Nazi crimes | Doctors as committed criminals

The Alt Rehse estate park is located on Lake Tollense near Neubrandenburg: old trees, manicured lawns, and the occasional view of the lake. Several larger buildings stand there on the slope, their timber-framed buildings clad in brick and under thatched roofs. Today, a hotel invites guests to Ayurvedic treatments. Outside the gate of the estate park lies a village whose past becomes quite clear upon closer inspection. On the doorposts of the residential buildings, one can read something like: "Erected in the 3rd year" – "of the 1,000-year Reich," although the date could be more precise. The 22 houses belong to the model village, with which the Nazis also intended to create an architectural showcase. And the estate park housed the "Führerschule der Deutschen Ärzteschaft" (Leadership School of the German Medical Profession) between 1935 and 1943. This school was inaugurated 90 years ago.

Approximately 10,000 doctors were "ideologically trained" here in courses lasting one to four weeks. The doctors, uniformly dressed in tracksuits, attended lectures on topics such as "racial hygiene," "hereditary health," and "The National Socialist doctor." Pharmacists and midwives were invited to shorter courses.

Ninety years ago, not only was this "leadership school" opened, but the Nuremberg Laws were also enacted. These included the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor." The initial goal was to exclude Jewish people, initially through prohibitions on marriage and sexual intercourse with citizens of "German and related blood." "Racial hygiene" was implemented through the "Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People," also enacted in 1935. In practice, these guidelines led to forced sterilizations and abortions, the murder of the sick, and even the mass murder of European Jews in extermination camps.

Training operations at Alt Rehse ceased during the war years. For a time, the site served as a reserve military hospital. After the war, the Soviet Army arrived, then a children's home was built, and then a teacher training facility. For many years, the site housed an East German People's Army (NVA) base. From 1990 onward, various parties attempted to use the park and school building for their own interests, culminating in the current hotel operation .

Since 2001, the non-profit association Alt Rehse Memorial, Education, and Meeting Center has been striving to establish a place of learning and remembrance in the village. A small permanent exhibition is housed in a new commercial building from the 1990s. A traveling exhibition on the role of health authorities during the Nazi era is currently on display there. In the future, space will be available in one of the former NVA barracks on the edge of the estate park. The financial situation has improved somewhat, with state and federal funding available, including support from the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania State Center for Political Education. Smaller contributions come from medical associations.

However, the activists, including the long-time project leader, historian Rainer Stommer, agree with the association's academic advisory board and other allies that the potential of memorial sites in the region should be more fully utilized. Students in the healthcare professions, in particular, should address the background of fascist medical crimes. Thus, the racist laws of 1935 were used as the occasion for an event on the second-to-last weekend in May, to which representatives from universities and technical colleges were expressly invited.

This approach is reinforced by the report of the Lancet Commission on Medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust, published at the end of 2023. The renowned US medical journal "The Lancet" regularly convenes commissions on future problems in medicine, bringing together experts from all continents, if possible, to discuss available solutions. The final reports are published in a special issue of "The Lancet."

One of the co-founders of this commission was medical historian Volker Roelcke from the University of Giessen. In Alt Rehse, he explained the key research findings. The wealth of details includes the prehistory, such as anti-Semitism before 1933 and the medical profession's interest in Nazi ideology even before that time. But even after 1945, there were "many types of continuities." Injustice in medicine was extremely pronounced in the twelve years up to 1945, but had already been inherent in modern medicine before then. In any case, doctors' enthusiasm for the new Nazi state was great: health, social, and population policies were to be based on the laws of biology. Accordingly, doctors were the academic group with the largest proportion of party members, even ahead of lawyers and teachers.

Participants in the courses at Alt Rehse also had to be party members. Overall, between 55 and 60 percent of doctors were members of the Nazi Party or the SS. "But not 98 percent," explains Roelcke – so there was certainly room for maneuver. One example is the reports by doctors about people who were to be sterilized. According to a recent study, up to two-thirds of practicing physicians in the Erlangen/Nuremberg area did not report any of their patients to health authorities or hereditary health courts. This was certainly noticed, but did not result in any sanctions.

Rather, the fascist state's framework allowed doctors to implement ideas that had existed since the end of the 19th century. The murder of up to 300,000 people as "deadweight" was possible because doctors contributed to it with their medical expertise. According to Roelcke, postwar courts concluded that, in fact, legitimate things had gotten out of hand here.

Another form of crime was research initiated by physicians, including in "completely deregulated areas" in occupied Eastern Europe. Physicians approached the SS to obtain test subjects. The research itself was not absurd, nor were its methods, according to Roelcke. It was brutal and ruthless toward the test subjects, and often resulted in fatal outcomes.

One of the commission's key findings was the realization that many post-war narratives contributed to alleviating guilt. For example, there were only a few exceptions among Nazi doctors who had been involved in crimes and were portrayed as individual monsters. Traces of all these themes can be found in research on the "Führerschule," but also in places like the sanatorium and nursing home on Schwerin's Sachsenberg or the Rostock-Gehlsdorf University Hospital, not to mention the concentration camp memorials in the region . These sites are ideal for student excursions, but such visits are only firmly established at a few educational institutions, including the Neubrandenburg University of Applied Sciences.