HELL

{"id":90,"thread_id":43,"author_id":20,"body":"Early life and education \r\n\r\nVon Hagens was born Gunther Gerhard Liebchen in Alt-Skalden (now called Skalmierzyce) near Ostrowo, Reichsgau Wartheland, in German-annexed Poland. Gerhard Liebchen, his father, was a member of the SS of Nazi Germany.[5] When he was five days old, his parents took him on a six-month trek westwards, to escape from the advancing Red Army and the imminent Soviet occupation. The family lived briefly in Berlin and its vicinity, before finally settling in Greiz, a town which was allocated to the Soviet occupation zone, so that von Hagens grew up in East Germany. He lived in Greiz until the age of nineteen.\r\n\r\nA haemophiliac, as a child von Hagens spent six months in hospital after being injured. This stimulated an interest in medical science, and in 1965 he began to study medicine at the University of Jena. While there, he began to question communism and socialism, and widened his knowledge of politics by gathering information from non-communist news sources. He participated in student protests against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. In January 1969, disguised as a vacationing student, he made his way across Bulgaria and Hungary, and on 8 January attempted to cross the Czechoslovak border into Austria. He failed, but made a second attempt the next day, at another location along the border.[2] He was arrested and punished with two years in jail.[6]\r\n\r\nIn 1970, the West German government paid the East German authorities DM43,000 for von Hagens's freedom, alongside several others, on the grounds that he was a political prisoner.[7] He continued his medical studies in Lübeck and received a doctorate in 1975 from the University of Heidelberg. When he married his first wife, he changed his surname from Liebchen to that of his wife, \"von Hagens\".[5]","revision":1,"deleted_at":null,"created_at":"2026-09-09 10:47:24","updated_at":"2026-09-09 10:47:24"}