Thank you, Edgar, for sharing the " somewhat different picture"(s) from the two
quoted texts. The Raggam-Blesch snippet, with its depth of background, and
details of the lengths people went to in order to escape from Nazi persecution,
is frighteningly stirring.
Eytan Fichman
Brookline, MA
Hải Phòng
Việt Nam
On Sunday, August 2, 2026 at 02:30:45 AM EDT, Edgar Hauster
<[email protected]> wrote:
Czernowitzers...
A new edition of "Die Stimme", the monthly newspaper for the Bukovinians, was
published on 01-JUL-1958. Let's take a journey into the past together to
comprehend what moved our ancestors, their relatives and friends back then!
In its July 1958 issue, "Die Stimme" celebrates the appointment of "our fellow
countryman" Dr. Emil Tuchmann as a Hofrat by the Republic of Austria. But it’s
worth not letting ourselves be blinded by this and taking a closer look. The
renowned historian PD Dr. Michaela Raggam-Blesch, whose reputation is beyond
dispute, paints a somewhat different picture in her study "Between Rescue and
Deportation: Jewish Health Care under Nazi Rule in Vienna". As two sides of the
same coin, I contrast the article "DR. TUCHMANN—HOFRAT" from "Die Stimme" with
the relevant excerpt from the study of PD Dr. Michaela Raggam-Blesch’s study.
Make up your own mind!
"DR. TUCHMANN – HOFRAT: One of the highest honors granted by the Republic of
Austria was bestowed upon our fellow countryman, Chief Physician Dr. Emil
Tuchmann. Dr. Tuchmann, a native of Jablonitza, graduated from the Second State
Gymnasium in Czernowitz, after which he studied medicine at the University of
Vienna. During World War I, he enlisted as a volunteer and returned home having
been awarded several decorations. He then completed his medical studies. His
professional career began at the Health Insurance Fund for Commercial
Employees; later, he successfully ran his private practice in the 2nd District.
During the most difficult times, he headed the health care system of the Vienna
Jewish Community until he returned to work at the health insurance fund in
1945. He left no stone unturned in his efforts to expand the health care system
in Vienna, particularly the youth clinics. He focused his attention primarily
on the institutions in the hospital and convalescent care sectors that had been
destroyed as a result of the war. It was certainly no easy task to meet the
demands of this complex undertaking, which required substantial resources. Yet,
with his characteristic energy, he overcame all difficulties and successfully
implemented many reforms. The ceremony marking his appointment turned into an
impressive gathering attended by a wide range of people. In the presence of
high-ranking officials from the ministry, Federal Minister Proksch presented
him—in his capacity as consulting physician for the Main Association of Social
Insurance Institutions and chief medical officer of the Vienna Regional Health
Insurance Fund—with the decree appointing him to the rank of Hofrat. Hofrat Dr.
Tuchmann is also a member of the Supreme Health Council and the Provincial
Health Council for Vienna. In his private life, Dr. Tuchmann has remained the
modest man averse to all formality that he has always been, and when people
from Bukovina seek him out in need of his help, their visit is rarely in
vain.—La"
Michaela Raggam-Blesch
Between Rescue and Deportation
Jewish Health Care Under Nazi Rule in Vienna
"Emil Tuchmann (1899–1976) — Head of the Jewish Health Care System and the
Beginning of the Deportations from Vienna. In early 1940, Emil Tuchmann was
appointed 'Trusted Physician of the Jewish Community for the Entire Health Care
System.' In this role, he was subject to the supervision of the Gestapo, to
which he was required to submit monthly reports. If a complaint or even a
formal accusation was made against employees of the health services, Tuchmann
was held accountable. Consequently, he maintained a very strict regime. His
forceful and often irascible demeanor toward his subordinates—which earned him
nicknames such as 'the Tiger'—did not exactly endear him to the staff. After
the war, Tuchmann—like most of the leading members of the “Council of
Elders”—was denounced by Jewish survivors for collaborating with the Nazi
regime. He was primarily accused of the relentlessness with which he had
insisted on compliance with official regulations. He was accused of threatening
staff with transfer to the dreaded forced-labor assignment at the “Mistgstätte”
(garbage dump) and even with imprisonment in a concentration camp. After
spending several months in pretrial detention, the case was dismissed. In fact,
Tuchmann had possessed less power than his subordinates had believed. Although
he was able to exempt individual members of his staff from the transports by
declaring them indispensable, he could not prevent anyone from being deported.
As Tuchmann stated after the war, he had hoped to protect as many employees and
patients as possible by strictly adhering to the regulations. Yet he had
repeatedly flouted the regulations himself when it came to supplying the
hospital with medicine and food.
Tuchmann was indeed a skilled organizer. In 1941, he succeeded in increasing
the capacity of the Rothschild Hospital to 450 beds. At that time, at the start
of the large-scale deportations, the number of unattended patients—who had been
held back from the transports while their family members, who had previously
cared for them, were being deported—was rising. At the same time, many Jews
tried to avoid imminent deportation by staying in the hospital, as Rosa
Müller—who had been working as a nurse at the Rothschild Hospital since
1939—described in an interview:
'I was working in the emergency room back then; it was in the morning. We often
had 50 admissions in a single morning. Everyone wanted to have their appendix
removed or undergo prostate surgery, just to kill time until they could leave
the country. [...] Of course, we could tell that people were coming in who
weren't really sick, but we admitted them anyway.'
This practice did not go unnoticed by the Nazi authorities. Regular raids on
the hospital followed, as the surgeon Erich Stern described in his memoirs.
During these raids, both patients and visitors were searched. This was
dangerous even for non-Jewish visitors. Fanny Tritt, who worked as a nurse at
the Jewish nursing home and whose mother had undergone surgery for breast
cancer, also unexpectedly found herself caught up in one of these raids one day
while visiting—though, by sheer luck, she was not discovered. The raids
achieved the success the persecutors had sought. Soon they were so feared that
even sick Jews sometimes avoided being admitted to the hospital. Susanne Kriss,
for example, fought 'tooth and nail' against being admitted to the Rothschild
Hospital for a festering boil.
In light of the continuing rise in the number of patients, a new training
program for nurses began in February 1942, when the deportations were already
in full swing. The course participants hoped that their professional
qualifications would protect them from deportation. Among them was Alma Klüger,
mother of the writer Ruth Klüger, who was born in Vienna in 1931; for this
reason, she was not deported to Theresienstadt until September 1942, on one of
the last transports of Jewish Community employees, together with her daughter
Ruth. Mother and daughter survived several camps."
https://www.doew.at/cms/download/144gr/jb_2017_raggam.pdf
https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/MassMigration/mas140.html
https://difmoe.eu/uuid/uuid:24166e0b-1f5e-4fef-92a7-b48cff9494a6
Dr. Manfred Reifer founded the Chug Olej Bukovina [Association of Immigrants
from Bukovina] and decided to publish "Die Stimme". He entrusted with this task
Dr. Elias Weinstein, the former editor of the renowned daily newspaper
"Czernowitzer Morgenblatt".
I will try to let "Die Stimme" continue to resound in the future and invite you
to follow me on this journey. Your comments are highly welcome!
Edgar Hauster [MacBook]
P.S.: By courtesy of the Digital Forum Central and Eastern Europe (DiFMOE)
"Jewish-German Bukovina 1918+" Digitization Project: https://www.difmoe.eu
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This moderated discussion group is for information exchange on the subject of
Czernowitz and Sadagora Jewish History and Genealogy. The opinions expressed
in these posts are the opinions of the original poster only and not necessarily
the opinions of the List Owner, the Webmaster or any other members
or entities connected with this mailing list. The Czernowitz-L list has
an associated web site at http://czernowitz.ehpes.com that includes a
searchable archive of all messages posted to this list. Beginning in 2021,
archived messages can be found at:
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
To send mail to the list, address it to <[email protected]>.
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