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Paula Tobias née Sussmann (born 15 January 1886 in Hamburg; died 13 November 1970 in Pacific Grove, Monterey, California) was a German physician. From 1912, she worked as a country doctor in the region of Brunswick. She was forced into exile in 1935 because her parents were Jewish. Before leaving Germany, and during a time when she was already suffering persecution, Tobias exchanged letters with several prominent National Socialists and protested against the exclusion of the Jewish minority from the German people. In 1940, Tobias wrote and compiled an autobiographic report for a contest organized by Harvard University ("My Life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933"). This report, which also included letters from authorities and acquaintances, was designed to show how people defined as Jews by National Socialist Germany were excluded from society and persecuted, and how non-Jews positioned themselves under these circumstances.

Youth and education
Paula's family lived in Hamburg. Her father, Siegfried Sussmann, was a merchant. He died in 1916.

Her mother, Anna Eva Sussmann, née Bernheim, a travel writer and women's rights activist, took her own life in 1942 when she faced deportation.

Paula's only brother, John, fell in the First World War in 1915.

From 1893 to 1901, Paula Sussmann attended the private Elisabeth-Goethe-Textor school for girls in Hamburg, and then took preparatory courses (Realgymnasialkurse) for the university entrance exam.

German universities started admitting female students in medicine and allowing them to take the final exam, so that they could become licensed doctors, between 1899 (Baden) and 1908 (Prussia). Paula Sussmann studied medicine in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Munich from 1906 to 1911. In 1911, her dissertation was accepted in Heidelberg. In 1912, she was admitted to medical practice. She started her clinical training in Hamburg and completed it in Göttingen, where she worked with the pediatrician Friedrich Göppert, who remained a mentor for her.

Paula Tobias was interested in literature. A particular favourite of hers since her schooldays was Wilhelm Raabe, whose novels and short stories are situated in the region where Tobias settled to live and work.

Life and work as a country doctor in the Brunswick region 1912-1935
In 1912, Paula Tobias and Siegfried (Fritz) Tobias, who was also a physician, got married and took over a country practice in Kreiensen, in the then Duchy of Brunswick.

Fritz Tobias served as a medical officer in the German army throughout World War I. From the end of 1914 to the end of 1916, Paula Tobias was on her own in providing medical care to the population of Kreiensen, because the only other physician in the village was also drafted.

At the time, Kreiensen was an important railway node. Trains bringing back wounded soldiers from the frontlines stopped there, usually at night. Paula Tobias tended to the wounded during those stoppages together with women from the village she trained as nurses and paramedics. Together with another doctor from a neighbouring county, she also worked in a military hospital (Lazarett) that was established in Kreiensen.

At the end of the year 1916, the other physician from Kreiensen was released from military service and returned. Tobias now moved to another small town in the region, Delligsen, because the distances she had to travel by bicycle to visit her patients were shorter there.

In 1917, Paula Tobias founded the first counseling station for new mothers of the Brunswick region in Delligsen. Infant mortality was high at the time.

From 1918 to 1920, Tobias and her husband witnessed the "Spanish flu" pandemic in Delligsen. The illness struck almost everybody. Paula Tobias reports that those who survived remained weakened, unable to work and irritable. She even believed that this was one of the reasons for the violent riots that broke out in 1921 in Delligsen (like in many other regions), when workers turned against wealthy farmers due to food prices.

In 1921 and 1923, two sons were born to the Tobias couple. Paula Tobias temporarily stopped practicing as a physician, but continued her counseling of new mothers. Her own older son died in 1928. Shortly after this, the Tobias family moved to Bevern, another small town in the Brunswick region and located in the Weser district. Paula Tobias comments, "We moved to Bevern, which we thought an ideal place to live and to work unto the end of our lives“.

In Bevern, Paula Tobias worked again with her husband in their medical practice, and she also offered counseling sessions for mothers again.

The Tobias couple tried to further public health also in a broader sense. Fritz Tobias suggested to build a public swimming pool, and the couple contributed to the construction costs. A contemporary witness, who was a youth at the time, reported that Paula Tobias recommended swimming to her on account of her size and bad posture, and even taught her herself. Paula Tobias also took in children from big cities for recreational stays in the family's home during the summers.

The start of the persecution of the Jews 1933-1935
After April 1933, "non-aryan" doctors lost their right to treat patients insured by the state health insurance schemes under a regulation adopted by the Federal government. The Tobias couple was not affected by this because the law contained exceptions for World War I veterans and physicians who had started practicing before 1914. However, their practice was not exempt from the boycott of Jewish businesses and practices organized by the National Socialists on 1 April 1933. Members of the Hitler Youth organisation stood "guard" in front of the Tobias' house for several weeks and told their patients to visit another doctor instead, who was a National Socialist.

The county health authority, which paid for the counseling sessions for new mothers, informed Paula Tobias that because she was "non-aryan", she was "unworthy" of continuing these sessions. She filed an objection, pointing out that she had established them in the first place, and not for monetary reasons, but for public health reasons, and that she had offered the sessions in Delligsen free of charge during the time of high inflation in 1923. But the decision was not revoked. Tobias reports that none of the other doctors took over the counseling sessions.

In Bevern Castle, which until then had housed an educational institution for 300 boys, a sports school for the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) organisation was established. The SA members terrorized Jews and Social Democrats by waking them up at night and taking them to the castle to beat them up, or by robbing them of their possessions. SA members regularly stood in front of the Tobias' house singing hate songs about murdering Jews.

The Tobias' son was tormented by other students and National Socialist teachers in the grammar school (Gymnasium) he attended in the nearby town of Holzminden. Other teachers tried to protect the Jewish students, but in 1935, a sign was put up at the school entrance stating that Jews were not welcome there, with the headmaster's approval.

In October or November 1935, the Tobias family left Germany for California.

An attempt to prove to the Nazis that German Jews are Germans
In 1933, Leonardo Conti, then State Commissioner for Health in the German state of Prussia, published an article in the German Physicians' Journal, demanding that only persons of German "race" should be regarded as part of the German people: „The term "citizen" (Staatsbürger) should already be avoided to the extent possible [...]. [...] Some Jews [believe] out of inner conviction, or pretend to do so, that they can treat their Jewishness only as a faith that has nothing to do with being part of a people or nation."  According to Conti, this was wrong because one's race determined the people one was part of, and this could not be changed by will.

After reading this article, Tobias compiled documents intended to prove that the German Jews - and thus, also she herself - were part of the German people. The documents included the letter her father had received in 1915 informing him that Paula's brother had been killed in the war. It also included the text of medical talks she had given to laypersons (e.g., on nourishment in times of hunger), patriotic poems by other Jews, and a newspaper article on eminent German Jewish scientists who lost their positions on account of the "Aryan paragraph". Tobias sent the documents to Conti with a polite protest note. Because she was aware of the risk, she deposited a copy of the letter with a friend, Friedrich Bodelschwingh, so that it could be known what her "crime" was if she was arrested.

Bodelschwingh was the head of Bethel, a charitable institution for disabled people near Bielefeld. In the years that followed, Conti would become Minister for Health and co-organizer of the euthanasia Aktion T4, whereas Bodelschwingh would find himself negotiating and pleading with the authorities for the lives of his patrons.

Conti does not seem to have responded to Tobias' letter, but Tobias subsequently sent copies of her documents to other National Socialists, trying to stand up for the rights of Jews and to convince the addressees of the injustice of their politics. She engaged some of the addressees in a correspondence, in which the National Socialists stated their views on "the question of the Jews". But Paula Tobias also gradually clarified and sharpened her position in these letters.

Protest against the exclusion of Jewish women from women's rights organizations
In 1934, Tobias wrote to a leader of the National Socialist women's movement, Gertrud Baumgart, criticizing her for neglecting to mention the fact that women's organisations also applied the Aryan paragraph in her book " Womens' Movement: Yesterday and Today" („Frauenbewegung: Gestern und heute“). Baumgart replied that she recognized Tobias' merits and regretted the undeserved "hardship" Tobias was facing, but Baumgart also made very clear that she nevertheless welcomed the Aryan paragraph: "I believe the separating cut is necessary". Tobias objected: „For generations, Germany has been our fatherland - I do not know which other country could supposed to be our fatherland. It has given us everything, and we have done everything for it on the basis of the mutual values created by such bondage. Therefore, we are now even more deeply hurt by the fact that our children are to be deprived of a basis for a living."

Correspondence with Börries von Münchhausen about race
Tobias also corresponded with the National Socialist literary figure Börries von Münchhausen in 1934 and 1935. He described the antisemitism of the Nazi era, which he himself shared, as a deeply rooted and unchangeable feeling that the other is a stranger, like a bad smell.

Tobias replied: "There have always been, and will continue to be, people whose tact and feeling for community are located in other body organs. I count myself as one of them in full consciousness, and in the course of my life I have met enough purely Aryan people with whom I have felt a connection on another basis, which not only endured tests like those of today, but which has been strengthened by those very tests in a manner that could not have emerged otherwise." She added that she, "like every German", thought that the Treaty of Versailles was unfair, but that the Aryan paragraph was also unfair: "I do not think that we will get closer to the peace we all long for if we now replace the wars between classes and between nations by a war between races."

California 1935-1970
In the USA, only one of the spouses could continue to practice as a doctor. Fritz Tobias opened a practice. Paula Tobias worked as a nurse until 1956 and lived in a room at the hospital where she worked after being divorced from her husband in 1945. She died in 1970.

Participation in the contest „My Life in Germany“ in 1940
In 1940, Gordon W. Allport, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, and Edward Y. Hartshorne from Harvard University organized a prizewinning contest for the best unpublished autobiograhic writings by Germans "who know life in Germany before and after 30 January 1933 very well". They wanted to establish a collection of scientific materials for conducting research on the impact of National Socialism on German society and the minds of the German people. They asked for submissions written in a matter-of fact way, which were rich in details.

Accordingly, Paula Tobias attempted to understand and describe her life as representative for a specific societal type. She mentions few details about her family life. Her autobiography only comprises 11 of a total 247 pages. The other documents are (annotated) letters from and to authorities and individuals, some of whom wrote in a professional capacity, designated to illustrate Tobias' life and personal environment in Germany before and after 1933. This included some of the correspondence devoted to the discussion of the persecution of the Jews. Other documents were arranged in categories of correspondents (organisations, teachers and schools, clergy, writers, and various indviduals). A few letters dated from after 1935 because Tobias continued her correspondence with friends in Germany until the start of World War II and tried to save Jewish friends.

Reception history
One of the scientists who initiated the contest "My Life in Germany", Edward Y. Hartshorne, reportedly started arguing publicly against isolationism in reaction to the papers submitted for the contest (by all the paticipants, not just Tobias). He later became responsible for the de-nazification of three major German universities and was mysteriously killed in Germany in 1946.

Tobias’ manuscript did not meet the expectations of the prize committee, and she did not win a prize. She explained to the committee that she had deliberately compiled it in this way because she thought that the letters from many different authors could present a more objective and more representative picture of the situation in Germany before and after 1933 than a longer text authored by herself could have done.

Her manuscript is accessible only to scientific researchers.

In 2003, the German educationalist Wiebke Lohfeld wrote as dissertation a portrait of Paula Tobias by deconstructing it and re-compiling the autobiographic parts of her manuscript, enriched by the result of Lohfeld's own research activities in archives and on he ground, where also she conducted interviews with witnesses who had known Tobias. The work result is a sociological case study. Lohfeld examines Paula Tobias' family, societal and professional circumstances and how she dealt with the tests and trials of her life. Lohfeld also discusses the social, economic and historic situation Tobias encountered in the places where she lived and worked.

The public in the region where Paula Tobias used to live was particularly interested in her and Lohfeld's descriptions of Tobias’ work as a doctor, her life in this rural region and the persecution she suffered. Since 2017, Tobias was honored in the framework of the project "Frauenorte" ("Places where notable women lived and worked") through lectures and exhibitions in Bevern Castle and the town halls of Kreiensen and Delligsen.

But her intellectual dispute with the National Socialists about the exclusion of the Jews from the German people was also noticed. The "separating cut"-letter by the National Socialist womens' movement activist Gertrud Baumgart was included in the first volume of The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, a selection of source materials edited by Wolf Gruner.

Literature in English
Lohfeld, Wiebke. (2005). Fight for Recognition. The Portrait of the German Physician Paula TOBIAS (1886 – 1970). A Reconstructive Biographical Analysis. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung. 6.