A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most authoritative publications for medical research, criticizes the journal for giving only “superficial and cursory attention” to the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of medical science.
The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the rise of Nazi Germany,” wrote the article’s authors, Allan Brandt and Joelle Abi-Rached, both medical historians at Harvard. Often, the journal simply ignores the medical depredations of the Nazis, such as the horrific experiments conducted on twins at Auschwitz, which are largely based on the false “” of Adolf Hitler.science of race.”
In contrast, two other leading scientific journals – Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association – covered the Nazis’ discriminatory policies throughout Hitler’s tenure, historians say. The New England journal did not publish an article that “openly condemned” the medical atrocities of the Nazis. until 1949four years after World War II.
The new article, published in this week’s issue of the journal, is part of a series started last year to address racism and other forms of discrimination in the medical establishment. One more recent article described the journal’s enthusiastic coverage of eugenics throughout the 1930s and ’40s.
“Learning from our past mistakes will help us moving forward,” said the journal’s editor, Dr. Eric Rubin, an infectious disease expert at Harvard. “What can we do to make sure we don’t fall for the same kind of undesirable ideas in the future?”
In the publication’s archives, Dr. Abi-Rached a paper endorsing Nazi medical practices: “Recent changes in German health insurance under the Hitler government,” a 1935 treatise written by Michael Davis, an influential figure in health care, and Gertrud Kroeger, a nurse from Germany. The article praised the Nazis emphasis on public healthimbued with dubious ideas about the innate excellence of the Germans.
“There is no reference to the killing of the persecutory and antisemitic laws that were passed,” wrote Dr. Abi-Rached and Dr. Brandt. In one passage, Dr. Davis and Ms. Kroeger on how doctors were made to work in Nazi labor camps. The role there, the authors gleefully wrote, was an “opportunity to mix with all kinds of people in everyday life.”
“Clearly, they viewed discrimination against Jews as irrelevant to what they saw as rational and progressive change,” writes Dr. Abi-Rached and Dr. Brandt.
Mostly, however, the two historians were surprised by how little the journal said about the Nazis, who killed some 70,000 disabled people before turning to killing European Jews, as well as other groups.
“When we opened the file drawer, there was almost nothing there,” said Dr. Brandt. Instead of discovering articles that could oppose or justify the perversions of Nazi medicine, instead there is something more puzzling: an apparent indifference that lasted until the end of the Second World War.
The journal recognized Hitler in 1933, the year he began implementing his antisemitic policies. Seven months after the advent of the Third Reich, the journal published “The Abuse of the Jewish Physicians,” an article that today is likely to face criticism for its lack of moral clarity. This appears to be largely based on reporting by The New York Times.
“Without any details, the notice reported that there were some indications of ‘bitter and relentless opposition to the Jews,'” the new article said.
Other journals saw the threat of Nazism more clearly. Science expressed alarm about the “crass repression” of the Jews, which occurred not only in medicine but also in law, art and other professions.
“The journal, and America, had tunnel vision,” he said John Michalczyk, co-director of Jewish Studies at Boston College. American corporations actively did business with Hitler’s regime. The Nazi dictator, on the other hand, look in favor in the killing and dispossession of Native Americans, and sought to capitalize on the eugenics efforts that took place throughout the United States throughout the early 20th century.
“Our hands are not clean,” said Dr. Michalczyk.
said Dr. Abi-Rached that she and Dr. Brandt to avoid being “anachronistic” and view the journal’s silence on Nazism through a contemporary lens. But when he saw that other medical publications took a different tack, the journal’s silence took on a whole new meaning. What is said is dwarfed by what is never said.
“We are looking for strategies to understand how racism works,” said Dr. Brandt. It seems to work, in part, through apathy. Many institutions later claimed that they would have acted to save more Holocaust victims if they had known the extent of the Nazis’ atrocities.
That excuse rings hollow with experts pointing out that there are enough witness reports to warrant action.
“Sometimes, silence contributes to these kinds of radical, immoral, catastrophic changes,” said Dr. Brandt. “That’s implicit in our paper.”
