In this March 6, 1931, speech, the physician and SPD member of the Reichstag Julius Moses warned his colleagues in the chamber of the severe consequences that high unemployment had on the health and education of the German population, especially its youth. A physician by training, Moses was a member of the Reichstag from 1920 to 1932 and had a significant influence on social democratic health policy in the Weimar Republic. When five million Germans had no work, Moses pointed out, it meant that another 15 million Germans, mostly children, suffered from the absence of a paycheck, which often meant skipping meals, going without baths, freezing in the winter, sharing threadbare clothes and shoes, and suffering from lice. Moses shared stories that he had heard personally, including that some families had resorted to sending one child to school one day, and another the next, because they only had one pair of shoes, and the children needed to take turns wearing them. Children’s clinics, declared Moses, compared conditions in 1931 to the worst periods of wartime suffering and even feared outbreaks of scurvy, a disease stemming from Vitamin-C-deficiency that had largely disappeared in the previous century.

Moses had served in the Reichstag since 1920, where he advocated for better housing, improved healthcare, and much more carefully regulated medical trials that involved human subjects. He issued clear and early warnings against Hitler, and for that reason, as well as his Jewish background, Moses suffered almost immediate persecution from the Nazis, once they had come to power in 1933. He died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942.