How Healers Became Killers

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 recorded, and by joining in the Zoom session you are consenting to be recorded. The recording will be made available on Carolina Center for Jewish Studies’ website and social media. The Zoom meeting starts at 5:30pm. Register below: