Dr. Friedrich Joseph Haass (Russian: Фёдор Петрович Гааз, Fyodor Petrovich Gaaz; 10 August 1780 – 28 August [O.S. 16 August] 1853) was the “holy doctor of Moscow”.[1][2] Born in Bad Münstereifel, as a member of Moscow’s governmental prison committee, he spent 25 years until the end of his life to humanize the penal system.[1] During the last nine years before his death, he spent all of his assets to run a hospital for homeless people. He died in Moscow. Twenty thousand people attended his funeral at the Vvedenskoye Cemetery, which was paid for by the state as he had no more money.
Haass, son of the pharmacist Peter Haass and grandson of the “surgeon on the Thurnmarkt” in Cologne, Wilhelm Anton Haass, studied German, philosophy and medicine after finishing school at the Ecole Centrale in Cologne, founded under Napoleon, and at the universities in Jena and Göttingen. In Göttingen he received his doctorate in medicine and surgery. In Vienna he trained as an ophthalmologist. One of his first patients as family doctor to the Russian Princess Varvara Alekseevna Repnin was her father, who suffered from a serious eye disease.[1] The latter recognized Haass’ talent and invited the young doctor to Russia. In 1806 he appeared in Moscow as Fyodor Petrovich Gaas. As early as 1807 he was appointed chief physician of the renowned Pavlovskaya Clinic (Paul’s Hospital).
From 1828, as a member of the Moscow Prison Protection Committee, he devoted himself for 25 years to caring for prisoners exiled to Siberia.[3] He was firmly convinced that man is good by nature because God created him in his own image. Therefore, a person who has strayed from the right path is nothing more than an unhappy, sick person who can only be healed through humanity. He learned this positive view of humanity primarily through Francis of Assisi and Francis de Sales, whose writings he counted among his favorite books, especially his main theological work, “Treatise on the Love of God.” In a letter to the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling dated December 31, 1843, he urgently recommended that he read the works of Saint Francis de Sales. In it, he calls Schelling “my beloved German teacher” and Francis de Sales “my beloved mentor and educator.” His will states that Haass was in possession of relics of Saint Francis de Sales, which he bequeathed to a Catholic church in Irkutsk.
In 1836, he implemented a decree replacing prisoners’ heavy iron shackles with lighter, leather-lined ones that no longer rubbed their feet dry. These shackles are called Haass’s shackles. The oversized metal shackles on his grave are a reminder of this. In 1841, he wrote an ABC of Christian Decency […], which he had printed and distributed to deported criminals. In 1843, a police prisoner hospital for the homeless, later called the “Alexander Hospital,” was opened. It was financed entirely from Haass’s personal fortune and private donations. During the 1848 cholera epidemic in Moscow, he and the philanthropist Sofia Stepanovna Shcherbatova organized the Nikolskoye Community to provide assistance to the needy. Sisters of this community continued their work during the Crimean War.[4] Haass lived and worked in this hospital, popularly known as the “Haass Hospital” or “Haassovka,” until the end of his life.[5] At the end of July 1853, Haass fell ill and wrote a detailed will. He died on August 16, 1853, and was buried on August 19.[6] 20,000 people attended his funeral at Moscow’s Vvedenskoye Cemetery. The gravestone is inscribed in Latin and bears Haass’s quote in Russian: “Haste to do good.”
- To mark the physician’s 200th birthday, the German Federal Post Office issued a commemorative stamp worth 60 pfennigs.
- The German School Moscow has been named “German School Moscow – Friedrich Joseph Haass” since May 27, 1989.
- The German-Russian Forum has awarded the Dr. Friedrich Joseph Haass Prize annually since 1995 to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to German-Russian relations. Award winners include Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and Egon Bahr.
- The Russian Lev Zinovyevich Kopelev, a promoter of German-Russian reconciliation and himself a Gulag prisoner from 1947 to 1954, who lived in Cologne after his expatriation and until his death, wrote a book about Haass in 1984.
- On April 16, 2016, an opera collage entitled Doctor Haas, consisting of 11 episodes, premiered at Moscow’s Helikon Opera. The composer was 27-year-old Alexei Sergumin, and the libretto was written by the writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya.