Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch is probably the best-known and, at the same time, perhaps the most controversial German doctor of the twentieth century. He was the leading German surgeon of his time, and in the first decades of the last century, set surgery on a new footing. His inventions secured him a popularity that a doctor seldom achieves. The stages of his career, which began with the German Empire and ended in the divided Berlin of the postwar period, are diverse: he rose from country doctor to star surgeon at the world-famous Charité University of Medicine in Berlin.