Guilty Verdicts, Acquittals, and New Injustices
The Antisemitic Scandal Surrounding a Jewish Chief Physician: Prof. Herbert Lewin
Herbert Lewin (1899–1982) opened his Berlin gynaecological practice in 1931. In 1935, he became the chief physician for obstetrics and gynaecology at the city’s Jewish Hospital. He then worked in Cologne at the Israelite Asylum for the Sick and Aged. In October 1941, he and his wife were deported to the Łódź ghetto, and then in August 1944 to Auschwitz; Alice Lewin did not survive her camp internment. Herbert Lewin returned to Cologne in the summer of 1945, completed his habilitation in 1948, and became chief physician of the Municipal Women’s Hospital in Offenbach in 1950.
The controversy surrounding his appointment triggered the first major antisemitic scandal in post-war West Germany. Lewin had been repudiated by doctors on Offenbach’s city council, other doctors and nurses at the hospital, and the city’s conservative mayor. The argument was that no female patient could trust a former camp prisoner, due to his alleged thirst for revenge. It was only after higher authorities intervened and public criticism grew loud that Lewin finally took his post.
Atonement and Legal Succession
At the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg (9 December 1946 to 20 August 1947), twenty concentration camp doctors (nineteen men and one woman), a lawyer, and two administrators stood before a US military tribunal, accused as organizers or direct perpetrators of medical crimes. Of the twenty-three defendants, seven were sentenced to death and seven acquitted. Five defendants received life sentences and the other four received prison sentences of ten to twenty years.
Twenty-three accused. Beyond this inner circle of “major offenders”, did the question of doctors’ guilt and responsibility even come up in post-war Germany? The successor organization to the KVD did not want to deal with it and soon would not have to: on 30 April 1953, West Germany’s Federal Ministry of Labour certified that the KVD had “not been a National Socialist organization”. A year earlier, there had still been internal discussion about what would happen if West Germany’s post-war association of statutory health insurance physicians became the legal successor to the KVD, with fears of restitution claims from Jewish plaintiffs.