Edgar Leon Waldemar Otto Wedekind (31 January 1870 - 22
October 1938) was German chemist and teacher at
Hannoversch-Münden. He was one of the signatories for the Vow
of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and
High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State
(1933).
Wedekind was born in Altona (near Hamburg)
and studied chemistry, receiving a doctorate from Munich in 1895
for studies on Tetrazolium under Hans von Pechmann, He received a
habilitation from the University of Leipzig in 1899. He then
taught chemistry at the Universities of Tübingen, Strasbourg,
Frankfurt, Göttingen as well as at the forestry university
Hannoversch-Münden and from 1938, he was a member of the Erfurt
academy. He worked with the mycologist Richard Falck and analyzed
the antibiotic Sparassol. He defended Falck against
anti-semitism but was, in November 1933, a signatory to the
Bekenntnis der Professoren an den Universitäten und Hochschulen zu
Adolf Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat (or Vow
of allegiance of professors at the German universities and
colleges to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist state).
Wedekind worked on stereochemistry and
magnetochemistry and was close to identifying ketenes when he
treated Ph2CHCOCl with n-Pr3N in 1901 at
Tübingen. He suggested that it produced the intermediate Ph2C-C=O
but ketene was later isolated by Hermann Staudinger in 1905. He
died at Erfurt.