The Happy Journey from Berlin to Minneapolis

In February of 1954 I  began working as a general medical officer at the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation next to the Manitoba border of North Dakota. About two weeks after I got there I needed help interpreting the chest x-Rays of a patient with a persistent cough. I showed the films to the other Public Health Service officer at our thirty-bed hospital and he couldn’t figure them out either. He told me that I should send them to Dr. George Loeb at San Haven for an opinion. So I sent one of our drivers with the films and a clinical summary to the North Dakota State Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Dunseith, thirteen miles away.

The report was ready the next afternoon. It consisted of two typewritten pages that described the images in minute detail and was followed by a scholarly differential diagnosis. The letter closed with the suggestion that I refer the patient to the Sanitarium with a diagnosis of  “Rule Out Pulmonary Tuberculosis.” During the next year and a half, I had many more consultations with Dr. Loeb, all of which were helpful and generally instructive.

I didn’t meet George until he and his American wife, Hannah, came to our house for dinner a few months after we got to Turtle Mountain. He was in his early forties with beginning frontal baldness and a sweaty forehead that he mopped frequently with a handkerchief. Between his rapid-fire delivery and fairly strong German accent he was hard to understand at first, but before long my wife, Jane, and I were able to understand most of what he said and enjoyed his company a lot. During the next year, at more dinner parties, we learned  something about his life. 

George’s father, an assimilated German Jew, was an army officer who had been killed in WWI. His widow, who was not Jewish, married the Professor of Surgery at the University of Berlin, and George was raised in a highly conventional upper-middle-class household. As an example of the atmosphere at home, George said that shortly before his stepfather was to come home in the evening, a servant would post himself at the front door. When the Professor’s chauffeured car was in sight, the family was alerted and gathered in the entrance hall to greet the great man.  From then on, no one spoke unless asked to. At dinner, father was served first and was given the best.  When they had asparagus, for instance, the tips were cut off for father and rest of the family had the stalks.

George followed the conventional educational pathway to an M.D. degree and an internship at one of the University of Berlin’s hospitals. He was able to get that far despite Hitler’s rise because of his stepfather’s position. By 1939, however, it was clear that it would be dangerous for him to remain in Germany and a position on the house staff of Charity Hospital in New Orleans was arranged. 

When George arrived in New Orleans, he was well-equipped for the rigors of the New World. Twelve large trunks crammed with all kinds of clothing  and footwear as well as embroidered linen sheets and pillowcases came with him on the ship. He also brought skis and  a motorcycle as well as  his considerable self-confidence and the certain knowledge that German medicine was the best in the world. He told us that he thought that much of what was being done at Charity was way below par and he wasn’t shy about letting people know what he thought.

After Pearl Harbor, the authorities decided that George was a dangerous enemy alien and he was sent to an internment camp in Arkansas. He was certain that his arrogance at Charity had played a role in the decision to intern him. I don’t remember how long he was in the camp, but when he was offered the opportunity to leave by accepting a post at San Haven came up, he took it. The physician shortage in North Dakota was severe. Except for some native North Dakotans and a fair number of Canadians, most doctors were not keen on enduring the isolation of that sparsely populated state and its hellish climate. Now that the war was on and most able bodied physicians were needed in the armed services, the shortage was worse than usual, especially in low-paying public positions. Enemy aliens, like George, as well as many doctors of Japanese descent didn’t seem to be much of a threat to national security in states like the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana and many of the displaced doctors were recruited for posts on and near Indian reservations.

As George told it, his talents and energy impressed his superiors and after several years he became director of the institution. He also impressed Hannah, a native North Dakotan nurse at San Haven, and they were married before long, eventually having five children. During his tenure as chief George streamlined the administration and endeared himself to the state legislature by asking for less money than his predecessors. He equipped a modern surgical suite, established a first-rate clinical laboratory, modernized the radiographic facilities and converted the institution into a referral center for chest disease. Most remarkably, he was successfully performing segmental lung resections for tuberculosis at San Haven even though he had essentially no formal training in surgery.

Before George learned how to do the resections, patients who needed the procedure were sent to the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis, about 500 miles to the East, at great expense to the taxpayers of North Dakota, not to speak of the inconvenience, expense and distress for the patients and their families. How did he learn to do the surgery? Over the course of about a year, he and Hannah went to Minneapolis every other week end where Dr. Lillehi, the chief thoracic surgeon, supervised George’s training  while Hannah was taught how to do the necessary endotracheal anesthesia. On the alternate weekends he and his growing family would usually go to Montana for skiing or mountain climbing.

We left North Dakota in the summer of 1955 and never saw George again but exchanged Christmas letters. A few years after we returned to the East George recognized that treatment of tuberculosis had changed to the point that inpatient facilities were passé. He developed a plan for regional outpatient treatment centers and recommended that San Haven be closed. As always, the legislature followed his advice. Having done himself out of a job, George moved to Minneapolis where he completed a radiology residency. After many years as a practicing radiologist in a VA hospital he died of a myocardial infarct.