1920s. By the time he moved to the Charité at the latest, he was regarded as the leading surgeon of his time.

From 1933, the NSDAP benefited from Sauerbruch's growing reputation. The physician repeatedly demonstrated his closeness to National Socialism in public. In 1933, for example, he signed the "Confession of German Professors to Adolf Hitler" together with other scientists.

In October and November 1933, Sauerbruch gave two radio speeches in which he declared his support for the new government. Sauerbruch emphasized that every German citizen had the opportunity to make a "free declaration" in the upcoming Reichstag elections, even though all democratic parties had been banned or forced into self-dissolution by November 1933 as the NSDAP expanded its power. Sauerbruch also welcomed Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations.

Conversely, the Nazi regime awarded Sauerbruch numerous titles and prizes: he was appointed State Councillor in 1934 and Surgeon General in 1942. In 1943, he was awarded the Knight's Cross for war service for his work as an advisory physician to the Wehrmacht and head of the medical department of the Reich Research Council. In 1938, he was also one of the first five recipients of the German National Prize for Art and Science, which was established by Hitler in response to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Carl von Ossietzky.

In his acceptance speech, which was broadcast on Reichsrundfunk radio, Sauerbruch regretted
Sauerbruch regretted the failure of Hitler's putsch on November 9, 1923 and welcomed the "seizure of power" in 1933.

Despite his repeated public commitment to Hitler and the Nazi regime, Sauerbruch did not become involved in the NSDAP, its branches or other Nazi organizations.

From March 1933, Sauerbruch was involved in the dismissal of Jewish staff at the Charité, among other things as a member of a personnel commission responsible for this and in meetings with the professorial staff. Sauerbruch's colleague Gustav von Bergmann drove the process itself as Vice Dean. At the same time, there is evidence that Sauerbruch privately supported several Jewish colleagues and friends. For example, he supported the emigration of his Jewish assistant Rudolf Nissen and helped him to obtain a professorship in Istanbul. Among other things, he helped the Nobel Prize winner in chemistry Richard Martin Willstatter, who was a close friend of Sauerbruch, and the lawyer Robert Kempner. In his scientific publications, Sauerbruch never made disparaging remarks about Jews or Jewish colleagues.

Sauerbruch's participation in the so-called Berlin Wednesday Society, an elite discussion group of high-ranking personalities from science, art and politics founded in the 19th century, which also met in the 1930s, fits in with this ambivalent behavior. Due to the participation of various later participants in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, including the former Chief of the General Staff Ludwig Beck, Sauerbruch was associated with conservative resistance circles by biographical research after the Second World War.

The minutes of the Wednesday Society show that Sauerbruch was present at all the lectures given by Johannes Popitz, Ludwig Beck and Ulrich von Hassel, who can be attributed to the circle of the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. The physician did not attend the lecture evenings of the anthropologist Eugen Fischer and the art historian Wilhelm Pinder. After the beginning of the Second World War, Sauerbruch apparently occasionally criticized Hitler and the Nazi regime within the Wednesday Society, which led to conflicts with Fischer and Pinder. However, the open criticism expressed within the discussion group did not make Sauerbruch an opponent of National Socialism or even a resistance fighter. Sauerbruch was neither involved in nor informed about the resistance plans of the group around Beck and the preparations for the attempted coup d'état of July 20, 1944.

Despite his sometimes critical attitudes in his private life, Sauerbruch put himself fully at the service of Nazi medicine and the National Socialist war effort from 1939 onwards. From 1933 to 1945, he was a medical reviewer for the Reich Research Council and from 1937 to 1945 he was head of the medical division of the council. He was also a member of the scientific senate of the Academy of Military Physicians. In this capacity, Sauerbruch also took part in the third workshop of the advisory physicians of the Academy of Military Physicians in 1943. There, Karl Gebhardt, head of the Hohenlychen sanatorium and personal physician to Heinrich Himmler, and his colleague Fritz Fischer presented their experiments to investigate the effects of sulphonamide on inmates of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Sauerbruch took part in the discussion without taking a critical view of his colleagues' approach or even questioning it in the plenary session. Both doctors stood trial in the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial and testified that all the doctors present had been aware that the experiments had been carried out on concentration camp inmates.

After the Second World War, Sauerbruch tried to relativize his participation in the conference. Sauerbruch even swore an affidavit stating that none of the participants at the conference had been aware that the experiments had been carried out on prisoners.

From 1937, Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch himself approved experiments on concentration camp prisoners as head of the Medical Section of the Reich Research Council. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, submitted a research project to Sauerbruch in October 1943. Behind this was the work of Verschuer's assistant Josef Mengele, who carried out experiments on twins in the Auschwitz concentration camp. It is unclear whether Sauerbruch was aware of the details, such as the fact that the abducted twins were killed after the experiments.

Nevertheless, Sauerbruch was responsible for demanding these experiments, which he also had extended in 1944. In his position as chairman of the Reich Research Council, Sauerbruch had had the opportunity to prevent or stop these experiments.
Sauerbruch, on the other hand, criticized "Aktion T4", the systematic murder of around 70,000 disabled people in 1940/41. Together with Paul Gerhard Braune and Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, Sauerbruch protested to the Reich Minister of Justice against the murders of mentally and physically disabled people. Shortly afterwards, Hitler stopped the "euthanasia program". The significance of Sauerbruch's protest has not been conclusively clarified by research, but it is at least likely that Sauerbruch's disapproval and the public rejection of church representatives, such as Bishop von Galen of Munster, led to the termination of the murder program in the form it had been carried out up to that point.

In the post-war period, Sauerbruch's approach to the crimes of the Nazi regime and the medical profession can also be described as ambivalent. Two weeks after Germany's unconditional surrender, Sauerbruch was appointed Berlin City Councillor for Healthcare by the Soviet military administration. In the opening speech to the first conference of surgeons in the Soviet occupation zone in July 1947, Sauerbruch also addressed the defeat of the war and the guilt of the German people. He attributed the Nazi crimes to coercion by the government.

Sauerbruch expressed similar sentiments in a petition for clemency for his former assistant Karl Brandt, Adolf Hitler's attending physician and the man in charge of "Aktion T4". Sauerbruch was "very shocked" by Brandt's death sentence in 1947 by the International Court of Justice in Nuremberg in the so-called Doctors' Trial.

Sauerbruch tried to obtain clemency for Brandt with the help of a petition in which he also referred to coercive measures taken by the Nazi regime against doctors as a reason for the crimes committed. Brandt, who was the highest-ranking defendant among the doctors in the medical trial, was executed in June 1948 for the crimes against humanity he had committed, despite Sauerbruch's attempt to intervene.

Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch died in Berlin on July 2, 1951. His medical achievements as a surgeon, particularly in the field of thoracic surgery, through the development of the negative pressure chamber and in the field of hand surgery, remained popular in the following decades, and not only in specialist circles.

In 2020, the Historical Expert Commission appointed by the City Council to review traffic areas, buildings and facilities named after people in the state capital of Wiesbaden recommended renaming Sauerbruchstraße because of Sauerbruch's chairmanship of the Medical Section of the Reich Research Council. During his time in office, Sauerbruch authorized criminal experiments on concentration camp inmates. He was also involved in the dismissal of Jewish staff at the Charité Surgical Clinic. As a result, Sauerbruch was involved in the deliberate harm, discrimination, exclusion and persecution of individuals or groups of people during the "Third Reich". Ferdinand Sauerbruch also supported the Nazi regime immaterially through public speeches and thus publicly articulated the National Socialist ideology.