‘Deadly medicine’
Holocaust Center to host program on Nazi doctors for Remembrance Day
The Nazis who murdered millions in the Holocaust of World War II were aided in their work by doctors whose mission of healing was perverted by political motives. These ideas are explored in a Farmington Hills exhibition and online presentation on Jan. 27.
The Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus will host “How Healers Became Killers, Nazi Medical Professionals,” to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday, Jan. 27.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the program will be presented via Zoom webinar. It is the opening event of a new featured exhibit at the center, “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” which runs Jan. 17-July 11.
The new exhibition “scrutinizes the role medical professionals had in the Holocaust,” says Holocaust Memorial Center CEO Rabbi Eli Mayerfeld in a press release.
“The most important lesson we teach is that history is made through a series of choices and that every choice has a consequence” Mayerfeld said. “By teaching the lessons of the Holocaust, our fervent hope is that each of us will be upstanders, not bystanders, when we witness wrongful actions.”
Patricia Heberer-Rice, senior historian from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will present “How Healers Became Killers, Nazi Medical Professionals,” discussing how medical professionals enforced policies of compulsory sterilization and “euthanasia” through which the Nazis murdered an estimated 650,000 people.
Herberer-Rice is a specialist on medical crimes and eugenics policies in Nazi Germany. She earned her bachelor of arts degree in history and German literature from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, a master of arts in European history from Southern Illinois University and a Ph.D. in German and central European history from the University of Maryland.
Meanwhile, the traveling exhibit “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race” examines how health professionals who collaborated with Nazi leadership perverted their sacred mission of increasing the public good by aiding and legitimizing persecution, murder and genocide.
Produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this exhibition includes reproductions of photographs and documents, films and survivor testimony tracing how the persecution of groups deemed biologically inferior led to near annihilation of European Jewry. It also challenges viewers to reflect on the present-day interest in genetic manipulation to create more perfect humans.
The eugenics theory of selectively breeding better humans rose from late 19th-century beliefs that Charles Darwin’s genetic theories of survival of the fittest should apply to people. Supporters believed that controlling marriage and reproduction would improve a nation’s genetic health.
The Nazi regime embraced the conviction that “inferior” people had to be eliminated from German society so that a “pure Aryan race,” mythologized by Adolf Hitler, could thrive. The Nazi ideal of an Aryan race is not anthropologically valid, but was a powerful symbol of health, strength and vitality to Germans suffering from unbelievable hyperinflation following World War I.
The Nazi regime defined as “inferior people” those with disabilities, homosexuals and ethnic minorities such as Jews, Armenians, Poles, Slavs and Roma and Sinti gypsies.
“‘Deadly Medicine’ explores the Holocaust’s roots in then-contemporary scientific and pseudo-scientific thought,” exhibition curator Susan Bachrach said in a press release. “At the same time, it touches on complex ethical issues we face today, such as how societies acquire and use scientific knowledge and how they balance the rights of the individual with the needs of the larger community.”
By the end of World War II, 6 million Jews had been murdered and millions of others also became victims of persecution and murder through Nazi “racial hygiene” programs.
This exhibition is made possible through the support of The David Berg Foundation, The Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation, The Lester Robbins and Sheila Johnson Robbins Traveling and Temporary Exhibitions Fund and The Dorot Foundation.
Locally, the exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Center is supported by Robin and Leo Eisenberg, Susan and Nelson Hersh, The Karp Family, Jackie and Larry Kraft, Sinai Medical Staff Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Michigan Council for Arts & Cultural Affairs and a donation in memory of Nancy and James McLernon.
The exhibit is open Sunday through Friday and free with museum admission or membership. For more information, visit holocaustcenter.org or call 248-553-2400.