Fritz Donner 1896 - 1979
December 26, 2008
Fritz Donner 1896 - 1979 was a German
homeopath
who had the hardest role of all to play in Nazi Germany.
As a physician at the Rudolf Virchow Hospital in Berlin, he was involved in homeopathic research.
Fritz Donner was well aware that many Jewish homeopaths had already fled, having been subject to the most vicious persecution. His colleagues Norbert Galatzer, MartIn Gumpert, William Gutman, Karl Koenig, Otto Leeser, Norbert Glas, Hanns Rabe, Oswald Schlegel and his father Emil Schlegel and many others had already fled. Edward Christopher Whitmont had also fled to America. Fritz Donner would also have known Adolf Albrecht Friedlander, Hans Wapler, and stories of various other Jewish homeopaths, including Albert Wolff
- not to mention the terrifying krystalnacht (Kristallnacht) in 1938!)
The homeopathic World was intimate and in close contact, then as now.
From http://www.diss.fu-berlin.de/diss/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/FUDISS_derivate_000000001860/02_Schrifttum.pdf?hosts= After their seizure of power companies, the National Socialists attempted health care reform in Germany. Homeopathy came under the description of folk medicine, and if necessary, “the laity may be exercised and to ensure that the public health should contribute…” In 1936 starts the kingdom of Health (RGA) with a scientific review of homeopathy under the direction of Fritz Donner…
When Rudolph Hess took the XII International Congress of Homeopathy in Berlin ‘under his protection’, no homeopath could have been in any doubt about the seriousness of the situation (Jean-Marie Abgrall, Healing Or Stealing?: Medical Charlatans in the New Age, (Algora Publishing, 1 Jan 2000). Pages 37-38).
Homeopaths had been tracking this particular bunch of Nazi occult loonies for years already!
(Of note: see Edward William Berridge, J Ellis Barker, Kenneth Robert Henderson MacKenzie, Oswald Schlegel, Walter Johannes Stein, Rudolf Steiner (with particular reference to the books of Walter Johannes Stein), Robert Masters Theobald, and Charles Lloyd Tuckey.
(Of note: Emil Schlegel was the homeopath of Rudolf Steiner’s second wife Marie Steiner von Sivers, and Rudolf Steiner had frequent correspondence with him about homeopathy. Oswald Schlegel and his father Emil Schlegel fled Nazi persecution in World War II to find refuge in America - and thus the knowledge of this madness also fled to America with them. Also Karl Koenig, Edward Christopher Whitmont and others took this drear knowledge with them to Britian!)
(Of note: Edward Bulwer Lytton was a patient of homeopaths Frederick Hervey Foster Quin and James Manby Gully. Edward Bulwer Lytton was a member of several occult societies, including the Societas Rosicruciana, and he wrote Vril: The Power of the Coming Race in 1870 which so influenced the Nazi occult elite). Frederick Hervey Foster Quin was the most influential and well connected homeopath of any era, and connected to homeopathic Aristocracy across the whole of Europe!)
In 1924, Rudolf Steiner prepared a homeopathic remedy from a dead male rabbit to remove a plague of rabbits from the estate of Count Keyserling in Silesia. Within three days, all of the rabbits on the estate had fled towards the distant wastelands and marshes and rabbits were rarely seen on the estate for years to come.
Rudolf Steiner knew how to unnerve Nazis!
It is no wonder that the Nazis were desperate to uncover these amazing homeopathic secrets, and the only way to protect homeopathy and to protect innocent people was for Fritz Donner to find against his own profession.
How else could he keep homeopathy out of Nazi hands?
From http://www.igm-bosch.de/content/language2/downloads/HomoeopathyNaziGermany.pdf Between 1936 and 1939 drug provings were carried out on behalf of the Reich health authorities in various homeopathic hospitals. Their “main purpose was to research the reliability of former provings and the validity of the drug pictures that were based on them”. The research team consisted of homeopath Professor Dr Hanns Rabe, internist Professor Werner Siebert and the professors of pharmacology Gustav Kuschinsky and Richard Bonsmann (life dates not known). Fritz Donner MD (1896-1979), who practised at the time in the homeopathy department of the Rudolf Virchow Hospital in Berlin, was also involved in the programme.
From Jean-Marie Abgrall, Healing Or Stealing?: Medical Charlatans in the New Age, (Algora Publishing, 1 Jan 2000). Page 38. Opening the international congress of the Homeopathic Society in the name of the Fuehrer on 8 August 1937, Rudolph Hess offered the following stout defence on the creed :
“However, certain physicians have not hesitated to attack and reject not only new therapies but also others whose origins go back to a distant past, as is today the case of homeopathy, without even making the effort to subject these therapies to serious examination.
“For this reason, I have taken under my protection the XII International Congress of Homeopathy in Berlin, to express the interest of the National Socialist State in all modes of therapies that are useful to the people’s health”.
As a result of this high grade intervention, it would appear, a well known homeopath, Dr Fritz Donner (assisted by a pharmacologist and an internist), was ordered to come up with the necessary proofs. His findings were not published and they were withheld from the medical community for many years.
It was only in 1969 that a translation of the Donner report appeared in a French magazine (the results were never published in Germany). *Henri Broch, who was responsible for the report coming to light, cites interalia two letters of Fritz Donner to, respectively, Erich Unseld, president of the German Association of Homeopathic Physicians, and Heinz Schoeler, editor in chief of the Allgemeine homöopathische Zeitung.
These confirm that all of Donner´s findings were negative and that he came under pressure to conceal the results of his research.
As Donner himself stated (translated from the french) :
“One cannot inform homeopaths about the real nature of homeopathy, nor can one publish it in a homeopathic journal. In the best homeopathic tradition, anyone can come up with the most glaring absurdities and they will be published; by contrast, the fundamentals of an important medicine against diphtheria will never be published and the researcher who works on these sources will be threatened with immediate dismissal.”
However and interestingly, in 1915 - 1927, Fritz Donner had also conducted earlier research which did prove the success of homeopathic remedies:
From 1 The Role of Homoeopathy in Nazi Germany – A Historical Expertise 2008 by Professor Dr Robert Jütte, Director of the Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation, Straussweg 17, D-70194 Germany, e-mail: robert.juette@igm-bosch.de… Tested substance: Cimicifuga (Actaea racemosa) Fritz Donner Allgemeine Homöopathische Zeitung 181 (1933), S. 406-425 Source: General Homeopathic Newspapers 181 (1933), p. 406-425__ _where Donner replicated experiments by Timothy Field Allen, Richard Hughes and Edwin Hale, to replicate the proving with great success. Many other successful and statistically significant provings and results are to be found in his publication Fritz Donner: _Bibliography of drug tests of 800 of the most important homeopathic remedies. Leipzig 1937 (Quellenverzeichnis der Arzneiprüfungen von 800 der wichtigsten homöopathischen Heilmittel).
Fritz Donner was himself the son of a homeopath. His father was the third doctor to become a member of the German Homeopathic Society. He took over the practices of Dr. Quesse in Goppingen and Nagold.
Fritz Donner wrote Über die gegenwärtige Lage der Homöopathie in Europa. _Allgemeine homöopathische Zeitung_ 179 (1931), pp. 229-271, Quellenverzeichnis der Arzneiprüfungen von 800 der wichtigsten homöopathischen Heilmittel. Berlin; Leipzig: Haug, in Komm 1937, Lectures on Homeopathy. Delivered at Berlin Academy 1939 to 1942, Zwölf Vorlesungen über Homöopathie, and articles for homeopathic journals and for Karl and Veronica Carstens Stiftung.
Of interest:
*Henri Broch is one of the biggest critics of parapsychology in France.