Dr. Laura Schaeffer, physician and municipal health officer in this area, returned here today after a ten-week stay in Israel during which she examined a number of Jewish victims of Nazi pseudo-scientific and “human guinea pig” experiments.
Dr. Schaeffer, a non-Jew of 32, who taught herself Hebrew in the small town where she grew up without having known Jews, certified some 90 injured or incapacitated survivors of the Nazis’ grisly experiments as eligible for lump sum compensation payments from the German Government. The largest group among these victims were Jewish girls from Salonika, Greece, who had been sterilized by Nazi doctors at the Oswiecim concentration camp.
The doctor, who is a fervent advocate of Zionism, said that she had encountered no obstacles or difficulties in working with the victims. She reported that only one case of a fraudulent claim had come to her attention, and then commented that from her experiences as a health officer she believed that among the Germans the proportion of fraudulent claims would have been greater.
Explaining her attitude toward the Jews, Dr. Schaeffer, who was the first German to go to Israel on an official Bonn Government mission, but who visited Israel last year in a private capacity, said that “we Germans should keep begging forgiveness (of the Jews) with contrition in our hearts, and we must strive to make amends to the best of our ability. ” Israel, she added, has every right to “repulse us, but it cannot keep us from trying over and over again.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
