Dr Gerd Tobias Schloss

Successful medical studies

Gerd Schloss' Jewish father, who had made a name for himself as a paediatrician, had already died in 1918 during the First World War, meaning that Gerd Schloss' mother had to support him and his brother, who was three years younger, alone with her job as a teacher. She was a Protestant and Gerd Schloss himself was also baptised.

In 1932, Gerd Schloss began his medical studies at Berlin University and passed his state examination five years later - with a grade of "very good" in all 14 subjects. He was able to study in Berlin for so long because he benefited from the exemption for children of front-line soldiers and was categorised as a "half-Jew".

University discrimination

Gerd did not witness the brawls between National Socialist and Jewish or left-wing students in the main building because he usually stayed on the rather quiet medical campus on the other side of the Spree.

However, he was harassed several times during his studies because of his Jewish background. Gerd Schloss remembers that a yellow rectangle on his student handbook labelled him a "Jewish half-breed". In February 1937, he and other students were denounced by name as "mongrels" in an anonymous notice.

No room for "non-Aryans"

When he was looking for a traineeship in a pathological institute to lay the foundations for training as a surgeon, he realised that the municipal hospitals did not accept "non-Aryans". The Protestant Martin Luther Hospital dismissed him as a Protestant despite his religious confession after his origins became known. He eventually found a place in the Catholic St Hedwig Hospital under the wing of Professor Paul Schürmann, who had been recommended to him as critical of the Nazis. Gerd Schloss had a similar experience in his search for a doctorate. He eventually wrote his dissertation with the liberal pharmacologist Wolfgang Heubner - another professor known at the time as an opponent of the Nazis.

Emigration and academic career

With a letter of recommendation from Professor Schürmann and his doctorate in his pocket, Gerd Schloss moved to Switzerland in January 1938, where he found a job as a research assistant in Lucerne and later in Basel. He remembers that, as a Protestant, he was treated better than the Jewish refugees and that he was able to avoid deportation by the immigration police thanks to his good contacts.

Meanwhile, Gerd Schloss' younger brother remained in Germany and was drafted into the Reich Labour Service. He served as a soldier in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Her non-Jewish mother survived the Nazi era in Germany without persecution.

After the war, Gerd Schloss married Helene Falk in Switzerland, with whom he raised three children. In 1947, he emigrated to the USA for professional reasons and, after stops at Yale and Michigan, finally found his place at the University Hospital in Tucson, where he headed a laboratory and taught pathology.

After his retirement, he and his wife attended a wide range of humanities seminars and read widely until old age. He was just as enthusiastic about Goethe as he was about Roman history or the latest theatre productions. He translated his letters to his mother and brother into English so that his children and grandchildren could understand the family history.

Dr Gerd Schloss died in Tucson, Arizona, in 2007.