Dr. med.
Walter Fischbein
1893 - 1941

 “I, Walter Fischbein, was born in Dortmund on October 16, 1893, as the son of the medical officer Dr. Friedrich Fischbein and his wife Klara, née Sternfeld. After attending pre-school for 3 years, I entered the municipal secondary school and passed the examination in 1912. I turned to the study of medicine and studied in Freiburg, Munich and Frankfurt am Main. In July 1914 I passed the preliminary medical examination in Freiburg i.Br. In 1916 I became a soldier and in 1917 was given three months leave to take my state examination, which I passed in August 1917 in Frankfurt am Main. I was a soldier until the outbreak of the revolution and on January 1, 1919, I joined the Medical Clinic in Halle a./Saale as a volunteer assistant to Prof. Volhard, where I am still working today,” wrote Walter Fischbein in his dissertation “On the aetiology and prophylaxis of blennorrhoia gonnorhoica neonatorum”, which he presented in Frankfurt am Main in 1920.

Walter Fischbein’s grandfather Calmon Fischbein came from Erwitte (now the district of Soest) and was a successful butcher and cattle dealer in Dortmund, owning several houses which he later sold. Walter Fischbein’s father Friedrich Fischbein, born in Dortmund in 1859, worked as a specialist for internal medicine in his own practice in Dortmund from the mid-1890s and was active on the board of the “Kuratorium für jüdische Krankenpflege” (Board of Trustees for Jewish Nursing).

Education and Places of Work

After the end of the war, Walter Fischbein began working at the University Medical Clinic in Halle an der Saale on January 1, 1919.

Following the departure of intestinal specialist Adolf Schmidt, the well-known nephrologist Franz Volhard, who had previously been chief physician at the Dortmund Municipal Hospitals from 1905 to 1908, took over the management of the clinic on October 1, 1918. At the time, the teaching and training activities and patient care at the clinic in Halle were at risk, not only due to the turmoil of war. The clinic’s spatial, structural and personnel reserves were worrying.

Volhard began his work as a doctor with 1 senior physician and 4 assistants for 160 inpatients. One of these residents was Walter Fischbein. He is likely to have benefited from Franz Volhard’s reputation and scientific teaching during his further training: “It was fundamental problems of medical thinking and learning that occupied Volhard throughout his life. He took the path into the infinite of science and conjured up the simple and only the true.” This is how his later successor Rolf Emmrich characterized him. By the time Volhard moved to Frankfurt am Main in 1927, the situation in Halle had improved considerably.

At the end of 1922 Walter Fischbein left Halle and returned to his hometown Dortmund. On January 1, 1923, he started working alongside his father in the latter’s practice at Burgwall 31 in Dortmund as a “specialist for stomach, intestinal and internal diseases”. His father passed away unexpectedly in July 1926. Walter Fischbein continued to run the practice alone. In October of that year, he married Agathe Pless in Duisburg-Ruhrort. Their daughter Hanna Toni was born in 1927 and their son Hans Friedrich in 1930.

He lived with his family in the practice building at Burgwall 31, just a few hundred meters from Dortmund’s main train station and town hall. According to the daughter’s personal recollections, it was a large house with three storeys and an inner courtyard. Like over 90 percent of Dortmund’s city center, the house was completely destroyed during the war. It was not rebuilt, instead the street Burgwall was considerably widened.

1933

As early as March 29, 1933, the Jewish doctors at Dortmund Municipal Hospitals were forcibly removed from the hospital grounds by an SA troop, humiliated in a forest and then taken into so-called protective custody. Even after their release, they were harassed and removed from their posts later that year.

It is not surprising that Walter Fischbein quickly sought to emigrate after seeing the events in Dortmund, especially as his license to practice medicine had already been revoked in April 1933. His sister Gertrud, who was two years older and married Heilbrunn, had emigrated to the USA in 1915 and, like her husband, became a US citizen in 1925. The widowed mother Clara Fischbein left for New York at the end of March 1933. On August 10, 1933, Fischbein booked tickets in Stuttgart for the SS Europa for himself, his wife Agathe and their children, then aged 6 and 3. They left Cherbourg on September 3, 1933, and arrived in New York on September 8, 1933.

Beforehand, he had to pay 7500 Reichsmark (35000 euros in today’s purchasing power) to the tax authorities as “Reich Flight Tax”.

From the outset, he planned to set up a medical practice in the USA again later and therefore had equipment from the practice shipped there, including an X-ray and diathermy machine. Two months after arriving in New York, the family received a residence permit and initially lived with his sister on Central Park West.

Fischbein was offered a position as a clinical assistant at Mount Sinai Hospital on the other side of Central Park, just a quarter of an hour’s walk from the apartment, as early as 1935.

There he worked as a physician in the Out-Patient Department, which had recently moved into a new building. Mount Sinai Hospital had been founded in 1852 and had already moved into the complex at Central Park in 1871. Over the years, it had developed into one of New York’s leading hospitals with a great reputation not only for the variety and quality of patient care, but also for several other activities (School for Nurses, Pathological Department, Medical Library, Department of Dietetics, Social Service Department, Fellowship Funds in Scientific Medical Works). It was financed mostly by donations. In 1933, the hospital founded the “National Committee for the Resettlement of Foreign Physicians”, thus quickly becoming the new home for many medical emigrants from Nazi Germany.

Walter Fischbein and his family were granted American citizenship in 1938.

He bought a practice from a colleague, but was no longer able to use the equipment he had brought with him as it had become unusable in the meantime. The family’s lawyer, Dr. Louis Koppel, later stated in the application for compensation: “He did not succeed in gaining a foothold in the USA when he was able to settle down some time after immigrating. He had no connections to the population. As a result, his income did not cover his expenses. He therefore did not have to pay any tax. His practice was located for a short time in a house at 27 West 86 St in New York. Assuming that he would have better prospects in another district, he moved his practice to 585 West End Ave, New York, but without much success. In addition, he had to buy some new equipment here. It turned out that several valuable pieces of equipment, namely a Roentgen apparatus and a diathermy, had rusted to uselessness during transportation. The purchase of these alone cost him $500. The resulting worries and efforts led to his premature death on August 24, 1941.”

In 1941, Fischbein fell ill with myocarditis but, according to his daughter’s recollection, did not want to give up his practice. He died shortly before his 48th birthday on August 24, 1941 as a result of heart failure and was buried in the Ferncliff Cemetery and Mausoleum north of New York. His mother Klara, who died in 1958, was also laid to rest there.

His now widowed wife Agathe later moved to Hewlett, New York, where she died in 1985. His son Friedrich Hans (later Fred H) died in 1969 at the age of 39. His daughter Hanna Toni attended the University of Michigan and married Roger C Norton, a German teacher, in 1948. Together with their son Gary and daughter Wendy, they traveled to Europe several times in the 1950s,most recently to Dortmund in 1990.

The building near today’s Dortmund concert hall, in which Fischbein’s practice and apartment were located, was destroyed like 90 percent of the city center during the war and no longer rebuilt. At Burgwall 27 lies today for another victim of the Nazi terror a stumbling block

It was only after lengthy administrative procedures and legal disputes that the Fischbein family was compensated as part of reparations from 1960.