When Medicine Bowed to Terror: The Charité During Nazism

At the height of the Third Reich, German medicine experienced one of its most contradictory and disturbing phases. The Charité, Berlin’s most renowned hospital, became a microcosm of the ethical tensions and dilemmas faced by doctors of the time. In this environment, prominent figures like Professor Ferdinand Sauerbruch stood out both for their surgical excellence and their complex relationship with the Nazi regime.

Ferdinand Sauerbruch: A Surgeon Between Excellence and Loyalty to the Regime When Ferdinand Sauerbruch was appointed to the Charité in 1927, he was already widely recognized as the best surgeon of his generation. Under his scalpel, everyone was treated with the same skill and dedication, regardless of their background or political affiliation. “He made cuts like an artist,” recalls Werner Podszus, one of the many students who watched his operations. “He threw the instruments to the nurses, except for the knives. Those, he carefully laid down.”

However, Sauerbruch was also a fervent nationalist, and his loyalty to the new government became clear when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. In a radio broadcast, Sauerbruch declared: “Today, there is no German who must not seriously ask themselves: How do I stand in relation to the new State? What has it done for us, and what must I do for it?”

This conviction, however, did not interfere with his medical practice. For Sauerbruch, all patients deserved the same treatment, whether they were Jews, Nazis, or Communists. This stance, however commendable it may seem, concealed a moral ambiguity that permeated not only his actions but those of the entire institution.

The Purge of Jewish Doctors The rise of Nazism brought a series of discriminatory measures that directly affected the medical community at the Charité. On March 28, 1933, all professors were summoned to the clinic’s campus in the heart of Berlin. Pharmacologist Wolfgang Heubner, one of the few who kept a diary at the time, recorded: “It is recommended to dismiss all Jewish employees and furlough other Jewish institutional inmates. Depending on the directors’ actions, their ‘national reliability’ would be assessed. Dismissal without pension is always a possibility.”

The decision to exclude Jewish doctors placed Charité professionals in an ethical dilemma. Otto Krayer, a renowned pharmacologist working with Heubner, was called to fill a vacancy in Düsseldorf, left by a non-Aryan doctor. Krayer refused the offer, writing: “The main reason for my hesitation is that I consider the exclusion of Jewish scientists an injustice whose necessity I cannot comprehend.” Heubner, in his diary, praised Krayer with a single word: “Magnificent!”

Meanwhile, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, despite his opposition to the expulsion of Jewish doctors, could not prevent his best assistant, Rudolf Nissen, from being forced to leave Germany. Sauerbruch secured him a position in Istanbul, saving him from Nazi persecution, but he could not protect his own conscience from the corrosive influence of the regime.

Collaboration with the Regime and Deadly Silence As the Nazi regime consolidated its power, the Charité became increasingly involved in morally questionable medical practices. Sauerbruch, as chief surgeon, continued to treat Jewish patients and protest against the euthanasia policy that was beginning to be implemented. However, his resistance was overshadowed by his growing closeness to the Nazi leadership. In 1942, he was promoted to Generalarzt, a high-ranking position in the military medical hierarchy, and began wearing under his lab coat a uniform adorned with the War Merit Cross with Swords, a clear symbol of his loyalty to the regime.

As the highest-ranking doctor in the Reichsforschungsrat, Sauerbruch was responsible for approving all medical research applications. This role placed him in a position of great power but also of terrible responsibility. Many of the projects he approved involved experiments on concentration camp prisoners. “He would say, as a practical doctor, I treat everyone, and as a scientist, I enable everything,” explains Thomas Schnalke, director of the Charité Museum. “It is very likely that he knew about the criminal human experiments conducted in the concentration camps.”

Under Sauerbruch’s command, the Charité and others became complicit in a system of horror. The bodies of executed prisoners were routinely sent to the anatomy institute for study. “Sometimes we received headless bodies,” recalls Werner Podszus, then a student. “We asked where they came from, but no one dared discuss it openly.”

The Lack of Resistance and the Persistence of Ambiguity Despite the growing evidence of heinous crimes, the Charité, like many of its doctors, offered little significant resistance to the Nazi regime. None of the tenured professors joined the Nazi Party, but the lack of decisive action against the exclusionary and inhumane experimentation policies spoke louder than any party affiliation. On May 2, 1945, with Germany’s surrender, the Charité was handed over to the new Soviet authorities, and many of the doctors who served the regime continued to work, now under the government of the German Democratic Republic.

For the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), figures like Sauerbruch, Heubner, and Stieve were celebrated scientific celebrities, whose pasts in the Third Reich were conveniently forgotten. Thus, the Charité, founded with the spirit of charity and compassion, became a symbol of the moral complexity of medicine in wartime, where the oaths to save lives were often distorted by the demands of a brutal regime.

The story of the Charité during the Third Reich is not just a tale of doctors facing almost unbearable ethical dilemmas but also a reminder of how moral ambiguity can flourish even in the most respectable environments. And while the hospital remains one of Europe’s leading medical institutions, the shadows of its wartime past remain a silent testimony to the difficult choices its doctors had to make.