Włodzimierz Józef 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.

Biography Włodzimierz Godłowski was born in Stryi on 7 October 1900. He finished a gymnasium in Sanok in 1918, and then enrolled in the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. From 1925-1927 he worked at the Mental Illness Institute in Rybnik.

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

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

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