About the Center for Medicine After the Holocaust

The critical role played by American eugenicists in the development of Germany’s “racial hygiene” policies is rarely discussed. American physicians, philanthropists, politicians, lawyers, and public health officials provided indispensable legislative models, financial aid, and moral support in the 1920s and 1930s for Germany’s political philosophy of “applied biology.”

The Hippocratic Oath, the bedrock of medical ethics, was blatantly violated by the physicians of Nazi Germany when they prioritized the health of the nation over the health of the individual. Simply put, Nazi Germans substituted their government’s eugenic public health policy for the best interests of their patients. The doctor-patient relationship was radically transformed into the Nazi eugenic state-Volkskörper (the nation's body) relationship with disastrous results for those with presumed transmissible genetic disabilities.

Guided by eugenic theories of race, they sterilized 400,000 citizens against their will, euthanized 200,000 disabled German children and adults, and created the gas chambers and crematoria that were used for the mass murder of 4.5 million Jews in the “final solution.”