Immediate Impact of Nazism on German Medicine
In the years immediately preceding the Third Reich, physicians’ organizations devoted to Party politics sprang up. One of these was the National Socialist Physicians’ Society, founded in 1929, in which Conti played a leading role. There was a rival association of Social Democratic Physicians, and a Socialist Society of Physicians. These societies proposed candidates for election to the Physicians’ Chambers, and thus the National Socialist Physicians’ Society and the Socialist associations came to compete with each other.
The notorious “boycott day” in Berlin, 1 April 1933, was a day of disgrace for German medicine. Members of the National Socialist Physicians’ Society, who knew the membership lists of the Socialist societies and the lists of Jewish physicians, broke into the apartments of their Socialist and Jewish colleagues in the early morning hours, pulled them out of their beds, beat them and brought them to the exhibition area near the Berlin Lehrter Station. There, all of them, including men up to 70 years old, were forced to run around the garden, as in a hippodrome, and they were shot at with pistols or beaten with sticks. There they had to stay for several days without sufficient food, and then were handed over to the SA which carried part of them to the cellars at the Hedemannstrasse jail for further tortures.
Thereafter, the members of the Socialist Society of Physicians were barred from all insurance practice because of “Communist and subversive activities.” In the subsequent listings of physicians issued by the insurance companies, the Jewish physicians were included in a separate list headed “Enemies of the State or Jews.” Soon, the insurance companies, even private ones, were no longer permitted to pay fees to the Jewish physicians. Immediately thereafter, Jewish physicians were excluded from all professional and scientific societies. At first, those who were war veterans were nominally allowed to carry on their insurance practice, but patients who kept going to them were threatened and exposed to all kinds of unpleasantness on the part of the insurance officials.
After the war began, certification and licensing were withdrawn from all Jewish physicians and they were degraded to the status of lay therapists. These physicians were forced to wear a blue shield with the Star of David and had to add a middle name such as “Sarah” or “Israel.” Their prescriptions likewise had to bear the Star of David, which exposed their patients to all kinds of unpleasantness when filling them at pharmacies, most of which had signs in their windows reading “Jews not wanted.”
At first, the Aryan physicians were allowed to treat Jewish patients, but finally they were prohibited from doing so. Hospitals refused admission to Jewish patients, apart from a few courageous ones who admitted them in defiance of the law. Jews were admitted to mental institutions in separate wards, but usually were quickly transported elsewhere for extermination.
In the early summer of 1943, Conti instigated and directed a wholesale persecution of doctors who were either foreigners or persons of so-called mixed blood and those related by marriage to Jews. At first, they were removed from their practice and sent off to posts under inferior Party doctors. In 1944, Conti went a step further and forbade these physicians to practice. They were drafted into the Speer organization, in which they were employed solely at manual labor, their living conditions being little better than those of concentration camp inmates.