Eliot Slater - Germany 1934-5; The Second World War

Germany 1934-5; The Second World War

In 1934 Slater was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation travelling fellowship, which he used to study psychiatric genetics under Bruno Schulz at the Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie (Psychiatric Research Institute) in Munich. He also made visits to psychiatric institutes in Denmark, Sweden and Austria. By this time Nazi persecution of Jewish professionals was well under way, and on Mapother’s initiative the Rockefeller Foundation started providing funds enabling the Maudsley to receive prominent psychiatrists expelled from their posts in Germany. Among them was Willi Mayer-Gross, with whom Slater subsequently collaborated both in research and in the writing of a celebrated textbook.

Meanwhile, in Munich, Slater met his future wife Lydia Pasternak, daughter of the Russian artist Leonid Pasternak and sister of the poet Boris Pasternak. The increasing Nazification of the Munich institute during this period outraged and sickened him (its head, Ernst Rüdin, was one of the architects of Hitler’s eugenic sterilization policy), and he was glad to leave in 1935.{v. sub Sources} He returned to his post at the Maudsley Hospital, bringing Lydia Pasternak to England with him. As he wrote, “It was a source of peculiar satisfaction to me to be showing what I thought of Nazi Rassenhygiene by marrying a Jewess, a member of an inferior race by their standards, a lady of the highest genetical aristocracy by mine.” Between 1936 and 1944 he fathered four children with his Jewish wife, and rescued her parents, her sister’s family of four, and several others from Nazi persecution in Germany. With the outbreak of war in 1939 the Maudsley was evacuated, and Slater became clinical director of the Sutton Emergency Hospital, where he had responsibility for the treatment of some 20,000 psychiatric casualties. This experience led to the influential book An Introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry (with William Sargant, 1944).