Heinrich Schoeneich
Heinrich Johannes Schoeneich (born January 2, 1948) is a German plastic surgeon, who founded and heads the Munich section of Interplast-Germany e.V. He is also a photographer and humanitarian activist. Life and work. Born in "Datteln", North Rhine-Westphalia, Schoeneich grew up in a family of physicians. His father, internist Paul Schoeneich, practiced family medicine (GP) in "Gelsenkirchen-Erle". From 1965 to 1967, he attended the boarding school of "Landschulheim Schloss Heesen". From 1968 to 1974 he studied general medicine in Cologne and passed the state examination. He completed his clinical traineeships in Peru, Japan and  the USA, among other countries, from 1972 to 1974. As a result of a key experience in the Peruvian Andean village of Coina in 1975, he began his studies in general and plastic surgery (amongst others with Ursula Schmidt-Tintemann) at the "Klinikum Rechts der Isar" in Munich (1975-1986). He received his doctorate in 1977. From 1980 onwards, he travelled to so-called developing countries and to crisis regions in (Southeast-) Asia, Latin America and Africa, to treat the poor, especially children and adolescents. In 1984, Schoeneich joined Interplast-Germany e.V., a non-profit medical aid organisation. In  1990, he opened a clinic for plastic and aesthetic surgery in Munich, which he ran until Spring 2017. In 1994, he founded the Munich section of Interplast-Germany e.V. and since then carries out 3 to 4 humanitarian missions a year in (South-East-)Asia, Africa and the Middle-East. In 2004, he co-founded the Interplast Foundation for Humanitarian Plastic Surgery to promote long-term projects. Since 2012, he is lecturing on medical and ethical aspects of medical humanitarian work at the Technical University of Munich. The lecture series "Humanitarian missions and internships in developing countries" was subsequently established  as an optional part of the medical curriculum. In 2001 Schoeneich and Interplast-Germany e.V. were awarded the Charity Bambi of the Hubert Burda Media Group for their many years of medical aid in Afghanistan. The award was presented to him by actress and physician Maria Furtwängler on November 15, 2001 in Berlin. In 2003, his work was showcased in a documentary titled ""Unter der Haut - Das zweite Leben von Dr. Schoeneich"" ("Under the skin - The second life of Dr. Schoeneich"). In 2006, he received the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for  his humanitarian work. First war surgery mission - Thailand | Cambodia (1980). For six weeks in Spring 1980, he assisted in war surgery missions in refugee camps Khao-I-Dang and Nong Mak Mun between Thailand and Cambodia. He was a member of a medical team of the "Soforthilfe e.V.", a German non-governmental organization, privately established in Munich at the end of 1979 in response to the Cambodian refugee crisis. Initially in cooperation with Rupert Neudeck's committee ""Ein Schiff für Vietnam"" ("A Ship for Vietnam"), "Soforthilfe" "e.V." provided large-scale medical help on the ground during the  Emergency Period 1979-1981. In "Deutsches Ärzteblatt", Schoeneich, along with three colleagues, described the extent of violence in the camps, military attacks and evacuations. War surgery missions - Pakistan and Afghanistan (1991-2004). Responding to an appeal launched by the European Union in 1991, he flew to Peshawar, located in the Pakistan-Afghan border region, to support trauma surgeon Ortwin Joch, Interplast colleague and member of the German Afghanistan Committee (DAK), in the treatment of refugees seriously injured during the Afghan civil war. When Kabul was taken by the Mujahideen in 1994, the Peshawar initiative moved its activities from Pakistan to  Afghanistan. Ongoing fighting between the troops of Ahmad Shah Massoud and growing Taliban militias made Kabul too insecure a place, so the project was set up 120 kilometers east to Jalalabad. It was here that Schoeneich, with the Interplast section Frankfurt and the help of the German Embassy, financed the reconstruction and conversion of a destroyed building into a hospital. It was inaugurated in September 1995 and, headed by Joch, throughout its existence, the only free-of-charge facility for reconstructive surgery in the region. In September 1996, the Taliban conquered Jalalabad and Kabul. The European Union ceased funding in  October 1998. Temporarily supported by the Federal Foreign Office, the Interplast hospital was finally confiscated by the Taliban, forcing the project to be aborted at the end of September 1999. Burma / Republic of the Union of Myanmar (since 1997). In 1995, he had met Burmese scholarship holder Khin Maung Lwin (Ludwig-Maximilians-University) in Munich. Through Lwin's mediation, he was authorized by the Burmese Ministry of Health to conduct his first surgical mission in its then capital Yangon in 1997. In order to ensure sustainability and avoid "medical colonialism", he has since promoted the establishment and expansion of plastic  surgery wards, organized equipment training, surgical workshops and scholarships for Burmese colleagues as well as clinical internships. In his 54 surgical missions up to and including 2017, 14 of 21 sites were located in border districts inhabited mainly by "ethnic minorities" or adjacent to areas of armed conflicts. The missions in Thai border regions (e.g., Sangkhlaburi) also served ethnic groups persecuted by the Burmese military regime. From 2005, the government granted him access to the so-called Golden Triangle. While he had previously treated Muslim members of the Rohingya minority in Thandwe and Sittwe, from 2015 onward he intensified his  activities in the politically troubled state of Rakhine. Cyclone Nargis. The night of May 2 to 3, 2008, just returned to Yangon after a 2 weeks surgery mission in central Burma/Myanmar, he there witnessed Cyclone Nargis, one of the most severe tropical cyclones in the history of weather records. In the early morning hours, a state of emergency was declared and the airport was shut down. Like other foreign organizations, Interplast specialists were not allowed to enter the Irrawaddy Delta, the region worst hit by the storm. Forced to inaction, his team flew back to Munich three days later . Due to a news embargo and the travel ban on foreign media representatives, they became of interest to German journalists. In cooperation with foundations also active in Burma/Myanmar such as the Myanmar Foundation, the "Stiftunglife" (Foundation Life) and the Amara Health Foundation, he then handled public relations, launched donation appeals and personally delivered emergency aid to the crisis region. In cooperation with the Amara Health Foundation and the "Stiftunglife", he initiated the clinic ship project "Swimming Doctors" in April 2009, which is still operating today. Journalist dispute. On 31 May 2008, the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" published Alice Schwarzers article  Renewal from within - Why Burma needs true friends. The article challenged Western criticism of the Burmese military government's disaster management as post-colonialist and driven by political interests. To Schoeneich, who had been working there unhindered by the military regime for ten years, she referred to as such a "true friend", who had been warned well in advance of the storm, and so had the population in Yangon. The head of the cultural section of German news magazine "Der Spiegel", responded with an open letter on June 1, 2008. He condemned Schwarzer's reference to the surgeon's freedom  of movement, as his case did not reflect the harsh reality his fellow journalists faced in the country. Also the Secretary General of the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) and supporter of the boycott measures, wrote an open protest letter to Schwarzer on June 2, 2008. China (2006). In 2004, he performed surgery on the 15-year-old Chinese Xiao Liewen as a team member with his former professor, incrementally reconstructing the burnt right half of her face. For the first time in medical history, the preformation of a nose on the lower abdomen and its transplantation into the face  succeeded. A German TV channel filmed the process and aired a documentary in the German TV show Galileo on March 23, 2006. In 2008 and 2013, Galileo aired a follow-up on Liewen's health and professional development. During a two-week mission in China, conducted by Interplast sections Munich and Wiesbaden in June 2006, Schoeneich picked up Liewen in Shanghai and performed follow-up surgery on her in Xuzhou. Peace Missions. With his "Peace Missions" in Palestine and Irak in 2011, he abandoned the classic Interplast principle of political neutrality. Inspired by the documentary "The Heart of Jenin" and  the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, he assembled a surgical team of Christian, Muslim and Jewish colleagues. Their mission was to take place in Summer 2011 in Jenin, West Bank. On April 4, 2011 Juliano Mer-Khamis, Jewish-Palestinian director, activist and founder of "The Freedom Theater" in Jenin, was shot dead in broad daylight. Since Interplast local associates had also been threatened, the Palestinian Minister of Health moved the planned mission to Nablus, West Bank, where Schoeneich and his interreligious team performed free plastic surgery on 118 Palestinian patients from 23 June to 8 July. A camera crew from "Bayerischer  Rundfunk", headed by journalist Richard C. Schneider, accompanied the mission. The 30-minute documentary "Operation Peace" was broadcast on September 5, 2011, in "Das Erste (ARD)". "Operation Peace" was mentioned again in Schneider's 2018 book on the Middle East conflict. Significance for Transsexual Men. In 1976, his then professor Edgar Biemer had started gender-reassignment surgery in Germany. Schoeneich offered this option not only to transsexual women, but also to transsexual men as early as the late 1980s. The surgical techniques he used at the time, he described in the book ""Im falschen Körper. Alles über Transsexualität"" ("In  the wrong body. Everything on Transsexuality") in 1991. In order to reduce the high risk of complications, he abandoned urethral lengthening in 1993 and instead specialized in forming the penoid exclusively from the anterolateral thigh flap, or a flap from the lower abdomen, while preserving the original genitalia. Photographic Work. In 2004, he exhibited a portrait series titled "Afghan Encounters" in Munich. In audio-visual presentations he juxtaposes landscapes, architecture and everyday motifs of his host countries with images of medical conditions induced by poverty and violence. In the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, he captured the state of emergency and  extent of destruction in Yangon, Burma/Myanmar. The series was published online on May 6, 2008 by two international photo press agencies.