How Doctors Tricked the Nazis With a Fake Disease
How Syndrome K tricked the Nazis into sparing the lives of Italian Jews
In 1943, while Nazi soldiers in are in the process of deporting Italy’s Jewish population to concentration camps, a handful of doctors in Rome are busy drafting a plan to save hundreds of Jews from this shocking fate.
When Nazis ransack a Jewish ghetto near Tiber River in Rome, the doctors hide a number of Jewish fugitives within the walls of Fatebenefratelli Hospital.
To protect these Jews, Dr Vittorio Sacerdoti and his team of dissident medics fabricate a lethal and highly infectious — yet entirely fictitious––disease.
“at the moment when we had to say what disease they suffered? It was Syndrome K, meaning ‘I am admitting a Jew,’ as if he or she were ill, but they were all healthy”
— Dr Adriano Ossicini
In a 2016 interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Dr Ossicini (who served under Dr Sacerdoti at the time) explained:
“We created those papers for Jewish people as if they were ordinary patients, and at the moment when we had to say what disease they suffered…
