Our first lecture of the spring semester is our Annual Holocaust Remembrance Day Event
January 24, 2022 at 5:30 pm, remote/Zoom, free and open to the public.
How Healers Became Killers: German Physicians and the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Program
with Patricia Heberer-Rice, US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Physicians played an important role as planners and implementers of Nazi racial policy. This lecture discusses how medical professionals enforced two significant aspects of Nazi policy: compulsory sterilization and the clandestine “Euthanasia” program, the Nazis’ first program of mass murder. Compulsory sterilization, through which 400,000 Germans were legally sterilized, was enforced through the German legal system and involved physicians in the roles of denouncers, jurists, and enforcers of sterilization policy. Likewise medical professionals instigated and carried out the so-called Nazi “euthanasia” program, which claimed the lives of 250,000 mentally and physically disabled patients and set an important precedent for the Holocaust.
Dr. Patricia Heberer Rice is the Director of the Office of the Senior Historian in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, a wing of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
This event will be remote, via Zoom. Registration on Eventbrite is required to receive the Zoom link [https://howhealersbecamekillers.eventbrite.com]. The Eventbrite system will email the Zoom link a couple day prior to the event and again the afternoon of the event.
