You are now outside Turmstrasse 21 in front of the former main entrance to Moabit Hospital, which was closed in 2001. In 1872, city councillor Rudolf Virchow had barracks for a provisional plague hospital built on 75,000 sqm (18.5 acres) of farmland.
At the time, the city was bursting at the seams. Due to cramped housing conditions, widespread poverty, and a lack of hygienic conditions, epidemics and diseases took hold easily. Local residents resisted the construction of the plague hospital, as many feared being infected. The plague hospital developed into Moabit Hospital, which gained a very good reputation over the decades. For example, in the 1880s, Doctor Robert Koch worked here to improve techniques for disinfection and sterilisation. Paul Ehrlich carried out ground-breaking experiments for treating TB. Important departments were constructed quickly here: For example, the Institute of Bacteriology and Serology was opened in 1891. The surgical department followed soon after, including building for operations as well as the Institute of Radiology. In 1904, the city began training nurses on site in Moabit.
The hospital’s reputation solidified until the 1920s. The progressive nature of Moabit Hospital was well-known beyond Berlin and Germany. Under Professors Moritz Borchardt and Georg Klemperer, the Surgical and Internal Medicine departments became university clinics. Professor Borchardt invented several surgical instruments, some of which are still in use today, although in modified form. Lenin’s advisers even called them personally to the sickbed of the Russian head of state in 1922. On this occasion, almost all other leading Soviet politicians were also examined by Klemperer. Despite inflation and the economic crisis that began at the end of the 1920s, the area was expanded further, soon making the hospital the second-most important in Berlin after the Charité. Innovators of science, social reformers, and creative outsiders in medicine met here. Female and male doctors who had the courage to break old taboos received their training here. At the time, this also included engaging with social and medical issues. Many of them were members in the Association of Socialist Doctors, which included left-wingers of all types. They offered education and counselling, as well as birth control and treatment for STDs. They also devoted themselves to the fight to lessen the housing shortage and expand government health care.
Straight ahead you can see House E, which at times served as an administrative building and residential house for nurses. To its right is House B, which has its front direct in Turmstrasse. It contained staff accommodation and training rooms. The memorial plaque for Dr Georg Groscurth hangs on its facade. He was a senior consultant and head of Moabit Hospital from 1939. In 1941, together with Robert Havemann, he founded a resistance group, which called itself “European Union” after 1943. They succeeded in hiding Jewish citizens and Wehrmacht deserters, procuring identity cards, food, and information for them. They were betrayed in Autumn 1943 and charged with “preparation for high treason” and “favouring the enemy”. Groscurth was sentenced to death and decapitated on 8 May 1944. You can hear more about him later.
On the morning of 1 April 1933, the day of the Reich-wide boycott of Jewish institutions and businesses, SA trucks also drove to the hospital to pick up the Jewish doctors. The fact that some were in the middle of operations did not stop them. Medical laboratory scientist Edith Thurm was there when Professor Goldstein was abducted from his office. She reports:
Few stood by the Jewish doctors, but a few medical interns were brave enough to develop a kind of warning service. When the SA moved in, they alerted their at-risk colleagues, who had remained on staff due to lack of personnel. At the last minute they were able to flee onto the street through back doors and windows.
The dismissals of Jewish doctors were followed by raids against nurses, orderlies, kitchen staff, and hospital employees suspected of political dissidence. These were about 10% of all employees. For an arrest it was sufficient to be a member of the Labour Party or a union. In effect, this was an occupational ban.
The gynaecology department had to be closed for months from 30 March 1933 because no doctor was available.
The hospital’s reputation was due not least to the many Jewish doctors and those associated with the working class, but it deteriorated dramatically from 1933 onwards. A military tone, medical botch-ups, intrigues, and forced sterilizations took hold. In 1935 the clinic was renamed Städtisches Robert-Koch-Krankenhaus (Municipal Robert Koch Hospital). However, this could not hide the fact that because of the high numbers of dismissals, there were only few qualified doctors left. The District Office had requested blacklists to be drawn up giving the reasons for dismissal. As a result, two thirds of doctors were dismissed. Renowned professors Borchardt and Klemperer were forced into retirement. Under threat of severe punishment, they, like their former colleagues, were forbidden from ever entering the premises again.
Chief and senior physician positions were taken over by inexperienced doctors that the Nazi party approved of. They often even wore their brown SA or black SS uniforms under their white coats. And there was a new doctor whose operations caused patients to die, one after another: SS member Dr Kurt Strauß, who soon earned the nickname “Dr Botch”. He operated on tumours that were only suspected to be malignant and tended to amputate the wrong limbs. By 1939, he was considered untenable because of his malpractice and was transferred to Prague.
The welfare centres set up by Jewish doctors were either closed or converted for the purposes of the Nazi regime. Now, for example, the department for alcoholics focused on registering them and dividing them into “heavy” and “light” drinkers. Patients registered as severe alcoholics were deemed to be “hereditary” and forced into sterilisation on a massive scale. Here, Professor Erwin Gohrband made a dubious name for himself because these simple interventions were not enough for him and many of his colleagues. They preferred measures that were irreversible.
Despite extensive surveillance to expose opponents and critics of the regime everywhere, groups of dissenters and opponents of the Nazis also developed at Moabit Hospital. On the top floor of the now defunct East Pavilion was the laboratory of Dr Groscurth and his colleague Havemann. It was managed by Ilse Kunze, a medical laboratory scientist. “Kunzes Kaffee Salon”, KKS for short, soon formed. There was another secret circle in the Neurology Department, based in the West Pavilion, which also no longer exists: As soon as the coffee was made, phone calls went around the building to say “The experiment is running”. Circle insiders knew this as code for their next meeting, where they could discuss both medical and political matters openly. Nazi opponents met here to freely exchange ideas and make plans. Their objectives were initially to hide “illegals”, mostly political dissidents and Jews. Safe housing, food, fake papers, and escape routes abroad were organised.
From 1941 onwards, the group added sabotage in the arms industry and education of the population. It was helpful that among Dr Groscurth’s patients were numerous politicians: Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess and his brother Alfred, as well as a secretary of state in the Foreign Ministry and an SS Obergruppenführer. Quite in passing, Groscurth learned of planned military campaigns and crimes. The resistance knew how to make use of the information.
They created a far-reaching network in the underground despite the risks to their lives: They even established contact with French and Russian resistance groups among the forced laborers. Soldiers could be written off as unfit for war, and transmitting equipment, dressing materials, and medicines could be smuggled. That their work would not go unnoticed was clear to the resistance fighters. In September 1943, arrests, torture, trials, and death sentences were carried out against Georg Groscurth and a few others.
Many buildings were destroyed during carpet bombing in 1943. The remaining ones are now under historic preservation. Several new buildings were constructed after the war.
You can read more in a book about Moabit Hospital, “nicht misshandeln” (Do Not Mistreat), which is available from Dorotheenstädtische Buchhandlung in Turmstrasse 5, opposite Tiergarten District Court. There’s a very touching story behind the title of the book: At the unofficial or “wild” concentration camp in a cellar in General-Pape-Strasse, two Jewish doctors shared a cell, having been taken there by the SA on 1 April 1933: Dr Erich Simenauer, surgeon at Urban-Krankenhaus, and Professor Kurt Goldstein, Head of the Neurology Department at Moabit Hospital. They were able to escape the usual beatings to a certain extent: Dr Simenauer had just recently removed the appendix of an SA man, who showed his gratitude by writing “do not mistreat” on Simenauer’s docket.
The former concentration camp is now a memorial site. It is directly next to Südkreuz train station and can be visited. You can also view the “Do not mistreat” permanent exhibition in Tiergarten Town Hall. It deals with the history of Moabit Hospital.
Foto: Landesarchiv Berlin
« Kurt Tucholsky’s birthplace
Heilige-Geist-Kirche (Church of the Holy Ghost) »
