OTTO WARBURG AND THE NAZI WAR ON CANCER
On 21 June 1941, the German biochemist Otto Warburg was summoned to the New Reich Chancellery, the seat of the Nazi government in Berlin. Warburg, winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, had good reason to be panicked. He was of Jewish descent and his relatives in finance were members of one of the world’s most famous Jewish families. Worse yet for Warburg, he lived with another man, Jacob Heiss, and was rumoured to be a homosexual. That Warburg had survived in Nazi Germany for so long was astounding, but he had recently been evicted from his laboratory. And now he was being called to Nazi headquarters. An unlikely survival story appeared to be coming to an end.
When he arrived at the New Reich Chancellery, Warburg, a lifelong anglophile, was likely wearing one of the elegant suits he ordered from his tailor in London. Walking through the long marble galleries of the New Reich Chancellery, Warburg’s carefully polished Scottish wingtips would have clacked
