Segal, Jérôme

The Immigration of Austrian Doctors to France during World War II - 2025.


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Of the nearly 4,600 doctors working in Austria in March 1938, a large-scale research project identified more than 3,400 doctors considered Jewish under National Socialist racial laws and another 800 who were persecuted for other reasons. Each life story was reconstructed from archival documents from a Victims’ Aid Fund (active after the war) to establish a prosopography. The vast majority of them — at least 2,630—had to emigrate, most to the United States, Great Britain, or Palestine. Those who arrived in France, whether in transit or to stay, had to face persistent xenophobia and intense corporatism. The German occupation only made their situation worse, as they were often threatened with deportation, but there was a certain continuity in the persecution they suffered, which continued, in more discreet or less obvious forms, after the end of World War II.