Abstract

In 1933 the nazis had immediately started to reorganize the health service and the medical profession on the basis of eugenics and efficiency. For everybody who had been engaged in the institutions of social medicine or social hygiene in the Weimar Republic the inhibition of medical practice, misery, distress, persecution, imprisonment or at the best emigration had been the consequence of it, for political and mostly also for racial reasons. But for these physicians who had to flee from Nazi-Germany the situation in the immigration countries had not been a good one in most of the cases. Therefore it is only possible to speak - if you neglect the special situation of the psychiatrists in the U.S.A. - in particular cases of transfer of medical science into the immigration countries from Germany. Most of the immigrants stayed after the war in their new homelands. The loss of these progressive aspects of social hygiene caused by the emigration of these physicians 1933 and afterwards from Germany can be noticed in this field of medicine and public health service in Western Germany until now