In Vienna last week, as Nazis took possession of the world's greatest establishment for medical teaching—the University of Vienna's medical school (300 professors & lecturers), the General Hospital (over 2,000 beds), the polyclinic and nine other hospitals—a dread epidemic struck down many a great physician. Reported as suicides were:
Professor Wolfgang Denk, 55, University & General Hospital chief surgeon, author of the textbook on surgery most widely used in Austria, no Jew.
Professor Gabor Nobl, 74, Polyclinic skin & syphilis specialist, who shot his wife and himself.
Professor Edmund Nobel, 54, baby specialist, who with the help of U. S. charity fed 400,000 Austrian children starving after the last War.
Professor Arnold Baumgarten, 58, part-Jewish director of Vienna's largest city hospital (1,000 beds), onetime head of the Austrian State health department.
Professor Moritz Oppenheim, 61, best skin specialist in Vienna.
Professor Jonas Borak, X-ray specialist.
Professor Gustav Bayer, 69, who with his daughter took morphine, turned on the gas and died in his home at Innsbruck.
The fate of most other Jewish, part-Jewish and non-Jewish physicians who mortally feared & hated Nazi domination last week remained hidden in the coffin of Nazi censorship. A Jewish Nobel Prizewinner, Professor Otto Loewi, University of Graz physiologist, was merely arrested. Jewish psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his wife were deprived of their passports and ready cash.
Most remarkable last week was the escape from death, at least temporarily, of Professor Heinrich (born Chaim) Neumann, greatest ear & throat specialist in Europe. This merry Orthodox Jew, who keeps a kosher home and prays each morning in phylacteries and sacred shawl, is the doctor & friend of England's George VI and Duke of Windsor, Spain's Alphonso, Rumania's Carol, Greece's George, Austria's late Emperor Charles. Two years ago Germany's Hitler, fearing cancer of the throat, asked Dr. Neumann to operate. The specialist refused, on the ground that if the operation failed, he would be blamed, not as a surgeon, but as a Jew. Last week he was arrested, whether to be tortured or to be preserved to doctor Führer Hitler, the world was not told. His fate appeared to hang by a thread between Nazi whimsicality and Jewish stubbornness.
Jewish doctors in Vienna last week had little hope for abatement of Nazi prejudice. Although 2,000,000 people live in the city (including 200,000 Jews), there has long been an excess of doctors in the community. Three out of ten Vienna doctors are Jews. Adolf Hitler, who once lived there as a penniless house painter thinks that the populace can get along with less doctoring. The fact that last summer German doctors were permitted to attend a Viennese X-ray congress dominated by Jews last week seemed no warrant against a thoroughgoing Nazi program.