Karel Sperber OBE was a Jewish Czechoslovak surgeon who travelled to England after the Nazi invasion of his country, but unable to practice medicine because he was an alien, took a job as a ship's doctor instead and was captured by Axis forces when his ship was sunk by the Germans.
12 Facts About Karel Sperber
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Karel Sperber was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp where he was forced to help the SS doctor Carl Clauberg in his sterilisation experiments on Jewish women.
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Karel Sperber was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1946 for the medical services he provided to prisoners of war.
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Karel Sperber became a ship's doctor again and worked for the British Colonial Medical Service in Ceylon, and then in Ghana where he died.
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Karel Sperber was born in Tachov, western Bohemia, in 1910 to a Jewish family.
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Karel Sperber completed his studies in medicine at the German University in Prague and Vienna.
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In 1939, Sperber escaped to Britain following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Germany.
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Carl Clauberg 8.
Karel Sperber was prohibited from practising medicine in Britain because he was considered an "alien".
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In late 1942, Karel Sperber was sent to a prison in Bremen following a journey through a number of prisoner-of-war camps.
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Karel Sperber saved the lives of many British prisoners at Stalag X-B, when an outbreak of typhus occurred.
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Karel Sperber subsequently escaped and hid in a forest until he was found by American troops on 1 April 1945.
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Karel Sperber signed on as a ship's doctor again and worked for the British Colonial Medical Service in Ceylon and then in Ghana, where in 1957 he died of Hodgkin's lymphoma in Accra.