Go East, Young Man

East Germany's Communist leaders are extending themselves to ease a desperate shortage of doctors. Trained physicians are made citizens of special privilege, showered with medals and promotions to keep them from fleeing west. Medical schools are being expanded, and a speedup has been instituted to rush thousands of students ("quick-quacks," Westerners call them) through training in only twelve months. Still far short of needs, the Communists are also beckoning seductively to doctors in West Germany.

There was considerable evidence last week that the seduction is getting results, and that West German practitioners are moving across to East Germany at the rate of several hundred a year to work under renewable one-year contracts. The bait: salaries that are fat by current West German standards (up to 5,000 East marks), promises of religious freedom, quick promotions, no restrictions on movement in and out of East Germany. Especially good doctors are not forced into political activities, need not even join the party. The best doctors are promised an extra bourgeois dividend upon their arrival: a free house and servants.

Growing Trickle. To many young West German doctors, the bait looks good. In contrast to the East, the Federal Republic of Germany has an increasing surplus of doctors. Of the republic's 69,109 registered physicians, 4,608 have no medical practice at all; they are unemployed, or making their livings in other ways. Pay for interns is low: 240 West marks ($60) a month. Even those with practices or hospital appointments have only limited opportunities. West Germany's currency reform wiped out the savings of many oldsters who were ready to retire, forced them to keep working instead of stepping aside for younger men.

Principal cause of the West German surplus is the wartime Nazi practice of exempting all medical students from the military draft and imposing no restrictions on entrance into medical school. As a result, thousands of draft-dodging Germans whipped through medical school. Refugees from the East have added to the problem, and the output from West German schools is still high because the admission requirements are still low. Desperate for employment, about 20,000 West German doctors have emigrated to Africa and the Near East since 1945. Compared to this exodus, the transfers to East Germany represent only a trickle. But unless the surplus is reduced, the trickle is likely to grow.

What Else? Aware of the perils behind Communist promises, the powerful Association of West German Doctors is campaigning to persuade the Adenauer government to expand its national health program and create 7,000 more jobs for doctors. One Bonn physician sourly observed: "Maybe if the Communists steal enough good men, it will make the pepper sacks [stingy ones] in the government spend a few pfennigs [to employ more doctors] . . ." On the other hand, West German doctors do not overlook the plight of their ill-doctored countrymen and do not actually discourage transfers to Communist Germany. Said the association's secretary general, Dr. Joseph Stockhausen: "When doctors . . . ask us about the contracts the Communists are offering, we try to explain the terrible needs of the Eastern zone--as well as the risks. What else can we do?"

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