Holocaust Denial

The Holocaust (1, 3)

The philosophy of the Nazis stated that the Aryan peoples, specifically the Germans, were the superior race, based on their physical strength, warrior qualities, intelligence and intuitiveness. Other races such as the Slavic peoples were inferior in all of the above respects; they deserved only a limited amount of education, should have their lands forcibly confiscated and become slaves to the Germans. The Jews, although intelligent were deemed odious, evil, and dangerous vermin because they wish to rule the world and most especially, to contaminate the Germans with their filth and diseases. Over the years, the German race has become defiled by miscegenation, and the German nation has been forced to bear the financial and emotional burden of their own mentally and physically handicapped, who live “lives not worth living” and therefore should be killed. Hitler, as physician of the Volk, and the Nazi party, the “paramedic” agent of his will, aim to purify the German race by programs of eugenics strictly enforced. This means euthanasia of the physically and mentally unfit, and sterilization of those men unfit to impregnate women and women unfit to bear racially desirable children. Only the fit were permitted to marry and to produce children. Other public health measures included cessation of smoking, exercise and the proper diet.

As for the Jews, they were segregated from the Germans, by confiscation of their German citizenships, by being forbidden from pursuing certain relationships with Aryans (marriages, employer-employee), by the Germans boycotting and then expropriating “Jewish businesses” and properties, and by forbidding Jews to hold certain jobs (e.g. in government) and to pursue certain professions (medicine and law). Many Jews were then driven out of Germany into Poland and placed into concentration camps. Finally, Jews were systematically and ruthlessly eradicated in German-occupied Europe, in a carefully planned and executed program that appeared to be more important to the Germans than overcoming their military enemies on the various fronts of World War II. The Holocaust in Europe, which lasted from 1933 to 1945, resulted in the murder of about six million Jews, and “cleansed” most western and central European countries of their Jews. The confiscated goods and properties of the Jews were used for the benefit of the German state and for the benefit of the Jews' Gentile neighbors. Similar confiscatory actions were taken in neighboring European countries.

The German Physicians (1)

German physicians played important roles in all aspects of the eugenics program and the Holocaust. Even before the Nazi party came into power, three-thousand German physicians founded a Nazi support organization. In the early years of Nazi rule, German professors and students expelled Jewish professors and students from German universities, including the medical faculties, and took over the positions of Jewish scholars who were either driven out of the country, imprisoned or killed. For example, when Austria was annexed by Germany, the world-renowned medical school of the University of Vienna lost 78 percent of its faculty. By 1942, about thirty-eight thousand physicians had voluntarily joined the Nazi party.

Physicians designed and executed the euthanasia and sterilization programs, from research into the most efficient methods of sterilization, to the most efficient means of large-scale killing. They selected the German subjects to be sterilized and killed, and carried out the procedures. The killing methods they developed were then adapted to the mass killings of Jews and Roma [gypsies]. In the extermination camps, they selected those to be killed and those to be sent for slave labor. They provided Jewish body parts and cadavers for anatomic studies to the German medical schools.

The Good Doctors in the Camps (2, 4, 5)

In contrast to the German doctors, many of whom studiously ignored or willfully forgot the beneficent Hippocratic tradition of medicine, many of the inmate doctors in the ghettos and the concentration camps attempted to be helpful despite the most abysmal conditions, and the discouragement of the Nazi guards, kapos (inmate trustees chosen for their sadism), and any supervising German doctors.

The Jewish hospital of Warsaw, which was the largest, best-staffed and best-equipped hospital in the city, was stripped of its equipment and non-Jewish staff, and moved into several ill-suited buildings in the ghetto. The Jewish doctor community practitioners and the dislocated physician faculty of the University of Warsaw Medical School were forced to move into the ghetto along with their co-religionists. The profession organized medical care and infectious disease control within the ghetto, and the faculty members established a medical school. During the two years of its existence [1941–1943], the school enrolled five hundred students. Eight of the students survived the war. The faculty carried out a large-scale study on the effects of starvation in humans. As the study progressed, both the study subjects and the scientists were dying of starvation and disease [tuberculosis, typhus]. The study was published in French after the war, and ultimately translated into English.

Fig. 1.

Dr. Alexander Schonfeld (seated) with patient, 1930.

Dr. Janusz Korczak, a pediatrician who was also director of the Jewish orphanage, a high quality institution wherein Dr Korczak carried out some studies on self-governance by the child-residents that made him famous. When the Germans were about to deport his charges to the extermination camp at Sobibor, Dr. Korczak was given the opportunity to escape the ghetto. He refused. Rather he chose to accompany his orphans into the gas chambers where he perished along with them.

My Father (6)

Dr Alexander Schonfeld, my father, graduated from the German speaking University of Prague in 1928, took a two-year residency in surgery, and opened his private practice in general medicine in Munkacs, our hometown, in Czechoslovakia in 1930. His work was interrupted for a few months in 1939 when the Hungarians acquired my hometown as part of the appeasing Munich pact that carved up Czechoslovakia. The Hungarians put my father in jail and took away his license to practice because he spoke out against the impending war. My mother took a large amount of money to Budapest, bribed the appropriate officials and within a few weeks my father was permitted to resume his practice. In March 1944, the German army invaded Hungary, and with the help of the Hungarian government placed the Jews into ghettos, and in May 1944 shipped them off to Auschwitz, where approximately half of the 800,000 were gassed and burned, including my grandmother, baby brother and half of my family.

Fig. 2.

Dr. Alexander Schonfeld (third from the right), Liberation, May 1945.

In the various camps, my father helped patients as much as he could, under the most primitive conditions. He treated work-related injuries, wounds created by beatings, infected skin ulcerations caused by a combination of malnutrition and infections that accompanied the dysentery that soiled the clothes of the inmates. Frequently, the only treatment modalities available to him were cleansing of wounds with water, covering them with paper crepe bandages, and putting the patient to bed for a couple of days. Surprisingly, this saved many lives.

I witnessed my first surgical operation in Muhldorf Waldlager, a work camp near Munich. A sixteen-year-old Dutch Jewish boy appeared at the infirmary with a red swollen left buttock and shaking chills. The diagnosis of a peri-rectal abscess was made. Despite the absence of anesthesia, sterile conditions or appropriate supplies, my father and Dr. Bence, a Hungarian Jewish surgeon, decided to operate. The lower tier of a two-tiered bunk served as the operating table. Two men held the boy down, as the surgeons operated. I was on the upper bunk holding a light to illuminate the operative field, and a rag to wipe the sweat from the foreheads of the operators. To everyone's delight and surprise, the boy survived to be liberated along with the rest of us by General Patton's US Army.

Holocaust Denial (7)

These stories of the Holocaust demonstrate both the worst and the best behaviors of our colleagues during World War II. If the German physicians besmirched the reputation of medicine, the camp inmate doctors saved it.

Thus, the Holocaust serves as a cautionary tale for our profession. Holocaust deniers spread their monstrous lies and bid us to deny the Holocaust ever occurred, or to minimize it. According to them, if Jews were killed, it was many fewer than six million and the killing was not deliberate, but merely part of the unfortunate side effect of the war. Although many of the lessons of the Holocaust have been absorbed, deviations from our beneficent role still occur during times of political and economic troubles. Our profession must not permit the lessons of the Holocaust to be diluted, confused or forgotten.

DISCUSSION

Barondess, New York: Gus that was an enormously moving talk and particularly moving was your tribute to your father.

Schonfeld, St. Louis: Thank you for both of those.

Barondess, New York: Just one comment. I would point out that German medicine from 1900 certainly to the time of World War II was the premiere medicine on the face of the earth. Major advances in biochemistry, physiology and clinical care and so on flowed from German laboratories and clinics. Ambitious young medical academics went to Germany if they wanted to really be tuned up for productive research and clinical careers. It was the flower of the profession. Nevertheless, as you point out, half the German doctors joined the Nazi party, and furthermore, they joined the S.S. at seven times the rate of adult German males in the thirties. So the ethos of medicine turned out to be fragile. They weren't drafted. They were enthusiastic and lent themselves to the political priorities of a state that was in the business of radicalizing the eugenics movement. I think the message for us is that the ethos of medicine is, in fact, fragile; that it requires the attention of people, like the people in this room, and underlying its importance and protecting it is of particular moment in relation to our contact with students, with house staff, and with young faculty. It is terribly important, I think, to keep this alive. Bioscience is critically important; being a good doctor is critically important; but taking care of this thing we are in is also enormously important. If we lose that, we'll be in enormous trouble. Thank you again for the talk.

Schonfeld, St. Louis: Thanks. Just a minute. Let me just say one word. Thank you very much, Jerry. You said it much better than I could have done it myself. I would like to, while I have Jerry here, thank him for several conversations he and I had about this talk. I appreciate his input very much.

Markel, Ann Arbor: That was a wonderful talk. Getting back to your original title, Holocaust Denial, and the perverse cleverness of those who are doing precisely that, I had a personal experience with that years ago. About 15 years ago I wrote a book about a Typhus Fever epidemic in New York City…

Schonfeld, St. Louis: How many years ago?

Markel, Ann Arbor: I wrote the book about 15 years ago but…

Schonfeld, St. Louis: Fifteen?

Markel, Ann Arbor: Yeah…

Schonfeld, St. Louis: Oh because you don't look old enough to have written it 50 years ago. Okay, thanks.

Markel, Ann Arbor: Thank you. The book took place in 1892. It was among Russian Jewish immigrants who contracted their typhus fever on the lower eastside of New York. Okay, flash forward about three or four years after that book came out and somebody contacted me. “Hey, your book is being cited on the internet,” and he gave me the link and it was a Holocaust denial article about typhus fever, which as you just mentioned was a huge problem not only in the camps but in the ghetto for all the obvious sanitary and microbiological reasons; and, in fact, when people went to the death chambers they were called “disinfection” because the ruse was that they were being disinfected for typhus, for body lice—and this gentleman—I am using the term gentleman lightly, cited my work, and in the title it says New York City 1892, as evidence of why Jews needed to be taken to disinfection units in the 1940s in a different country as a public health measure. Very strange use of citation. There are tons of these types of citations. I am wondering what you have found in your work in terms of the use of footnotes, all the accoutrements of a scholar study, but you know when you scratch the surface, its pure garbage. I am wondering what you have found in terms of the uses of medicine and public health rationales to do whatever the Nazis did in the 1940s.

Schonfeld, St. Louis: Thank you for your question. I must admit in all candor that I don't consider myself an expert in this area. I came to the United States in 1946 at the age of 12, and my aim at that time was to become an American. As time went on, I concentrated on academic medicine and my family and friends. I hope whatever legacy I leave is not solely as a Holocaust survivor but as a decent academic physician, husband, father and grandfather. So, I have not really started reading into the Holocaust and its deniers until the last few years when my children started asking me about my experiences. I wrote my memoirs and included some of these things and that's how I came to know about it. But in a little more direct answer to your question David Irving, a well-known denier had a book written about him by a lady called Deborah Lipstadt who is a professor at Emory. She is a historian and is in the Jewish Studies Department at Emory. In that book she accuses David Irving of being not a historian but being an anti-historian and of taking citations out of context and of misusing historical information, in short. He sued her in High Court in London. The process of the suite and the accumulation of experts took five years. Irving lost and lost in a very big way, including three separate appeals of the verdict against him. The judge declared him to have used historical data in a completely unacceptable way. Selective citations, changing the meanings of citations, changing the date when something was said or took place, to make one thing precede another, to make it look as if one was the cause of the other when in actual fact, the dates were reversed—that sort of thing. The professional historians who helped Deborah Lipstadt got very upset about this because they viewed David Irving's techniques as a direct assault on the voracity of history, on how one decides on what is true in history. The way he used the documentary evidence—he put their very technique at risk and their believability at risk. So, Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book after the trial describing in great detail what happened, and one of the experts that was used by her counsel to testify at the trial, a fellow called Evans who is a historian at Cambridge University in England also wrote a book; and it's these two books that have given me most of my information about the deniers and the techniques that they use. Evans was extremely perturbed by the techniques that Irving uses. So yes, what you are saying is true. I am sorry for the long answer but it was very interesting to see how historians approach historical truth, to see how they dig it out and how Irving broke every tenet of the historical profession.

Schiffman, Providence: That was very moving, Dr. Schonfeld.

Schonfeld, St. Louis: Thank you.

Schiffman, Providence: Can you tell us a bit about Drs. Wegener and Reiter and attempts, I think good attempts, to strip them of their honorific eponymic titles?

Schonfeld, St. Louis: Well I know about Wegener's granulomatosis. I know a little bit about this story, because I have a colleague at Washington University called Steve Lefrak, who is a pulmonologist, who for reasons that are not entirely clear to me because he was born in Brooklyn, became very interested in the Holocaust; and when he discovered that Dr. Wegener was one of those physicians in Germany during the war who was honored by having a disease named after him, he took many steps to get the name removed, and he succeeded in that; and so the name Wegener's granulomatosis, as I understand, and I'm not a pulmonologist, is no longer used; but just to generalize this a little bit, one of the bitter pills that one has to swallow after all that happened, is to see how few of the people were actually held accountable for their activities. Of course now, it's way too late. Most of them are dead or so old that one hardly sees a reason to have them go to trial except for the same reason that I told you the story and that is that people should remember what happened. Sorry, go ahead.

Hochberg, Baltimore: No, I was just going to close the loop. So to close the loop on Reiter and Reiter's syndrome is that there is a nice paper by Dan Wallace and Michael Weitzman which was published in the Journal of Rheumatology about three or four years ago detailing Reiter's activities during the second World War and the Holocaust, and the eponym has now fallen out of favor so that in the textbook that I edited, along with Mike Weitzman and two or three others, we've removed that eponym from a chapter. It is now called reactive arthritis, and it is one form of reactive arthritis so the eponym has fallen out of favor in rheumatology.

Schonfeld, St. Louis: Thank you. Bless you.