Dean’s Seminar Series featuring Patricia Heberer Rice, PhD – “How Healers Became Killers: German Physicians and the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Program”

Dean’s Seminar Series

Cosponsored by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics

Patricia Heberer Rice, PhD
Senior Historian and Director of the Senior Historian’s Office
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Title & Abstract: 

“How Healers Became Killers: German Physicians and the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Program”

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.