Medical Care in a Ruined Society
House Calls in the Rubble: Dr Wolfgang Michel
A native of Cologne, Wolfgang Michels (1877–1956) opened his general practice there in 1904 after completing his medical degree. He was already 68 years old when he sat down at his typewriter on 6 March 1945 to start recording his diaristic “Thoughts on the Times”. American troops were advancing on Cologne’s city centre, which had been badly damaged by Allied bombing raids. Apart from him, there was only one other doctor still supplying primary care to the residents of his neighbourhood, the Südstadt quarter.
Michels was hoping that the occupation forces would rebuild Cologne’s medical services. In looking back, he absolved himself and the vast majority of doctors of any political or moral responsibility for what had happened during the Nazi period, putting all the blame on the Nazi leadership. On 13 March, he wrote: “It is therefore to be hoped that the doctors still practicing in Cologne will somehow be registered as such and, after many years, will be given a chance to discuss professional matters with one another, which had no longer been possible or desired in the years since ’33.”
Auxiliary Hospitals and Emergency Medical Care
As early as the summer of 1940, the KVD was already complaining about a doctor shortage in parts of the Reich. With the widening of the war, the spiralling number of injured, and above all the increasing destruction of hospitals and doctors’ offices due to air raids on German cities, the situation of medical services on the “home front” soon became even worse.
Hitler entrusted the coordination of both civilian and military healthcare to his official personal physician Dr Karl Brandt, who later became the highest-ranking defendant at the 1946 Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg. In 1942, Hitler appointed him Plenipotentiary (and in 1943 General Commissioner) for Health and Emergency Services. One of Brandt’s main tasks was to increase the number of beds in auxiliary and military hospitals. The effort to make more space included the relocation and even killing of patients from sanatoriums and care homes in what was later called “Operation Brandt”. In 1944, one of the doctors working on Brandt’s team for “Special Hospital Facilities” was Dr Erika Flocken, who was later deployed to the Dachau subcamps at Mühldorf.