Historians' report claims prestigious medical journal ignored Nazi atrocities

A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most esteemed publications for medical research, criticizes the journal 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 article's authors, Allan Brandt and Joelle Abi-Rached, both medical historians at Harvard University. Often, the journal simply ignored the Nazis' medical depredations, such as the horrific experiments conducted on twins at Auschwitz, which were based largely on Adolf Hitler's spurious “racial science.”

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

The new article, published in this past week's issue of the journal, is part of a series started last year to address racism and other forms of prejudice in the medical establishment. Another recent article described the journal's enthusiastic coverage of eugenics throughout the 1930s and '40s.

“Learning from our past mistakes can help us going forward,” said the journal's editor, Dr. Eric Rubin, an infectious disease expert at Harvard. “What can we do to ensure that we don't fall into the same sorts of objectionable ideas in the future?”

In the publication's archives, Abi-Rached discovered a paper endorsing Nazi medical practices: “Recent changes in German health insurance under the Hitler government,” a 1935 treatise written by Michael Davis, an influential figure in health care, and Gertrud Kroeger, a nurse from Germany. The article praised the Nazis' emphasis on public health, which was infused with dubious ideas about Germans' innate superiority.

“There is no reference to the slew of persecutory and antisemitic laws that had been passed,” Abi-Rached and Brandt wrote. In one passage, Davis and Kroeger described how doctors were made to work in Nazi labor camps. Duty there, the authors blithely wrote, was an “opportunity to mingle with all sorts of people in everyday life.”

“Apparently, they considered the discrimination against Jews irrelevant to what they saw as reasonable and progressive change,” Abi-Rached and Brandt wrote. For the most part, however, the two historians were surprised at how little the journal had to say about the Nazis

“When we opened the file drawer, there was almost nothing there,” Brandt said.