Document vya89Md2mymVZnOzq0Kyj5qK8

34 CHAPTER 1 but it was also pragmatic in the sense that things were supposed to get done. "Positive thinking" was the order of the day, designed to replace the sullen "critical/Jewish" spirit of the Weimar era. Ag gressive measures in the field of public health would usher in a new era of healthy, happy Germans, united by race and common outlook, cleansed of alien environmental toxins, freed from the previous era's plague of cancers, both literal and figurative. 2 The Gleichschaltung of German Cancer Research A <*> We Germans stand at an important turning point: new men are shaping the destiny of our fatherland, new laws are being created, new measures put into place, new forces awakened. The struggle touches on everything that has been and is unclean. Prof. Dr. Immanuel Conser, a leading antialcohol activist, in 1933 The Nazification of German cancer research meant, first and fore most, the exclusion of Jews and communists from governmental research and teaching positions. According to the Civil Service Law of April 7,1933, all persons of "Jewish or related blood" were no longer entitled to work for the state. The consequences for can cer research were profound. At Berlin's famous Charite Hospital Cancer Institute alone, twelve of thirteen cancer researchers lost their jobs.1 The only scientist to survive the purge--Hans Auler-- took over as director of the entjudetes (dejewified) institute after Ferdinand Blumenthal, general secretary of the Central Committee since 1919 and vice chairman of the Reich Anticancer Committee since 1931, was forced to resign.2 The Charite never again attained its former glory, as the core of Berlin's cancer research shifted to a "General Institute against Tumorous Diseases," erected in 1935 with financial support directly from the Fiihrer at the new Rudolf Virchow Hospital in Berlin. Heinrich Cramer, the radiologist