Hospital.Help

Berlin It is precisely the individual and human fates and the faces that make the hideous acts of the Nazis against Jewish doctors and patients clear. This is the concept of the traveling exhibition Systemic Disease. Doctor and patient under National Socialism, which opened yesterday in the rooms of the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KBV).

It brings together files from, among others, the KBV’s legal department from the 1920s to the 1990s and case studies. Some files were stored in Cologne, others were found by chance in offices in Berlin. At the same time, the files that were evaluated for the exhibition can also be seen in the subtle shifts in the basic understanding of doctors that were already clear before the National Socialists came to power, as the medical expert at the Nuremberg Medical Trial, Leo Alexander, the curator of the exhibition Ulrich According to Prehn. The exhibition aims to clearly name victims, but also perpetrators.

The chairwoman of the KBV representative assembly, Petra Reis-Berkowicz, warned: The medical profession has incurred an irreparable guilt by essentially becoming the murder machine of the National Socialists, which would not have been able to function in this form without the support . As difficult as it is for us to consider it today, we are less allowed to consider this chapter as closed in our history.

The medical profession, like other professional groups, has long found it difficult to delve deeper into its own history.

Petra Reis-Berkowicz / Andrea Katheder

That’s why this exhibition is even more important. Reis-Berkowicz emphasized that the representative assembly as the highest body of the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians stood and still stands behind this project with absolute unity and unanimity from the first resolution on the review in 2017 through several project extensions to the financing of the exhibition and the catalog.

Of course, with the exhibition you look into the past, but you also have to see the responsibility for the future, said Andreas Gassen, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the KBV. Because if our Jewish friends left Germany today out of fear, the alarm bells should ring. Gassen also pointed out the guilt of the medical profession and the late coming to terms with the role of the professional organizations.

As an example, he cited the former headquarters of the KBV and Federal Medical Association (BK), Haedenkampstrasse in Cologne, which still bore this name until 1986. Karl Haedenkamp was one of the highest medical officials in the post-war period, but was also active in the elimination of Jewish and socialist doctors during the Nazi era, explained Gassen.

This is a good example of the systemic disease: how professional representatives turned into willing henchmen of the Nazi regime, according to the KBV board chairman. In Germany today we have a responsibility to ensure that extremist parties never gain power again, warned Gassen.

Andreas Gassen / Andrea Katheder

Following public pressure, Haedenkampstrasse was then renamed Herbert-Lewin-Strasse, named after the Jewish doctor and SPD politician who also headed the Central Council of Jews in Germany after the war. When moving to Berlin in 2004, the medical organizations simply took the address from Cologne, Herbert-Lewin-Strae, with them, says Gassen.

At the ceremony to open the exhibition, the speakers reported on many of the fates that can also be found in the exhibition. On September 30, 1938, all Jewish doctors’ licenses to practice medicine were revoked, they were excluded from professional organizations and their merits were stripped. A few days later, on October 17, 1938, a letter from the Reich Medical Officer said that the waiting rooms of German doctors should not be populated with Jews.

However, the revocation of the license to practice medicine led to supply shortages for the population; in Berlin, two thirds of all statutory health insurance physicians had Jewish roots. As a result, some of them were at least allowed to look after Jewish patients again, although no longer as doctors but as so-called medical practitioners. This document on the exclusion of Jewish doctors was found in the archives of the Federal Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians.

For Orit Farkasch-Hacohen, Vice President of the Knesset in Israel, it is particularly important to clearly name today’s anti-Semitism: After October 7, 2023, the murderous attack by Hamas on Israeli territory, the terrible face of anti-Semitism in Europe and the the whole world, she said.

She thanked the KBV for keeping the memory of anti-Semitism alive with the exhibition. That’s why such an exhibition is more important than ever. Violence and hatred against Jewish people have taken root again in Europe, said Farkasch-Hacohen.

Orit Farkash-Hacohen, Vice President of the Knesset / Andrea Katheder

The Bundestag has also repeatedly been preoccupied with the crimes committed by the doctors,” said Petra Pau, Vice President of the Bundestag. A motion is currently being discussed in which the investigation of the euthanasia programs and forced sterilization should be intensified, reported Pau. The Culture Committee has this There has already been a broad majority, but the final decision by the plenary session of the German Bundestag is still pending.

And I fear that this will no longer be addressed by the 20th German Bundestag, unless we manage to resolve this issue on a day-to-day, cross-party basis, with dignity and responsibility in the German Bundestag, beyond the looming early federal election campaign.

Coming to terms with the times is also important for federal ministries, emphasized Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach. The Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) is also taking on this responsibility and has initiated two research projects. This will be used to research the post-war history of the two health ministries in the GDR and the Federal Republic. The results made it brutally clear how long National Socialism continued to shape public health.

The role of medicine in National Socialism is one of the darkest chapters of the medical profession. According to the SPD minister, putting medical practice at the service of humanity has been systematically turned into its opposite.

Doctors committed horrific crimes against Jews, from euthanasia to forced sterilization to human experiments in concentration camps. In addition, the National Socialists persecuted, disenfranchised and murdered Jewish doctors. Lauterbach warned that the investigation into the crimes of National Socialism against Jewish people must never come to an end.

The exhibition can be seen in the KBV rooms in Berlin until February 2025. It will then be presented in all KV locations nationwide in 2025 and 2026. © bee/mis/aerzteblatt.de