Paul Spiro
1892 - 1975

Paul Spiro was born in Leipzig (Saxony) on October 15, 1892, the son of university professor Karl Spiro (1867-1932) and his wife Therese (Rosalie), née Barschall. His father studied natural sciences (especially chemistry) and medicine and qualified as a professor of physiological chemistry at the University of Strasbourg in Alsace (then German Reich) in 1897. His brother Hans Peter Spiro was born in Berlin on April 22, 1894. Paul Spiro's parents came from Jewish families, but he himself was baptized a Protestant.

Karl Spiro taught at the University of Strasbourg, first as a private lecturer from 1897 and later as an honorary professor from 1912. He was also an assistant to Professor Franz Hofmeister, who held the Chair of Physiological Chemistry (successor to Professor Felix Hoppe-Seyler) at the University of Strasbourg. Meanwhile, Paul Spiro attended the Protestant grammar school in Strasbourg, where he passed his school-leaving examination in 1910. After the end of the First World War, the Spiro family moved to Basel (Switzerland). There, his father initially worked as a pharmacologist for the company Sandoz AG and from 1921 as a full professor of physical chemistry and director of the Physiological-Chemical Institute at the University of Basel. Karl Spiro died in 1932 in Wimmenau (Alsace, then France).

Paul Spiro's first wife died of the Spanish flu in 1919. They both had a daughter. Paul Spiro's second marriage was to the Swiss woman Erna Gyr. He met her in Frankfurt on the Main when she was an assistant doctor. After emigrating to Switzerland in August 1933, she ran a children's clinic in Davos. Paul Spiro and Erna Gyr had three children.

After Paul Spiro passed his school-leaving examination at the Protestant grammar school in Strasbourg in 1910, he studied medicine at the universities of Strasbourg in Alsace and Munich. He passed the preliminary medical examination in 1913 and the state medical examination in 1917. In January 1918, he received his doctorate from the University of Strasbourg. At the beginning of the First World War, he served on the Western Front as a field surgeon. He was awarded the Iron Cross II Class for his work before Verdun in March 1916. He was then garrison doctor at the fortress of Strasbourg and at the same time assistant at the Institute of Pathology at the University of Strasbourg. He described the following period in a curriculum vitae from 1928 as follows:

"After the end of the war and after the French invasion of Alsace, I went to Switzerland with my father, where I did practical and theoretical work at Professor [Rudolf] Staehelin's Medical Clinic and at my father's Physiological and Chemical Institute."

At the beginning of 1922, Dr. Paul Spiro went to Frankfurt on the Main and worked first as a trainee and then as an assistant at the medical clinic of Professor Gustav von Bergmann, an important internist who, in 1933, ensured that all Jewish doctors were dismissed from the Charité hospital in Berlin. From October 1925, Paul Spiro worked as a senior physician at the Frankfurt University Medical Clinic under Professor Julius Strasburger.

In November 1928, Dr. Paul Spiro habilitated at the University of Frankfurt on the Main in the subject of internal medicine, in particular pulmonary tuberculosis. His inaugural public lecture followed in January 1929, in which he spoke "On arthritism". He then worked as a private lecturer at the university and remained senior physician at the polyclinic. At the end of 1929, the University of Frankfurt applied to the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and National Education for an unpaid lectureship for Paul Spiro in order to recruit him for the fight against tuberculosis. The application states the following about him:

"According to his entire personality as well as on the basis of his many years of medical practice and his scientific work on tuberculosis issues, the same person appears particularly suitable for this very important task."

In March 1930, Dr. Paul Spiro was commissioned by the Ministry to treat pulmonary tuberculosis in lectures and, where necessary, in tutorials at the Faculty of Medicine from the summer semester of 1930. According to the lecture notes of Frankfurt University, he did indeed lecture on "Constitutional Pathology" in the winter semester of 1931/32 and on "Problems of Modern Tuberculosis Research" together with Associate Professor Dr. Philipp Schwartz. Although Paul Spiro was a Protestant, his teaching position was revoked after the National Socialists came to power in 1933 because of his Jewish ancestry.

Dr. Paul Spiro became a member of the Frankfurt on the Main section of the German and Austrian Alpine Club in October 1931. He had been recommended by three people, namely Wilhelm Schloßmacher, who had been a member of the section since 1911 and was then the managing director of the Berufsgenossenschaft der Chemischen Industrie (employers' liability insurance association for the chemical industry), by Heinrich Josef Schloßmacher, a company lawyer, for whom it was not possible to determine when he joined the Frankfurt section, and by Dr. Heinrich Lampert, a private lecturer in internal medicine at the University of Frankfurt, a fellow specialist who had joined the Frankfurt section in 1923. Heinrich Lampert later ensured that Jews and people with Jewish ancestors - such as Julius Strasburger, father of Section members Marie and Eduard Hermann Strasburger - were removed from the university in his role as "representative of the NSDAP" at the University of Frankfurt on the Main.

Whether and how Paul Spiro participated in the life of the Frankfurt Section has so far eluded us due to a lack of meaningful sources. It also remains unclear whether he resigned from the section before emigrating to Switzerland in August 1933 or was excluded from the section's leadership because of his Jewish parents. As a "front-line fighter" in the First World War, he could have remained in the section despite the introduction of the so-called "Aryan paragraph".

According to a granddaughter of Paul Spiro, he climbed numerous mountains in Switzerland with his younger son after his emigration. He also did this to escape the enforced inactivity imposed on him by the Swiss ban on working as a doctor.

Dr. Paul Spiro had been chief physician and head of the tuberculosis advice centre in Frankfurt on the Main since 1931, and was also a private lecturer in internal medicine at the local university and managing director of the Academic Health Insurance Fund at the University of Frankfurt. Because he came from a Jewish family, he was not allowed to continue in these positions. For example, the Hesse-Nassau State Insurance Office (Landesversicherungsanstalt Hessen-Nassau, LVA) terminated his employment as head of the tuberculosis advice center on August 1, 1933, as he was no longer allowed to continue working despite his status as a so-called "front-line fighter" in World War 1. According to a note in a file in the Hessian Main State Archives in Wiesbaden, it states:

"There were no grounds for dismissal in the person of Dr. Paul Spiro. On the contrary, the board of the L.V.A. issued him honorable references, granted him the contractual pension and, after Spiro had taken up residence in Switzerland with official approval, paid it out until August 1, [19]37. [...] On April 5, 1938, the L.V.A. informed Mr. Spiro that the Reich and Prussian Minister of Labor had refused to approve his stay in Switzerland beyond August 1, 1937, and that his pension payments would be suspended from then on. [...] There is no doubt that Dr. Paul Spiro only lost his position, salary and pension for reasons of race."

In fact, Paul Spiro was only able to work in Switzerland as a "volunteer" at the "Alpine Children's Clinic" in Davos, which had already been founded in 1922, because he did not have the Swiss medical diploma and was therefore not allowed to work as a doctor. This children's clinic was run by his wife Erna Gyr.

Paul Spiro's brother Peter Spiro, born in 1894, was murdered by Germans in May 1944 near Cranves-Sales (Savoy), close to the French-Swiss border. His mother Rosalie Spiro, née Barschall, born in 1862, remained in Switzerland after her husband's death and died there in 1936 at the age of 74. His uncle Friedrich Spiro was also able to emigrate to Switzerland in 1939 together with his wife Assia Spiro-Rombro. However, his uncle died the following year.