INTRODUCTION
Recently, two Australian nurses made headlines for claiming, on video, that they would kill -- and have killed -- Israeli patients. They’ve since been suspended and placed under investigation. Unfortunately, a coalition of Muslim groups from Sydney -- the nurses are Muslim -- have come out in support of the nurses.
While medical professionals are meant to uphold ethical standards, the truth is that antisemitism in medicine is nothing new. For decades, both Jewish doctors and patients have been subjected to antisemitism from medical professionals. In the United States, for example, prospective Jewish medical professionals were subject to restrictive antisemitic med school quotas until the 1960s.
A December 2024 study found that about 40% of Jewish American medical professionals have been subjected to antisemitism in their work or study environments; 26.4% of them have even felt threats to their safety. Only 1.9% of anti-bias trainings included any content whatsoever on antisemitism.
Jewish patients and medical professionals in other countries, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, have reported similar discrimination.
NAZI EUGENICS AND RACIAL ANTISEMITISM
“Scientific racism” (also known as “biological racism”) is a pseudoscientific form of racism that claims there is scientific evidence to justify racial discrimination or the belief that some races are inferior or superior to others. Scientific racism reached its peak and “legitimacy” between 1870 and the end of World War II. The Nazis applied the theories of scientific racism to antisemitism, which in turn was one of the main factors that fueled the Holocaust.
The Nazis believed that it was your “Jewish blood” that determined your Jewishness. In the Nazi hierarchy of race, Jews were placed at the very bottom. The Nazis justified the Jewish genocide with the belief that they had to eradicate the defective “Jewish racial traits.”
It was doctors in Nazi Germany that legitimized the theories of scientific racism and the Nazi persecution of Jews. Doctors in Nazi Germany played a major role in creating and implementing Nazi policies, thus becoming complicit in Nazi crimes against humanity.
NAZI MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS
The Nazis as many as 30 sadistic different non-consensual medical experiments on Jewish concentration camp prisoners. Some of these experiments included cutting off the limbs of prisoners in an attempt to transplant them onto other prisoners, submerging people in subzero temperatures and then attempting to resuscitate them by raping them, serving prisoners seawater instead of drinkable water, defleshing living Jewish prisoners, exposing fresh wounds to mustard gas, and more. The Nazis particularly enjoyed experimenting on twins.
THE RED CROSS AND THE NAZIS
Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Red Cross chose to “conform” to the new regime, rather than oppose it. In fact, an SS general, Ernst-Robert Grawitz, became the head of the German Red Cross in 1933. Grawitz was closely involved in the plans to murder disabled people and in Nazi medical experimentation. The German Red Cross thus essentially became a Nazi medical unit, rather than a humanitarian organization. When pressed about it, the German Red Cross claimed that, by allying themselves with the Nazi regime, they’d have access to concentration camps, which would ensure that the inmates would be “treated better.”
In the 1990s, the Red Cross finally officially admitted that they’d long had previous knowledge of the Nazis’ plans for the total extermination of Jews.
As early as 1933, the Red Cross received desperate pleas from prisoners in Dachau concentration camp, begging for intervention. By 1942, the Red Cross had full knowledge of the Germans’ atrocities. In early 1945, the president of the Red Cross wrote, “Concerning the Jewish problem in Germany, we are in close and continual contact with the German authorities.” The use of the phrase “Jewish problem,” of course, is indicative of the attitude of the Red Cross, considering the very same phrase was used in the Nazis’ “final solution to the Jewish problem” (in other words, the Nazi plan for the total genocide of the Jewish People).
A representative of the Red Cross who’d visited several of the camps falsely claimed that other than segregation, “no other discrimination was made against [Jewish POWs].”
By 1943, word of German atrocities toward the Jewish people had spread throughout the world. Following the deportation of ~500 Danish Jews to Theresienstadt, the Danish authorities pressured the International Red Cross to visit the camp/ghetto to check on its conditions.
The Nazis saw this visit as an opportunity to spread their propaganda. Nearly 8000 Jews were immediately sent to Auschwitz to counteract reports of overcrowding in Theresienstadt. In Auschwitz, these Jews were placed in a “special unit” in the event that the Red Cross chose to visit them.
The camp/ghetto was “cleaned up.” For example, buildings were painted and a football field was staged. “Cultural activities” were promoted to create the illusion that the Jewish prisoners were thriving. The Red Cross officials were taken on a tour of a pre-planned route and interviewed prisoners who’d been trained on what to say. Unsurprisingly, the Red Cross left Theresienstadt with a glowing report.
The Red Cross helped thousands of high-level Nazi officials escape justice after the Holocaust. They alone issued around 120,000 travel documents, many to Nazis. They also issued 25,000 new identity documents. It was due to the actions of the Red Cross that high-level war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele were able to escape.
DR. MARCEL PETIOT
After the Nazis occupied Paris in June of 1940, Parisian Jews grew desperate to escape. A series of smuggling routes out of France and into Switzerland and Spain began popping up. Dr. Petiot then chose to pose as a member of the French Resistance and claimed to operate a network to help Jews flee France.
Dr. Petiot's so-called "network" was pricy. Those wishing to escape had to pay him the equivalent of $10,000 today.
Petiot would then bring the Jewish refugees to a "safe house" at 21 Rue Le Sueur in Paris, where he would give them the necessary vaccinations for the journey. In reality, he was injecting them with cyanide. They'd die quickly, after which he'd dismember their bodies and dissolve them in quicklime or burn the remains in a furnace.
He would often approach Jews with no family and offer to help them, knowing that no one would come looking for them if they went missing.
It's estimated that he murdered 60-200 people, mostly Jews.
In 1944, his neighbors discovered an odd smell and alerted the police. By then, he had already fled his apartment. When the police showed up, they found body parts everywhere. Several months later, he was arrested at the Paris Metro Station.
After the war, Petiot claimed that the bodies belonged to Nazi collaborators, but the personal belongings of the victims were found in his home, debunking his story. Nevertheless, at his trial, he continued to portray himself as a hero fighting the Nazi occupation. The jury did not buy it, and he was sentenced to death by guillotine. He was executed in 1946.
THE DOCTORS PLOT
The Doctors’ Plot was an antisemitic campaign that took place under the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union. Between 1951-1953, Stalin alleged that Jewish doctors in the Soviet Union had conspired to assassinate Soviet leaders. Jewish doctors were dismissed from their jobs, arrested, and tortured. A massive propaganda campaign warning of the dangers of “Zionism” was enacted throughout the Soviet state. People with Jewish last names were condemned.
The first allegation in the Doctors’ Plot was made against a Jewish doctor named Yakov Etinger in 1951. According to the MGB, the precursor to the KGB, Etinger had committed malpractice in treating two Communist party leaders. Etinger was imprisoned and died from torture and harsh conditions.
In 1952, a letter written by a Russian cardiologist in 1948 was recovered. The letter attested that a Communist party leader had suffered a heart attack, but Kremlin doctors had misdiagnosed it and covered up their mistake. Though none of the Kremlin doctors involved in the cover up were Jewish, the Soviet regime added Jewish doctors to the list to portray the cover up as a “Zionist conspiracy.”
Initially, there were 37 arrests. Under extreme pressure and torture, the Jewish doctors admitted to the alleged plot. But after Stalin’s unexpected death, the Soviet regime admitted no evidence for such a plot existed. The allegations against the Jewish doctors had been entirely fabricated.
THE HOSTAGES
Since the October 7 massacre, a long list of now-released Israeli hostages have testified that they were held captive in hospitals. Israel has also since found dead hostages on Gaza hospital grounds. Former hostage Sharon Aloni Cunio, for example, has said that the nurses and doctors were aware that they were being held captive there; in fact, she said, the nurses “went along with it.” Fawzia Amin Saydo, a Yazidi woman who was captured by ISIS in Iraq at age 11 and sold as a sex slave to a Hamas member in Gaza, has since also testified that Hamas uses hospitals as military bases. As early as 2006, PBS even aired a documentary showing Hamas operating out of Al-Shifa Hospital.
Mia Shem, a former Israeli hostage, was operated on by a veterinarian while in the Gaza Strip. She has since needed extensive surgeries to regain function of her arm.
CCTV footage from Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza shows Hamas dragging hostages through the halls, in plain view of doctors, nurses, and patients.
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