In 2012 Lina Haag died near Munich at the advanced age of 105 years. She was born in 1907 in the German southwest as the daughter of a maid and a worker and became involved in the German Communist Party in the 1920s. After the Nazis seized power, her husband Alfred Haag, a member of the state parliament in Wurttemberg for the Communist Party, was declared an enemy of the state and sent to various concentration camps. As a member of the Communist Party, Lina Haag also served a two-year prison sentence and was then interned in Torgau concentration camp for another year. Not even her prior incarceration in various prisons had prepared her for this experience of complete vulnerability: “You were nothing, not even a number anymore – just a handful of dust“.
After her confinement ended, she moved to Berlin, where she succeeded in personally asking Heinrich Himmler, the “Reichsführer- SS“, to release her husband. Indeed, Alfred Haag was released in February 1940 on Himmler’s orders, though shortly afterwards called up for service in the Wehrmacht. In 1944 he became a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union and did not return until 1948.
During her time in Berlin, Lina Haag completed training as a physiotherapist and worked in a war hospital. After she lost her apartment in a bombing raid, she was granted permission in May 1944 to transfer to a military hospital in Garmisch, Bavaria.
Lina Haag’s report Eine Hand voll Staub (A Handful of Dust), published in 1947, was one of the first books about the resistance in the “Third Reich“. Writing in the form of a letter to her husband, Lina Haag wanted to document what happened during the Nazi period as proof that people of integrity “could fight back against the superior forces of lawlessness and violence with nothing but their outraged fists”. Her report has been published hundreds of thousands of times and in many languages and is still available in print today.
Her book also contains some information about her work as a physiotherapist, which contributes to our – so far still rather sketchy – knowledge about German physiotherapy during World War II.
On the one hand, it serves to challenge the persistent self-image of physiotherapy as a profession for female members of the upper social classes, which was connected with the first schools for physiotherapy in the early 1900s and went unchallenged throughout most of the 20th century. In fact, during World War II, the sharp increase in the demand for physiotherapy favoured the opening of the profession to wider sections of the population. Two new schools were opened during the war and the training was shortened to one year, so those female graduates could leave school with an “emergency exam” and work in the war hospitals. Lina Haag, who earned her living as a factory worker before her training as a physiotherapist, was able to benefit from this development due to her determination and personal commitment: “In the half-year of my vacation I complete an otherwise two-year course at the Charité and take my state examination as a physiotherapist under Professor Dr Adams” (Haag, 2004, p. 210). Being able to help others seems to have been one of the motives for her career decision: “I have devoted myself to the suffering of others, there is no time for my own” (Haag, 2004, p. 221).
Regarding the development of physiotherapy during National Socialism, areas of interest are especially how it was influenced by Nazi ideology and what its contribution to the health system of the time was. So far Angelika Uhlmann (2005) is the only researcher who has explored this topic (in the context of her PhD research on the emergence of German sports medicine). From the very beginning, the goal of the National Socialist state was a healthy population fit for military service. Physiotherapy, with its focus on prevention and physical exercise, could be seamlessly integrated into the health policy of the Nazi regime. In addition to general sport, it was seen as a particularly suitable measure for improving public health, as it also served the purpose of making temporarily ill people fit for military and work again. Thus Uhlmann comes to the overall conclusion that physiotherapy was ideologically courted by National Socialism and vice versa.
As an opponent of the Nazi regime, Lina Haag was critical of the role of physiotherapy in the care of wounded soldiers during the last years of the war. Her book even starts with the description of her experience as a physiotherapist in the large sports hospital Hotel Riessersee in Garmisch in May 1944:
“Today thirty are gone again, to the front. Unhealed, but kv [“kriegsverwendungsfähig”, i.e. “fit for war”]. So the capable medical officer can stay for a while again. The miracle worker who heals by the laying on of hands as in the Old Testament or the New: And I tell you, my son, get up and go! I gave him x-rays of those who left today. Obediently, without many words, the images were clear enough. Yet it was of no use. Not a single order to march was rescinded. The shipment had to go. The front needs heroes. There was nothing to be done. On the contrary. Probably just my appearance irritated him a bit, otherwise, he would have chided me for sure. Instead, he left it with the usual reference to the final victory. What he doesn’t say is that even in May 44 it’s still nicer here than in a military field hospital near Tarnopol. Instead, he says: ‘No sacrifice is too great for the final victory’. I threw the x-rays into a corner and went up to my attic. I have to write it down, or I’ll explode. Otherwise, I’ll scream it all out without restraint one day. That’s how far I’ve come. Totally exhausted.”
This is the rare testimony of a physiotherapist’s critical self-reflection regarding her professional role during World War II. Physiotherapists had to work according to the doctor’s instructions and meet objectives set by the authorities instead of being able to work towards their patients‘ actual recovery. Lina Haag registered the consequences of the ruthless and inhumane National Socialist health policy, to which German physiotherapy had dedicated itself, and recorded them for posterity.
Readings
Lina Haag (2004). Eine Hand voll Staub: Widerstand einer Frau 1933 bis 1945. Tübingen: Silberburg-Verl. (English version A Handful of Dust: One Woman’s Struggle 1933-1945. First published in London: Left Book Club/Gollancz 1948.)
Barbara Distel. In the shadow of heroes. Struggle and survival of Centa Beimler-Herker and Lina Haag. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (Herausgeber): Dachau and the nazi terror 1933–1945. Dachau 2002, 143–178.
Angelika Uhlmann (2005). »Der Sport ist der praktische Arzt am Krankenlager des deutschen Volkes«: Wolfgang Kohlrausch (1888-1980) und die Geschichte der deutschen Sportmedizin. Frankfurt am Main: Mabuse-Verlag.
Hello Sandra, I am the great-grand-daughter of Lina Haag. I loved your article and would like to thank you full-heartedly for sharing this angle (physio) with the rest of the world. #neveragain
(Fun fact, my spouse had a physio therapy practice in Canada).