In December 2023, I presented a series of articles from the NEJM (New ENgland Journal of Medicine), with an editorial and an article on slavery. I had welcome comments. Series, Recognizing Historical Injustices in Medicine and the Journalcontinues with:
- January 4, 2024: Indigenous Americans — The Newspaper‘s Historical “Indian Problem”
- February 1, 2024: Explaining health Inequities—The Enduring Legacy of Historical Biases
- March 2, 2024: “Ridding the Race of His Defective Blood” — Eugenics in the Newspaper1906–1948
- March 30, 2024: Nazism and the Journal
Articles in the series have a warning
A first article in 1935
Hitler was first specifically mentioned in the Journal in 1935, in an article by Michael M. Davis, a noted American health expert and reformer, and his collaborator Gertrud Kroeger, a leading German nurse. Yet between this article and 1944, when Nazi war crimes were first explicitly acknowledged in an editorial, the Journal remained all but silent regarding the deeply anti-Semitic and racist motives of Nazi science and medicine and the threat to the “ideals” of civilization, as Albert Einstein put it in an open letter to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
The following article in 1944… after almost 10 years of silence
But when the Allied powers liberated the concentration camps, it became clear, as the so-called Doctors’ Trial (1946–1947) categorically demonstrated, that the medical profession in Germany embraced Nazism’s anti-Semitic and eugenic ideology and was deeply complicit in the implementation of mass extermination. The crimes of the Nazi state could no longer be ignored. The first Journal article explicitly damning Nazi medical atrocities is a 1949 article by Leo Alexander, a Viennese-born American neuropsychiatrist, who gathered evidence for the trial of the Nazi doctors at Nuremberg.
On the other hand, JAMA published the ‘Berlin letters’ (2 to 4 per month for a few years)
More relevantly, the fact that Jewish physicians were being persecuted was well known in medical circles. The Journal of the Medical Association (JAMA), for instance, which had a “Berlin correspondence,” frequently informed its readership about the detrimental impact of Nazi rule on medical practice. During the first year after Hitler’s accession to power, two to four “letters” per month were written by various JAMA correspondents around the world, including from Berlin. (The Berlin letters would appear every month until 1940.) In 1933, under the new heading “Foreign Medical News,” JAMA published a report entitled “New Regulation of German Medical Practice,” detailing the persecution of Jewish physicians, including the restriction of their practice and access to medical education.
A 1973 article in Bulletin of History Medicine on these letters.
Conclusion
I read this article twice, without being able to judge the behavior of newspapers during the Second World War. This questions us about the role of scientific journals in current conflicts, which will be the subject of tomorrow’s post.
The Journal paid only superficial and idiosyncratic attention to the rise of the Nazi state until the liberation of the camps in 1944–1945. Perhaps it was this complacency or lack of careful attention to the pernicious nature of Nazi rule that allowed Davis and Kroeger’s article to be published in the first place. As we explore historical injustices in the Journal and beyond, we must consider not only expressions of explicit and implicit bias, discrimination, racism, and oppression, but also how rationalization and denial may lead to silence, omission, and acquiescence — considerations that are critical to understanding systematic historical injustices and their powerful, tragic legacies.
