Nazi crimes – doctors as a conviction

The Alt Rehse estate park is located on the Tollensesee near Neubrandenburg: old trees, well -kept lawn, sometimes a look at the lake. Some larger buildings stand there on the slope, the half -timbered framework with brick, under thatched roofs. A hotel invites you to the Ayurveda cure these days. There is a village in front of the gate of the manor, the past of which is very clear when you look closely. On the door beams of the houses, it says: “Built in the 3rd years”-“of the 1000-year-old empire”, the time would have to be specified. The 22 houses belong to the model village, with which the Nazis also wanted to create an architectural figurehead. And between 1935 and 1943 the “Führer School of the German Medical Council” was in the manor. This school was inaugurated 90 years ago.

Around 10,000 doctors were “reproduced in terms of ideological”, in courses of one to four weeks. The doctors, dressed uniformly in training suits, heard lectures, such as the subjects of “racial hygiene”, “hereditary health” or “the National Socialist doctor”. Pharmacists and midwives were invited to shorter courses.

Not only was this “leader school” opened 90 years ago, but the Nuremberg laws were also enacted. This included the “Law to protect German blood and German honor”. The aim was initially to rule out Jewish people, first of all about bans of marriage and sexual intercourse with nationals “German and related blood”. The “racial hygiene” was implemented by the “law on the protection of the hereditary health of the German people”, which was also adopted in 1935. In practice, forced sterilizations and abbreviations, sick murders up to the mass murder of European Jews in extermination camps followed.

The training in Alt Rehse was discontinued in the war years. In the meantime, the place served as a reserve “. After the end of the war, the Soviet army came, then a children’s home was built, then a teacher training facility. There has been an NVA location for many years. From 1990, changing actors tried to use the park and school buildings for their own interests, right down to the current hotel.

Since 2001, the non-profit association has been trying to anchor a learning and memorial location in the village. A small permanent exhibition can be found in a new new building of the 90s. There is currently also a hiking exhibition on the role of health authorities in the Nazi era. In the future, rooms will be available in one of the former NVA barracks on the edge of the estate park. The financial situation has improved somewhat, there are state and federal funds, also supported by the State Center for Political Education Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Smaller contributions come from medical associations.

However, the active people, including the long -time project manager, the historian Rainer Stommer, are agreed with the scientific advisory board of the association and other allies that the possibilities of memorial locations in the region should be used more. With the background of the fascist medical crimes, learners in the health professions in particular should deal. The racist laws of 1935 were taken as an occasion for an event on the penultimate May weekend, to which representatives of high and technical schools were expressly invited.

This approach is reinforced by the report of the Lancet Commission on Medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust from the end of 2023. The renowned medical US magazine “The Lancet” regularly appoints commissions to the future problems of medicine, in which experts will bring together as possible from all continents. The final reports are published in a »Lancet« special edition.

Medical historian Volker Roelcke from the University of Gießen is one of the co -founders of this commission. In Alt Rehse he explained the essential research results. The history of details includes the history, such as anti-Semitism before 1933 and the interest of the medical profession in the Nazi ideology before this time. But even after 1945 there were “many types of continuities”. The injustice in medicine was extremely pronounced in the twelve years until 1945, but was already created in modern medicine. In any case, the enthusiasm of the doctors for the new Nazi state was great: health, social and population policy should be based on the laws of biology. Accordingly, the doctors were the academic group with the largest proportion of party members, still in front of lawyers and teachers.

The participants in the courses in Alt Rehse also had to belong to the party. In total, there were between 55 and 60 percent of doctors in NSDAP or SS. “But not 98 percent,” explains Roelcke – so there were definitely scope for action. An example is the reports of doctors about people who should be sterilized. According to current research work, up to two thirds of the resident doctors in the Erlangen/Nuremberg area did not report any of their patients to health authorities or hereditary health courts. That was well noticed, but no sanctions resulted in.

Rather, the doctors were able to implement ideas with the framework conditions of the fascist state that have existed since the end of the 19th century. The murder of up to 300,000 people as “ballast existences” was possible because doctors contributed to this with medical assessment. According to Roelcke, courts of the post -war period came to the conclusion that there were actually real things out of hand.

Another form of crime was researched by doctors, including in “completely deregulated rooms” in the occupied East of Europe. Doctors approached the SS to maintain subjects. Research itself was not absurd, nor was her methods, according to Roelcke. Compared to the test subjects, she showed herself brutal, ruthless and often led to a fatal outcome.

The central results of the Commission also realize that many post -war narrative contributed to the relief of debt. We were talking about just a few exceptions among the Nazi doctors who had been involved in crimes and were presented as individual monsters. Traces of all of these topics can be found in research on the »Führerschule«, but also in places such as the healing and nursing institution on the Schwerin Sachsenberg or the Rostock-Gehlsdorf University Hospital, not to talk about the region’s concentration camp memorial. The places are available for excursions from students, but only such visits are firmly anchored at individual training centers, including at the Neubrandenburg University of Applied Sciences.