Herr Doctor

Berlin was getting ready to watch a big operation last week. Dr. Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch, the greatest surgeon in Germany, was about to undergo a denazification trial.

Ivory Pegs & Rubber Gloves. To doctors far & wide, Dr. Sauerbruch is a reminder of the onetime glory of German medicine. In his time, he operated on Britain's late King George V and many another European statesman. He became world-famed for his daring pioneering in lung surgery; one of his inventions was a chest operation in a low-pressure chamber to avoid collapse of the lungs. During World War I (a general while still in his 30s) he developed a method of hooking an artificial arm to the muscles of a stump by means of ivory pegs, so that the muscles operated the fingers. His operations on the heart, in cancer and in bone-grafting are almost equally famous.

Dr. Sauerbruch has been known to perform three operations at once: his assistants cut open the patients and Sauerbruch moved from table to table to make the crucial excisions. He invariably operates barehanded. Rubber gloves, he says, destroy the delicate feel of his work. A Sauerbruch operation is a continuous bellow; he shouts at his assistants, shouts for his instruments. Once, irked by a clumsy assistant, he slashed the fellow with his scalpel to teach him a lesson.

Quick Checks & Long Chances. Sauerbruch likes to examine students during automobile trips. Bright students are rewarded with a long ride, but dull ones are dropped along lonely highways.

An American family living in Berlin once appealed to Sauerbruch to operate on their son, desperately ill with peritonitis. Sauerbruch barked: "It will cost you $1,000." He examined the boy and growled: "This is almost hopeless; it's throwing money away." He was prevailed upon to operate anyway. Emerging from the operating room, Sauerbruch snapped: "Not a chance; he will be dead by morning. Please give me the check immediately." Next morning the patient sat up for breakfast.

In 1928, Sauerbruch went to Berlin's Charite Hospital as head of the surgical clinic and has been there ever since. He now insists that he thought all along that the Nazis were crazy. But he accepted three Nazi awards for his services--the title of Staatsrat (for doctoring President von Hindenburg), the German National Prize and a post as advisory surgeon to the Army during World War II. Meanwhile, in public speeches, Dr. Sauerbruch demanded "freedom" for German scientists. In the final battle of Berlin, he sent a courier to Hitler demanding in the name of the endangered Charite patients that the fighting stop immediately.

When the Russian Army took over Berlin, General Georgi Zhukov appointed old Sauerbruch as Berlin's public-health chief. On U.S. insistence, Sauerbruch was later fired from that job, but he remained in charge of the Charite. Last week Berliners were betting that the denazification court (the Spruchkammer) would clear the doctor. Said he, still spry and fiery at 72: "I am a physician and no Nazi."

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