Nazism and the Journal

Abstract

A ny consideration of the legacy of historical injustices in theJournal must address the rise of National Socialism in Germany, the antisemitism of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, and the Holocaust.Hitler was first specifically mentioned in the Journal in 1935, in an article by Michael M. Davis, a noted American health expert and reformer, and his collaborator Gertrud Kroeger, a leading German nurse. 1 Yet between this article and 1944, when Nazi war crimes were first explicitly acknowledged in an editorial, 2 the Journal remained all but silent regarding the deeply antisemitic and racist motives of Nazi science and medicine and the threat to the "ideals" of civilization, as Albert Einstein put it in an open letter to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.3 Antisemitism was a critical element of Nazi racial science.The Nazis developed an elaborate ideology based on deeply racist assumptions about Jews and other non-"Aryan" people, whom they considered to be "defective" and "undesirable."4 What does this lack of critical attention reveal about the Journal and its engagement with issues of racism and medical science?What is the nature and significance of silence, as we attempt to understand the role that oppression played in the medicine and science of the time?One explanation could be that the rise of Nazism as a statesanctioned persecutory regime did not receive editorial attention in the 1930s since it was deemed irrelevant to the Journal's focus on evolving medical knowledge and therapeutic innovation, as well as Recognizing His toric al Injus tices in Medicine and the

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