"…without avisible sign of protest or at least solidarity from colleagues": the expulsion of neuroscientists from Hamburg

Abstract

In Hamburg, the National Socialists' racially motivated exclusion principally hit neurologists from two institutions: the Eppendorf Neurological Clinic (director until 1934 Max Nonne) and the Psychiatric and Neurological Clinic of Friedrichsberg State Hospital (director Wilhelm Weygandt). The chief physician of the neurological department of Barmbek Hospital, Heinrich Embden (1871-1941), who had been trained by Nonne, emigrated to Brazil, whereas Friedrich Wohlwill (1881-1958), another Nonne pupil who had been a pathologist at St Georg since 1924, lived for many years in Lisbon, before he found anew scientific home at the Harvard Medical School. The cerebrospinal fluid researcher Victor Kafka (1881-1955), aFreemason and intermittent member of the Communist Party, was briefly in so-called protective custody (Schutzhaft) in Fuhlsbüttel then fled via Norway to Sweden. Hermann Josephy (1887-1960) and WalterR. Kirschbaum (1894-1982), both imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp after the November pogroms in 1938, could successfully continue their professional careers in Chicago. Richard Loewenberg (1898-1954) first opted to continue his career in China, then changed his mind and also went to the USA after the Japanese invasion. With the exception of the latter all were full members of the Society of German Neurologists. The broad scope of their research work clearly illustrates that in addition to clinical core competence, former neurologists could intensively follow scientific interests in the neighboring disciplines of pathology, serology, and psychiatry.