May 1



GERMANY:

German Medical School Gives Scholars Full Access to Hospital's Nazi-Era
Records


A German medical school has decided to give a group of historians full
access to the World War II files of its teaching hospital, in the wake of
embarrassing accusations that it was obstructing efforts to help elderly
survivors of Nazi forced labor at the hospital.

The medical school of the Georg-August University, in Gottingen, agreed in
March to commission a group of historians to expand on an earlier
investigation into the use of slave labor at the hospital during the time
of the Third Reich. Until now, researchers have been given access to the
files of only two of the hospital's three major sections.

This week, the faculty assembly of the medical school endorsed an appeal
by the dean for employees and students to contribute to a voluntary fund
to compensate foreigners forced to work at the hospital as slaves during
the war. Critics say the hospital should have contributed out of its own
resources.

The unseemly spat has surprised observers, because other teaching
hospitals have dealt with the issue without accusations of foot-dragging
and obstruction. Since the end of the 1980s, Germany, having already made
large compensation payments to victims of the Holocaust, belatedly turned
its attention to its use of foreign slaves during the war. More than 10
million residents of Eastern Europe and other areas Germany occupied
during the war were deported to Germany to make up for the severe labor
shortages caused by German men fighting in the army.

Since the start of the 1990s, companies and public entities, including
most of the country's two dozen university hospitals, have commissioned
historians to write reports about their use of forced labor. In 2000, the
German federal government established a $6-billion fund -- with half of
the money coming from the government and half from companies -- to
compensate surviving former slaves, whose numbers are dwindling rapidly.
So far, 1.2 million people have each received amounts ranging from $1,100
to $8,250.

Gottingen's medical school asked its department of medical ethics and the
history of medicine to carry out such a study in 2000. Andreas Frewer, a
physician and assistant professor in the department at the time, was given
the job.

However, after asking him to do the research, he says, the school's
administration took months to provide access to hospital archives, refused
requests to discuss the research, and generally hindered his work. Worst
of all, he says, while he was given access to the World War II records of
two major specialties, surgery and gynecology, he was refused access to
the files of another major section -- for neurology and psychiatry -- that
had been given to a storage company off the campus. Mr. Frewer was told
that was done to protect the privacy of those former slaves.

Mr. Frewer, who worked together with several other historians and a number
of students, identified 125 foreigners who had been forced to work at the
hospital between 1939 and the end of the war, in 1945. Most were from
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and three-quarters of them
were women. They were assigned menial tasks like cleaning, washing,
cooking, and aiding in the wards.

Among them were also several medical students from Holland and France.
Conditions varied, "but it wasn't at all as bad as working in a
concentration camp," says Mr. Frewer. Having worked in Germany -- even
under duress -- usually carried a stigma, however, and when they returned
home after the war, slave laborers often tried to hide where they had
been.

The research also turned up records of nearly 600 slave workers, assigned
to industries in Gttingen, who had received treatment in the university
hospital. These records were important in helping back up applications to
the federal compensation fund, since slaves received no paperwork, and
many have had trouble proving their wartime fate.

The federal fund stopped accepting applications at the end of 2001. Mr.
Frewer, who took up a professorship at Hannover Medical School this year,
said that if he and his colleagues had gotten access to the neurology and
psychiatry records, they might have been able to help more people prove
that they had been in the Gttingen region as forced laborers. Others say
this is not likely, since many of the slaves admitted to those two clinics
were killed under a policy of euthanasia of those deemed no longer useful.

Mr. Frewer submitted his report last June. The medical school at Gottingen
decided not to publish it, and issued a news release on the findings only
in December after several small protests by students demanding the
information be made public. The dean later announced that the study would
be expanded, and that historians would now get access to the neurological
and psychiatric records.

Claudia Wiesemann, head of the department of medical ethics and history of
medicine and vice dean of the medical school, said that the school was
"absolutely satisfied" with the study, but that the dean felt "it is
important to know if there were comparable situations at other hospitals."
The new study, which will include information on the policy of euthanasia
and sterilization practiced by the neurology and psychiatry section,
should be published by the end of the year.

Ms. Wiesemann denies that the school obstructed the earlier research in
any way. "I think we've done quite a lot, compared to other university
hospitals" she said. The dean, Manfred Drse, declined requests for an
interview.

Volker Zimmermann, a senior professor in the department of medical ethics
and history, was nominal chairman of the group that carried out the study
under Mr. Frewer. He also rejected the complaints, and said that Mr.
Frewer never got access to the neurological and psychiatric files because
he never asked in a polite and formal way. "The problem is Mr. Frewer, not
the [medical school] administration," he says.

(source: Chronicle of Higher Education)