Ailing Germany

Primary Nazi propaganda is the assertion that the Germans of today are tough, strong, exuberantly healthy. Actually, they are an ailing, weakened people; Germany's state of public health is like that of a country in the last throes of a war of attrition. Such was the burden of medical reports which reached the U. S. last week-- by way of Das Neue Tage-Buch, a Parisian anti-Nazi paper, but based on official statistics of the Reichsgesundheits-amt (Reich Department of Health).*

Main symptom of Germany's bad condition is the increase of disease since 1933, as shown in the following table (the figures for 1938 cover only Germany proper, not territorial acquisitions) :

Cases in Cases in

1933 1938

Diphtheria 77,340 149,429

Scarlet fever 79,830 114,243

Contagious cerebrospinal meningitis 617 1,826

Infantile paralysis 1,318 5,757

Contagious dysentery 2,865 5,265

Trichinosis 2 21

According to Das Neue Tage-Buch the lowered disease-resistance of Germans can be ascribed to:

1) Poor nutrition--not only insufficient quantities of food but insufficient vitamins and minerals.

2) Unhygienic overcrowding among young people in youth movements.

3) Fewer doctors. Not only have thousands of able Jewish physicians been removed from practice but many "Aryan" doctors have been absorbed by the fighting forces.

4) Fewer midwives. In 1938 the number of midwives declined by 766.

5) Fewer meat inspectors; more bootleg slaughtering; more food poisoning due to spoilage of hoarded foods.

6) Scantier public distribution of medicines ; shortage of raw materials for bandages, disinfectants, cleaning agents.

7) Overwork. A Duesseldorf public health officer named Gottwald, while puffing up a smokescreen of acclaim for general health conditions in the Reich, admitted that the curves of increased illness among workmen and increased working hours are closely parallel. Hardest hit are men in the building trades, who work 14-hour and 16-hour days.

Recently German health statistics made the most amazing disclosure of all: that 75% of the male population at one time or another have had some form of venereal disease. This almost incredible figure, in the light of Das Neue Tage-Buch's, researches, may be a consequence not only of the moral paganism preached in the New Germany but also of lowered resistance on the part of young Germans to venereal infection.

*The Reichsgesundheitsamt statistics through 1937 are available in the U. S., check with Das Neue Tage-Buch's more recent report.

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