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A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most respected publications on medical research, addresses the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of medicine. It criticized the magazine for paying only “superficial and idiosyncratic attention.”
The magazine “was an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the rise of Nazi Germany,” wrote the article’s authors, Harvard medical historians Alan Brandt and Joel Abirashed. In many cases, the magazine simply ignored Nazi medical plunder, such as the horrific experiments performed on twins at Auschwitz, based largely on Adolf Hitler’s bogus “race science.”
In contrast, two other leading scientific journals, Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association, covered Nazi discriminatory policies throughout Hitler’s tenure, historians noted. The New England Journal did not publish an article “unequivocally condemning” Nazi medical brutality until 1949, four years after the end of World War II.
The new paper, published in this week’s issue of the journal, is part of a series launched last year to address racism and other forms of bias in medical settings. Another recent article described the magazine’s intense coverage of eugenics from the 1930s through his ’40s.
“Learning from past mistakes will help us in the future,” said Dr. Eric Rubin, the magazine’s editor and an infectious disease expert at Harvard University. “How can I avoid having similar unpleasant thoughts in the future?”
Dr. Abi-Rashed discovered papers supporting Nazi medical practices in the publication archives. “Recent Changes in Health Insurance in Germany Under Hitler” is a 1935 paper written by influential medical experts Michael Davis and Gertrud Kruger. A nurse from Germany. The article praised the Nazi emphasis on public health, which was infused with questionable ideas about the innate superiority of the German people.
“There is no mention of the numerous persecutory and anti-Semitic laws that have been passed,” Dr. Abirached and Dr. Brandt write. In one passage, Dr. Davis and Ms. Kruger described how doctors were forced to work in Nazi labor camps. Working there, the authors write lightheartedly, was an “opportunity to interact with all kinds of people in everyday life.”
“They apparently believed that discrimination against Jews was irrelevant to what they considered reasonable and progressive change,” Dr. Abirached and Dr. Brandt write.
But most of all, the two historians say the magazine says too little about the Nazis, who murdered some 70,000 disabled people, before turning to the genocide of Europe’s Jews and other groups. I was surprised that there wasn’t.
“When I opened the file drawer, there was almost nothing there,” Dr. Brandt said. Instead of finding articles condemning or justifying Nazi medical perversions, there was something more puzzling instead. It is an apparent indifference that continued long after World War II ended.
The magazine recognized Hitler in 1933, when he began implementing anti-Semitic policies. Seven months after the emergence of the Third Reich, the magazine published an article called “The Abuse of Jewish Doctors” that would probably be criticized today for lacking moral clarity. It seems to be based primarily on reporting in the New York Times.
The new article said, “Although it did not provide details, the notice reported that there were signs of ‘violent and unrelenting opposition to the Jewish people.'”
Other magazines had a clearer picture of the threat of Nazism. The scientific community expressed alarm at the “terrible oppression” of Jews, not only in medicine but also in law, the arts, and other professions.
“This magazine and America were in tunnel vision,” said John Michalczyk, co-director of Jewish Studies at Boston University. American companies were eager to do business with Hitler’s regime. The Nazi dictators, on the other hand, looked favorably on the genocide and forced relocation of Native Americans and sought to co-opt eugenics practices practiced throughout the United States throughout the early 20th century.
“Our hands are clean,” says Dr. Michalczyk.
Dr Abi-Ratched said she and Dr Brandt wanted to avoid becoming “anachronistic” and viewing the magazine’s silence on Nazism through a modern lens. But as other medical publications have taken a different direction, the journal’s silence has taken on a dangerous new meaning. What was said was dwarfed by what was never said.
“We were looking for strategies to understand how racism works,” Dr. Brandt said. It seemed to work partly through indifference. Many institutions would later claim that had they known the extent of the Nazi atrocities, they would have acted to save more Holocaust victims.
This excuse rings hollow to experts who say there were enough sighting reports to merit action.
Dr. Brandt said, “Silence can sometimes contribute to such radical, immoral, and destructive changes.” “It’s implicit in our paper.”
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