Abstract
Objectives
The first full-time professorship for urology at a German university was established in 1937 and in 1942, a rare teaching qualification (Habilitation) for urology was granted, both at the prestigious Berlin University. At the same time, nearly a third of all physicians who worked in the field of urology were classified as “non-Aryan” according to Nazi race laws and were forced out of their profession and their homeland. Many of them committed suicide or, if they refused to flee, were murdered in concentration camps. German urologists also contributed to compulsory sterilization of men according to the “law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring” between 1934 and 1945.
Methods
Historical sources on the history of urology in Nazi Germany were reviewed and analyzed. These include textbooks and medical journals from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as files from different state and university archives.
Results
For urologists, the changing political environment in Germany after 1933 offered possibilities to assert their personal and professional interests. Unfortunately, in many cases, moral principles were thrown overboard, and physicians advanced their own careers and the specialty of urology at the expense of their patients and their Jewish colleagues.
Conclusion
Under national socialism, German urologists backed Nazi health and race policies and in exchange gained further professionalization for their specialty, including university positions and increased independence from surgery. Only in recent years has this chapter of German urology’s past become a topic of debate among members of the professional society.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the material and immaterial support provided by the German Society of Urology for research on the history of urology in Nazi Germany. This article is based on a paper presented at the 2012 American Urological Association annual meeting, which was made possible by a travel grant from the German Academic Exchange Service, and for which the author subsequently received the AUA Earl Nation Retrospectoscope Award. For these reasons, he would also like to thank the German Academic Exchange Service and the American Urological Association.
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Krischel, M. German urologists under national socialism. World J Urol 32, 1055–1060 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00345-013-1183-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00345-013-1183-3