the case can be laid. In the early days of the anti-Semitic movement many German lawyers, believing that the anti-Semitic wave was transitory, helped out their Jewish colleagues, but the number of Germans willing to associate themselves professionally in any way with Jews becomes less and less as it becomes increasingly evident that such “fraternization” may be costly.
NO NEW JOB, NO EMIGRATION
At the very best, the new decree will throw thousands of professional German Jews out of work. It is hard to see how they can ever recuperate. It is difficult for anyone today to emigrate, and it is particularly difficult for a German lawyer, doctor, or school teacher to establish himself in his own profession in a foreign country. Families are therefore faced with ruin.
Jewish physicians can not be reached by any such general measure as the one which shuts Jewish lawyers out of the courts, but the campaign against them is just as sinister. They are debarred, first, from occupying positions either as chiefs or assistants in any state, provincial, or municipal hospital, sanitorium, or other institution for the care of the ill. This decree, which applies throughout all Germany, meant that some of Germany’s most eminent physicians were dismissed from their posts from one day to another, often after thirty years of distinguished service. In Munich, for instance, Professor Oberdorfer, head of a Department of Pathological Anatomy, Professor Neubauer, head of a Department of Internal Medicine, and Professor Mandelbaum, head of a Zoological Department, all men against whose professional competence or ethics no word has ever been spoken, were dismissed at once. In Munich alone—which has not a large Jewish population—twenty assistant physicians were dropped. In Berlin 228 institution physicians were dropped in one day.
These men are still on pension lists, but it is a question whether the Hitler government intends to maintain the pension service instituted by the Republic. If it is abolished, the older men dropped from official positions in every town in Germany, will be ruined. Most of them cannot go into private practice; the experience of many years has not fitted them for it. Further scientific work is closed to them, because the public institutions with laboratories will not let them work.
HOW BOYCOTT AGAINST M.D.S WORKS
A great German institution is the Krankenkasse—the semi-public system of sickness insurance which takes care of the health of some eighty percent of the German population. Barred from cooperation with this institution, the general German physician finds it difficult to live at all. All Jews have already been barred as control physicians in the Krankenkasse itself. Krankenkasse patients have not yet been forbidden to go to Jewish doctors, but a refined system has been worked out for persuading applicants for insurance money to patronize only Germans.
The applicant for insurance must go through two bureaus before he obtains the certificate entitling him to a physician’s services. In each bureau he is asked whether he prefers a German or a Jew. If he says German, his card is stamped with a big red D. Since to say that you prefer a Jew is to make yourself a suspect in today’s Germany, the authorities believe that they will accomplish the shouldering out of the Jewish doctors without a law.
It should perhaps be made clear that the Krankenkasse is not a state institution, but is one maintained by employers and employees, by percentual contributions on the basis of wages or salaries. But the Nazi government, in its attempt to achieve what it calls the “total state” has interfered as much in private as in public institutions. All professional organizations, trades unions, and employers’ organizations have, like the various offices of the state, been put under dictatorship.
Thus, the various Medical Societies have been forced to dissolve their executive committees and reorganize under a Nazi dictator. The process invariably meant the shutting out of any Jewish members, so that in the purely private practice of medicine, in the purely professional societies, the Jewish doctor is an outcast.
JEWISH MEDICINES TAGGED
Moreover a Nazi Doctors’ Society has been formed (as well as Nazi vereins of Lawyers, Teachers, Students, etc.) which takes pains to publish in medical journals lists of medicines put out by Jewish firms and to encourage physicians to boycott these goods. The object is clearly to ruin such industries.
There is not a single Jewish physician in Germany who is not hit by these measures. Let us take a specific case. I have been treated at one time or another in Berlin by a physician of some international reputation, whose practice as a specialist is entirely private, and whose operative work is performed in a private clinic. He is a Jew. When I met him on my last visit to Germany he said: “If you hear of anyone in America who will give me a chance as an assistant in his office, let me know. “I shall have to leave Germany.”
I demurred. “Surely,” I said, “you are not particularly injured by these measures.”
He answered, “Of course I am!” First of all, I am a specialist. I derive most of my clients from other physicians. As things stand at present in Germany, a German doctor is literally afraid to recommend his patients to a Jew. Furthermore, I notice already that my old patients are leaving me for non-Jewish doctors. It is not that they are disloyal, or dissatisfied. Some of them have been my patients for many years. But they do not dare to buck public opinion.”
“I AM AN OUTCAST”
“But the most important thing,” he added, “is that my purely scientific work is made impossible. I have been working for six years on a matter which I had hoped to be able to present to the world this year. Do you realize that there is no medical society and no medical publication in Germany where I can expect a hearing? I am an outcast.”
The physician I am quoting is a man in a peculiarly good position. The last words were spoken very bitterly. “I am an outcast.” Hundreds and hundreds of men of science, whose lives have been devoted to one of the most exacting and selfless professions, who come from a race which has made distinguished contributions to German medicine today realize that they are outcasts in the only land they ever knew, from the only people whose language they speak.
I interviewed a physician in Munich, whose testimony about his own practice tallied almost exactly with that given above. This man was a soldier in the German army for four years and has every order which is given for distinguished service and for exceptional bravery under fire. When on the boycott day, S. A. men entered his office and put up in his window the derisive sign, “Jew!” he said: “For a thousand years it has been an honor to be a Jewish physician. What you have said, you have said, and I shall never take the sign down.”
WHAT GERMANS OWE TO JEWS
Actually it remained there until his patients removed it.
Three German Jewish physicians have been Nobel Prize winners. To a German Jew world medicine owes the cure for syphilis, and to another German Jew the test by which it is diagnosed. I have not yet heard that the Nazi government has barred Salvarsan from medical remedies, but they may come to it.
Similar measures have been applied to Jewish teachers, journalists, musicians, and other artists. A wholesale purging of the public schools of Jews and socialists is responsible for a prolonged Easter vacation. Even were a few Jews to slip into the public schools it is impossible to imagine how they could remain, compelled as they will be, to teach the doctrine of triumphant Aryanism.
WAR ON JEWISH JOURNALISTS
All Jewish journalists have not been deprived of their positions, but the vast majority have, and those who remain do so on sufferance. In every newspaper office the responsible editor has been obliged to compile a list of Jewish employees, and to offer reasons why they should not be replaced by “Germans”. Under no circumstances is a Jew permitted in a leading position on the newspaper. Those who keep jobs as reporters, or in minor positions as critics realize that they are insecure and subject to maintaining “good behavior”.
In the theaters, in the concert halls, the same, “cleaning up” process has gone forward. Here it is difficult for the outsider to see who suffers most: the Jews or German culture. The blow to the German theater has been prodigious. Berlin, until recently probably the finest theater city in the world has been reduced at a blow to the rank of a provincial town. I would certainly hesitate to say that this is because the Jews have been weeded out, or live in the fear of dismissal, although the Jewish names that flash into ones mind are certainly outstanding in the German theater: Reinhardt, Jessner, Elizabeth Bergner, Massary, Pallenberg, Ernst Deutsch, Koertner. But the point, I think, is that neither art nor science flourish under a system which believes that a political faith can be the measure of all things. As a Jewish physician remarked to me: “I do not know how to cut a cancer out in harmony with the national revival. I do not know how to cut it out in a German way or a Jewish way, but only in the right way—and the right way is determined by quite other standards.”
THE JEWISH ARTIST
The Jewish artist sometimes survives, but always under conditions which are humiliating in the extreme. Eric Kleiber, a Jew, was finally allowed to direct Parsifal in Berlin. But Klemperer and Bruno Walter had concerts cancelled. The Jewish director who made the Municipal Opera in Berlin one of the glories of Germany was summarily dismissed.
And it has now been determined that anyone with a single Jewish grandfather or grandmother is, for purposes of discrimination, a Jew !
For a foreigner, and particularly for an American, Frenchman or Englishman, the astonishing thing about this whole procedure is the small amount of civil courage which has been shown. It is out of the question that the campaign against the Jews in the professions is accepted by all non-Jewish professional colleagues ! On the contrary many, many Germans said to me: “This business makes me ashamed to call myself a German.” Precisely the most distinguished Germans in the learned professions are those who regret it most. But where is a voice raised !
I nominate for the Hall of Fame Professor Sauerbruck, of the Charite in Berlin, who steadfastly refused to dismiss his Jewish head physician or his two assistants. I nominate for the Hall of Fame the seven people, who in a mass meeting of five hundred stage artists in Munich voted for the measure ! I nominate for the Hall of Fame Professor Furtwaengler. who in an open letter to Dr. Goebbels of the Reichspropaganda bureau, pleaded that quality be made the measure of art rather than race. (Incidentally the German radio broadcasted Dr. Goebbels’ reply to Professor Furtwaengler, but not Professor Furwaengler’s letter !) I nominate for the Hall of Fame Hans Pfistner, the composer-conductor, who protested in an open letter to Adolf Hitler against the cancelling of Bruno Walter’s concert. These men stand out, a few lone figures of protest, in a culture whose servility is the astonishment of the whole world !
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.
