Dr. Ernst Friedrich Lepold Niedermeyer, who was a leading researcher, author, clinician and pioneer in the field of electroencephalogy and its use in epilepsy and other brain research, died Thursday of colon cancer at Gilchrist Hospice in Towson.
The longtime Towson resident was 92.
"He was one of the senior people in his field at his passing and widely respected. His textbook, 'Electroencephalography,' is the standard in the field," said Dr. Ronald P. Lesser, professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
The son of a country physician and obstetrician and a homemaker, Dr. Niedermeyer was born in Schoenberg in the German province of Silesia, now part of Poland.
When he was 15, his family moved to Vienna, where he attended high school. His father, who was outspoken and had forceful opinions, opposed the Nazi racial laws after Germany's takeover of Austria in 1938 and was imprisoned for three months.
After Ernst Niedermeyer graduated from high school the same year, he was inducted into the German army. He was sent to Vienna to study medicine, but after it was discovered that his maternal grandfather was Jewish, he was removed from medical school because the authorities considered him "racially tainted and politically unreliable."
Sent to the Eastern Front, Dr. Niedermeyer was assigned to a Panzer division, where he was wounded twice and then sent to France.
"He survived the horrible winter of 1943-1944 on the Russian Front. He once told me he and his mates didn't care about the army's mission; they only wanted to find enough to eat and avoid capture by the Russians," said Charles W. Mitchell, a Parkton editor, author and historian.
Captured by Allied forces in 1944 after D-Day, he was put aboard an American troopship full of wounded soldiers for whom he cared on the long westbound voyage across the North Atlantic.
He was sent to prisoner of war camps in the Midwest and Colorado, where he picked corn and roused the suspicion of his fellow prisoners because he "attended Mass and read The New York Times," said a son, Franz Niedermeyer of Harrisburg, Pa.
After the end of World War II, he returned to Austria and completed his medical degree in 1947 at Leopold-Franz University in Innsbruck.
Dr. Niedermeyer completed training in neurology and psychiatry from 1950 to 1951 at Hospital de la Salpetriere in Paris. He returned to Leopold-Franz University, where he was a docent in neurology and psychiatry, and acting chief of the department from 1958 to 1960.
While at the university in Innsbruck, Dr. Niedermeyer's hospital received an electroencephalograph under the postwar Marshall Plan, and when the technician who worked with it resigned, it became his task to learn how to operate the machine.
Dr. Neidermeyer was a Senior member of AES.