Włodzimierz Godłowski

Włodzimierz Józef Godłowski (7 October 1900 – April/May 1940) was a Polish neurologist and psychologist. A professor of the Stefan Batory University in Wilno (Vilnius), he was also an officer in the Polish Army during the German and Soviet invasion of Poland. He was made a prisoner of war by the Soviets in 1939 and was murdered in the 1940 Katyn massacre.

Włodzimierz Godłowski was born in Stryi on 7 October 1900.^[1] He finished a gymnasium in Sanok in 1918, and then enrolled in the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.^[1] Around that time he also served in the military, where he served as a trainee at the Internal Illnesses Clinic.^[1] He obtained his PhD in 1925 at the Jagiellonian University, where he also worked as a docent.^[1][2] From 1925-1927 he worked at the Mental Illness Institute in Rybnik.^[1] From 1927 he worked in the Neurology Clinic at the Jagiellonian University.^[1] In 1930 he spent half a year practicing in Vienna.^[1] From September 1938 he was a member of the faculty if the Stefan Batory University in Wilno (Vilnius).^[2] He was the director of the University's Neurology Clinic and Brain Institute.^[3]

His research concerned issues such as brainstem and cerebral cortex.^[1] His best known work was the Podkorowe ośrodki spojrzenia i skojarzonych ruchów oczu (1936)(Subcortical centers of gaze and associated eye movements).^[1] It was that work that gained him his habilitation.^[1]

As a junior lieutenant of the military reserves of the Polish Army, he was mobilized on 27 August 1939.^[3] He served on Poland's eastern frontier, in the "Łużki" Battalion of the "Głębokie" Regiment of the Border Protection Corps.^[3] After the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 he became a prisoner of war in the custody of the Soviet Union.^[2][3] He was imprisoned in Kozielsk, and was a victim of the Katyn massacre in 1940 (around April–May),^[2][3] aged 39.

He was the father of Kazimierz Godłowski, an archeologist and historian.