Hugo Merton
- Born
- 18 November 1879
- Died
- 23 April 1940 (age 60)
Hugo Merton was a German zoologist and explorer. He went on an expedition to the Maluku Islands in Indonesia and made many observations about the sea-life there. He was also a victim of the German persecution of Jewish people when he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp before being deported.
Merton was born in 1879 in Frankfurt and began his academic career at the University of Heidelberg in 1898. Seven years later Hugo graduated from the university with a science doctorate.
Merton travelled to Naples, Italy to begin research at the Zoological Station of Naples, but he later returned to Heidelberg to act as a research assistant at their Zoological Institute.
In 1907 he travelled to the Maluku Islands, a small island group within Indonesia, to conduct scientific investigations on the organisms in that area. He went on this expedition with another scientist, Jean Roux, who was interested in the Maluku people and culture.
When he returned from his expedition, Merton took up a position as the deputy director of Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, one of the largest natural history museums in Germany. That year, he married Gertrud Oswalt, with whom he later had two sons.
In 1913 Merton gained his habilitation, Germany’s highest academic qualification, at Heidelberg with a dissertation on a type of flatworm, named Temnocephala. Shortly after that, the First World War began, and Merton began a military service for Germany. When the war came to a finish, Merton resumed his work in Frankfurt, and also took appointment as an associate professor at the University of Heidelberg.
However, in 1935 Nazi law forced Merton to withdraw from both of his posts within the Senckenberg Museum and the University. Two years later, Professor Francis Crew from the University of Edinburgh offered Hugo a research partnership and a visiting lectureship in the Institute of Animal Genetics.
In Autumn 1938, Hugo returned to Heidelberg but upon reaching Germany was arrested and taken to concentration camp at Dachau, Bayern where he fell seriously ill. He was released a year later and deported back to Scotland with his wife, where he resumed work with Francis Crew.
Hugo died shortly after returning to Edinburgh, most likely due to the late effects of the disease he had suffered from in the concentration camps in Germany.
Hugo was a Member of the Association of Geography and Statistics in Frankfurt as well as receiving awards from several societies within Germany. He also has several organisms named in his honour (with the species name mertoni) and his wife also has a fish species named after her (Pseudomugil gertrudae).