Scientific magazine ignored Nazi atrocities – 04/09/2024 – Science

A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most respected publications for medical research, criticizes itself for paying only “superficial and idiosyncratic attention” to the atrocities perpetrated in the name of medical science by the Nazis.

The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the rise of Nazi Germany,” wrote the paper’s authors, Allan Brandt and Joelle Abi-Rached, both medical historians at Harvard University. Often, the magazine simply ignored the Nazis’ medical depredations, such as the horrific experiments performed on twins at Auschwitz, which were based largely on Adolf Hitler’s spurious “race science.”

In contrast, two other major scientific journals — Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association — covered the Nazis’ discriminatory policies throughout Hitler’s tenure, historians noted. The New England Journal did not publish an article “explicitly condemning” the Nazis’ medical atrocities until 1949, four years after the end of World War II.

The new article, published in last week’s edition of the newspaper, is part of a series begun last year to address racism and other forms of prejudice in the medical establishment. Another recent article described the newspaper’s enthusiastic coverage of eugenics throughout the 1930s and 40s.

“Learning from our past mistakes can help us move forward,” said the paper’s editor, Eric Rubin, an infectious disease expert at Harvard. “What can we do to ensure we don’t fall prey to the same reprehensible ideas in the future?”

In the publication’s archives, Abi-Rached discovered an article that endorsed Nazi medical practices: “Recent Changes in German Health Insurance Under Hitler,” a 1935 treatise written by Michael Davis, an influential figure in the health field, and Gertrud Kroeger, a nurse from Germany. The article praised the Nazis’ focus on public health, which was steeped in dubious ideas about the innate superiority of Germans.

“There is no reference to the series of persecutory and anti-Semitic laws that had been passed,” Abi-Rached and Brandt wrote. In one excerpt, Davis and Kroeger described how doctors were forced to work in Nazi labor camps. Duty there, the authors wrote nonchalantly, was an “opportunity to mingle with all kinds of people in everyday life.”

“Apparently, they considered discrimination against Jews irrelevant to what they saw as reasonable and progressive change,” Abi-Rached and Brandt wrote.

However, for the most part, the two historians were surprised by how little the paper had to say about the Nazis, who murdered some 70,000 people with disabilities before turning to the massacre of Europe’s Jews as well as other groups.

“When we opened the file drawer, there was barely anything there,” Brandt said. Instead of discovering articles that condemned or justified the Nazis’ perversions of medicine, there was something more intriguing: an evident indifference that lasted well after the end of World War II.

The periodical recognized Hitler in 1933, the year he began implementing his anti-Semitic policies. Seven months after the start of the Third Reich, the periodical published “The Abuse of Jewish Doctors,” an article that today would likely face criticism for lacking moral clarity. It seemed to be based largely on reporting from The New York Times.

“Without providing details, the notice reported that there were indications of ‘bitter and implacable opposition to the Jewish people,'” the new article says.

Other publications saw the threat of Nazism more clearly. Science expressed alarm over the “gross repression” of Jews, which occurred not only in medicine but also in law, the arts, and other professions.

“The journal, and America, was tunnel-visioned,” said John Michalczyk, co-director of Jewish studies at Boston College. US corporations eagerly did business with Hitler’s regime. The Nazi dictator, in turn, looked favorably on the massacre and displacement of Native Americans, and sought to adopt the eugenics efforts that had taken place in the United States throughout the early 20th century.

“Our hands are not clean,” Michalczyk said.

Abi-Rached said she and Brandt wanted to avoid being “anachronistic” and view the publication’s silence on Nazism through a contemporary lens. But once she saw that other medical journals had taken a different approach, the journal’s silence took on a tense new meaning. What was said was overshadowed by what was never said.

“We were looking for strategies to understand how racism works,” Brandt said. It seemed to work, in part, through apathy. Many institutions would later claim that they would have acted to save more Holocaust victims if they had known the extent of the Nazis’ atrocities.

This excuse rings hollow to experts who point out that there were enough witness accounts to justify the action. “Sometimes silence contributes to these kinds of radical, immoral, catastrophic changes,” Brandt said. “That’s implicit in our magazine.”