NMT01-T057
Volume I · Page 57
ernment agencies which supervised the certification and licensing of physicians as well as their professional activities were the Ministry of Education and the Reich Health Office (Reichsgesundheitsamt) in the Ministry of the Interior. The latter supervised medical practice and licensing through the channels of the Ministries of the Interior of the various German states, although licensing was a federal function rather than a state function.
Medical education and training were rather standardized but good. The students spent 5 or 6 years at one of several of the medical universities; they took a final examination covering their clinical studies and then spent a year at an authorized hospital under supervision. Thereafter the internee were licensed and permitted to establish a practice. After two more years they became eligible to treat insurance patients, and, after submitting a thesis, could obtain the degree doctor from a university.
In the years immediately preceding the Third Reich, physicians' organizations devoted to Party politics sprang up. One of these was the National Socialist Physicians' Society, founded in 1929, in which Conti played a leading role. There was a rival association of Social Democratic Physicians, and a Socialist Society of Physicians. These societies proposed candidates for election to the Physicians' Chambers, and thus the National Socialist Physicians' Society and the Socialist associations came to compete with each other.
The notorious "boycott day" in Berlin, 1 April 1933, was a day of disgrace for German medicine. Members of the National Socialist physicians' Society, who knew the membership lists of the Socialist Societies and the lists of Jewish physicians, broke into the apartments of their Socialist and Jewish colleagues in the early morning hours, pulled them out of their beds, beat them and brought them to the exhibition area near the Berlin Lehrter Station. There, all of them, including men up to 70 years old, were forced to run around the garden, as in a hippodrome, and they were shot at with pistols or beaten with sticks. There they had to stay for several days without sufficient food, and then were handed over to the SA which carried part of them to the cellars at the Hedemannstrasse jail for further tortures.
Thereafter, the members of the Socialist Society of Physicians were barred from all insurance practice because of "Communist and subversive activities." In the subsequent listings of physicians issued by the insurance companies, the Jewish physicians were included in a separate list headed "Enemies of the State or Jews." Soon, the insurance companies, even private ones, were no longer permitted to pay fees to the Jewish Physicians. Immediately thereafter, Jewish phy-
[...sicians]
