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Dr David Brenner is Visiting Asst. Professor and Lecturer in Comparative Literature, Humanities, and Honors at University of Houston and University of Houston, Downtown. In this syllabus on Medical Ethics and the Holocaust, Dr. Brenner asks the question: how can we be sure that doctors and other health-science professionals are practicing medicine more ethically today with the historical context of Nazi doctors in mind. The objectives of the course include an examination of the Nazis’ approach to “applied biology,” discussion of other genocides and instances of mass violence from the standpoint of bioethics and human rights, and an exploration of the role of health professionals in recent controversies. Objectives: Examine the Nazis’ approach to “applied biology” – i.e., the practice of eugenics, sterilization, euthanasia, and research experiments conducted on inmates in concentration camps during World War II. Discussion of other genocides and instances of mass violence from the standpoint of bioethics and human rights: the Milgram and Zimbardo/Stanford Prison obedience experiments, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the conduct of research with human participants (from “informed consent” to the Belmont Report). Explore the role of health professionals in recent controversies surrounding discrimination in health care delivery, genetic testing, the interrogation of enemy combatants, etc.

Vivien Spitz worked as Chief Reporter of Debates in the United States House of Representatives from 1972 to 1982 and reported the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in Germany from 1946 to 1948, including the Nazi Doctors Cases. She published a book Doctors from Hell covering this experience. Spitz began speaking publicly about what she had witnessed at Nuremberg and was such a powerful speaker that Holocaust deniers began confronting her at speaking engagements. After a run-in with them in 1999, she decided to write Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans.

Traute Lafrenz is a German-American physician and anthroposophist, who was a member of the White Rose anti-Nazi group during World War II. She completed her medical studies at Saint Joseph’s and afterward ran a private practice. She served from 1972 to 1994 as head of the Esperanza School. Lafrenz arrived at the Maximilian University in Munich in May 1941 to continue her medical studies; she met fellow students Hans Scholl, Willi Graf, Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst, and Sophie Scholl. They became distressed over National Socialism and took action by writing and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. Calling themselves The White Rose, they distributed 10,000–12,000 leaflets by mail or by placing them in public locations. Group members were arrested in 1943, and then executed or imprisoned by the Nazis.

Traute Lafrenz is a German-American physician and anthroposophist, who was a member of the White Rose anti-Nazi group during World War II. She completed her medical studies at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in San Francisco and ran a private medical practice, as well as serving as head of the Esperanza School. On April 19, 1943, Traute and other “White Rose” members were tried and found guilty. Three were executed but Traute was sentenced to one year in prison for distributing the leaflets. She was re-arrested immediately upon the completion of her prison term and was finally liberated from prison by U.S. forces. She emigrated to the United States in 1947.

Vivien Spitz was the Chief Reporter of Debates in the United States House of Representatives from 1972 to 1982 and a Fellow of the Academy of Professional Reporters of the National Court Reporters Association. Spitz reported the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in Germany from 1946 to 1948, which included the Nazi Doctors Cases. She published a book Doctors from Hell to document this experience. Spitz volunteered as a court reporter for the Nuremberg trials. She listened in horror to the testimony at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial about physician cruelty during medical experiments and was stunned that some perpetrators “got off so lightly.” Because she did not think the Holocaust was being adequately taught in local schools, she began speaking publicly about what she had witnessed at Nuremberg.

Eva Mozes Kor, Holocaust survivor, developed the organization CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors). She also founded the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center. She has worked with Indiana legislators Clyde Kersey and Tim Skinner to establish a law requiring Holocaust education in secondary schools. As a child survivor of Mengele’s cruel experiments in Auschwitz, Kor reveals her experience in the camps. Eva made a silent pledge: “I will do whatever is within my power to make sure that Miriam and I shall not end up on that filthy latrine floor.” Despite a variety of cruel and inhuman experiments that nearly killed them both, Eva and her sister did survive and they were liberated together on January 27, 1945.

Eva Mozes Kor is a Holocaust survivor and the founder of CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors). She also created the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center. She has worked with Indiana state legislators Clyde Kersey and Tim Skinner to gain passage of a law requiring Holocaust education in secondary schools. In May of 1944, the Mozes family, including ten-year-old identical twins Miriam and Eva Mozes, were loaded onto cattle cars. They were ultimately relocated from their home in Portz in Transylvania, Romania to the Auschwitz death camp. An SS trooper hurried by, shouting, “Zwillinge! Zwillinge!” (Twins! Twins!). Miriam and Eva became part of Josef Mengele’s 1500 sets of twin, subjects for experiments.

Why Are They Trying to Make Us Kill Our Patients? California’s new assisted-suicide law violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. By PHILIP B. DREISBACH, July 25, 2016 Wall Street Journal This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal. I am an oncologist/hematologist who has been practicing in California, primarily at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, for 39 years. It has been my privilege to have treated and cared for more than 16,000 patients with cancer or blood diseases and to have provided pain relief and comfort for the dying. I am also one of six concerned physicians who, along with the American Academy of Medical Ethics, have sued in a California Superior Court to try to block as unconstitutional the state’s Physician Assisted Suicide law, which went into effect on June 9. More recently, a group of doctors and health-care professionals in Vermont joined a lawsuit filed July 19 to try to block the way that state’s 2013 assisted suicide law is being interpreted and misapplied. Signed by Gov. Jerry Brown and voted against by every elected Republican member of the state legislature, California’s radical measure is part of an organized, nationwide, social-engineering campaign, heavily funded by big donors such as the leftist George Soros. Our state’s physician-assisted suicide law instantly removes penal-code protections from a vulnerable segment of the population deemed “terminally ill.” The law allows anyone labeled as terminally ill to request assisted suicide—but it also accepts heirs and the owners of caregiving facilities to formally witness such requests, even though the probate code does not even accept “interested” parties as witnesses to a will. The law does not require an attending physician to refer the patient for psychological assessment. It thus does not allow for screening for possible coercion, or for underlying mental conditions that could be behind the suicide request—unless the patient has signs of mental problems, which may not be visible to a suicide-specialist doctor they may not even know. In these and other ways, the law devastates elder-abuse law and mental-health legal protections, and it deprives those labeled as terminally ill of equal-protection rights that all other Americans enjoy. All of us in the practice of cancer care have seen patients, diagnosed with so-called terminal illness, who have experienced a marvelous remission of disease. Very little is absolute—except death itself. On the day that physician-assisted suicide was legalized, my hospital and the other local hospitals announced that they were opting out and would not facilitate the killing of any patients. Some local hospices informed me that they would continue to give palliative care, instead of helping patients kill themselves. Killing is never medical care. There is no circumstance when any compassionate, competent physician would prescribe a deadly drug to any patient. If “medical practice” has any meaning, it definitely does not include using drugs to willfully kill a patient or for a physician and pharmacist to supply a lethal drug so that a patient can kill himself. The American Medical Association has spoken for all physicians by stating: “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.” The irony here is that the medical community has strongly objected to facilitating the death of felons on death row, but that same medical community is now expected to help kill the innocent. One must ignore the false rhetoric, the clawing propaganda, used by the death-by-drugs advocates. Terms like “death with dignity” and “compassion in dying” are meant to obscure the fact that these death-march ideologues are targeting the doctor to become an instrument of death. And why must it be the physician who facilitates self-murder? Why not make the agent of death a non-physician who is given special permission to order and administer a regimen of lethal drugs? No, the advocates want to exploit the respect and trust accorded to the “good doctor” so that drug-induced deaths are viewed as “compassionate.” It is part of the marketing scheme for a small but influential necro-political movement. California and other states contemplating making this devastating change to their laws should heed the troubling example of what has happened in Oregon since its adoption of the “Death with Dignity Act” in 1997. Dr. William Toffler, a distinguished professor of family medicine at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Ore., testified before Congress in 2015 about abuses of the law and about the state health department’s negligence. “There is a shroud of secrecy enveloping the practice,” he said. “Doctors engaging in this practice are required by state law to fabricate the cause of death stating that the cause is ‘natural’ rather than suicide.” As the law took effect, Dr. Toffler noted, “the Oregon legislature implemented a system of two different death certificates—one that is public with no medical information and a separate one that is never made public. Thus, review and tracking of physician-assisted suicide deaths by anyone outside of the Oregon Health Division is impossible.” Equal protection is not a mindless bumper-sticker slogan. It is a pillar of state and federal constitutions and must not be corrupted. Under the law, equal protection must apply not only to the healthy and able but to the most vulnerable—the unhealthy, the disabled, the elderly—and all who might fall victim to those peddling physician-assisted killing. Dr. Dreisbach is the director of the Desert Hematology Oncology Medical Group at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

I just finished reading the heartbreakingly tragic story of Fritz Haber’s life as told by Vern Thiessen in his play Einstein’s Gift. The story of his remarkable life is beautifully summed up by his friend, colleague, and fellow Nobel Laureate Albert Einstein in a letter to Haber’s family following his death in 1934: “You can only imagine, how heavy the news of Fritz Haber’s death hit me. It seems that now almost all my real friends are dead. One feels like one is made of stone and not a living creature…Haber was the most spirited, the most complex, most generous of all my friends. I did not see him often, but I always thought it a gift when I could spend even an hour with him…(Haber’s was) the tragedy of the German Jews, the tragedy of unrequited love… You can read more about Haber in two biographies, Mastermind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare by Daniel Charles and Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew by Dietrich Stoltzenberg. You can also hear a podcast from the BBC about him, including interviews with his relatives.

Polish-born Princeton University history professor Jan Tomasz Gross was awarded the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in 1996 for his extensive work documenting the fate of Polish Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. His acclaimed 2001 book Neighbors examined the massacre of 1,500 Jews from Jedwabne and concluded that it was the Poles, not the Nazis, who committed the atrocity. Polish nationalists have been critical of the book as well as the excellent, recent, Polish movie Aftermath which dramatizes the responsibility of local residents for the massacres of Jews during the Holocaust. The immediate cause for efforts to strip Gross of his award is his explanation of Poland’s wariness to accept Syrian immigrants: “The Poles, for example, were indeed rightfully proud of their society’s resistance against the Nazis but, in fact, did kill more Jews than Germans during the war.”

Abstract from journal article: At a time when the last direct witnesses of the Holocaust are passing, new approaches to the restoration of ‘lost’ biographies of victims need to be considered. This investigation describes the potential of an international collaboration including surviving family members. Archival documents discovered in Jerusalem in 1983 concerned a discussion on the cancellation of a medical licence for a German Jewish physician, Dr. Leo Gross of Kolberg, who had been disenfranchised from medical practice under Nazi law. After applying for a medical licence during a 1935 visit to Palestine, Gross remigrated to Germany, where he was imprisoned in a concentration camp. No further information was found until 2014, when a group of scholars linked a variety of archival and internet-accessible sources and located a nephew of Gross. The nephew’s testimony, cross-referenced against data from other sources, enabled the reconstruction of the ‘lost’ biography of his uncle and family, in fact a posthumous testimony. The resulting narrative places Dr. Leo Gross within his professional and social network, and serves his commemoration within this context of family and community.

As Holocaust survivors are dying out, and as Israel, the Jewish State, is viewed more and more as an oppressor, there is a shift from study of the Holocaust to the study of genocide, intolerance, human rights, and hate. The essential but little known role of the German medical profession, and the even less well-known moral, legal, and philanthropic support provided by American eugenicists for German eugenic policies, are very likely to be forgotten. Dismissing or covering up the public health policies and medical practices of German physicians would be another way of forgetting both the Holocaust and its medical crimes, one aspect of the Holocaust that distinguishes it from other genocides. William Porter states in this essay a sentiment that is widely held by students who study medicine and the Holocaust: “…a more realistic portrayal of the Holocaust in our education seems like a profound way to take meaning from its atrocities as we shape tomorrow’s leaders.” Read his perspective in his paper below. Teaching About the Holocaust: Influencing How Generations Will Learn from the Past By Medical Student William Porter When I reflect on the way my perception of the Holocaust has changed over the course of this elective, I cannot help but feel astounded by how many of the ideas we explored were completely new to me. Despite addressing this topic many times before throughout my educational journey thus far, I found myself taken aback by a more critical analysis of the events leading up to the atrocities we are all so familiar with. For example, the fact that Eugenicism in Germany had large American influences seems to contradict my perception of how the Holocaust came about. Such discrepancies led me to think back on the way I was taught about the Holocaust in the first place. I believe that careful examination of the way we teach our youth about the Holocaust can have a profound impact on our ability to learn as much as possible from this terrible failure in human history. As we discussed in class, it is important to remember that the physicians and other party members who participated in the Holocaust were not “aliens” who came from another planet or purely evil humans who woke up every day planning to commit murder out of pure hatred. The Holocaust was a calculated and rationalized progression of ideology gone awry, slowly developing in a step-wise progression which culminated in the horrors we now reflect on. The Final Solution represented the last step in a very gradual progression stemming from beginnings in seemingly rational practices. Moreover, the underlying eugenic framework was not a purely German sentiment at the time. The Germans were able to bring these ideas to the forefront of the global scene in a far more pronounced way, yet they cannot be credited entirely for the desire to sculpt their society into a uniform and superior machine. The role of some of the greatest minds in other countries, such as the U.S., in sculpting this thought process cannot be overlooked. These ideas, among others, shed light on the need to dig deep into the forces at play in the Holocaust in order to fully understand it and learn from it. Thinking about my early and secondary education, I have realized that all my knowledge about the Holocaust resided in a look at that end result: fathoming the atrocities and plans of an irrational and evil regime. The farthest my analysis ever went was to put the events in the context of the German post World War I depression, explaining how Hitler was able to gain support for his cause so easily. Yet that thought process still aligns with the idea that the Nazis were an “alien” and evil group who came and went, simply taking advantage of the German people’s desperation to enact a plan that had been intended from the beginning. Outside of school, I had a real fascination with the Holocaust growing up, but even all of the supplementary reading and media I was exposed simply served to paint the Nazis as the ultimate enemy against which the Americans fought as the “good guys.” Growing up, the Nazis were always used as an end-all description of evil and everything that is wrong in the world. I remember a real fear that I experienced when learning about some of the more terrible facets of the Holocaust, only finding consolation in the fact that Americans were the saviors and would never be capable of such destruction. With my own experience as a lens for analyzing the way in which children are exposed to the Holocaust, I can see the huge discrepancy between the perception we cultivate in our society and the truth that has recently come to light through this course. How can we hope to learnanything from the atrocities of the Holocaust if we refuse to see the Nazis as human beings just like us? Distancing ourselves from the ideologies underlying the development of the Holocaust only serves to quiet the cognitive dissonance that occurs internally when we entertain the idea that we would ever be capable of committing similar acts of hatred. Armed with the knowledge of America’s lack of infallibility throughout history, in addition to the true nature of the German rationale behind the Holocaust, it is easier to see how we could travel down a dangerous path similar to the one that Hitler led the Germans down so many years ago. Our overwhelming thirst for progress must be checked as we continue to uncover new frontiers in medicine, genetics, and societal attitudes. I think a very effective means for enacting this would be to provide a more critical look at the American role in the Holocaust to students earlier in education. Children in Germany grow up with the knowledge and guilt burdened on them by generations past. The benefit of such a thorough education for German children is that they are able to develop a greater respect for the value of all human life in the context of a political system. American children, coddled from a young age to embrace the infallibility of the “greatest country in the world” could benefit from a more realistic portrayal of the Holocaust in which our role in, and susceptibility to, its ideas are more fully explored. With everyone believing in American supremacy, it would be harder to question any ideas which gain popular traction, just as many Germans allowed nationalism to supersede morality. Thus, I think looking to our education of younger generations as a vehicle for societal critique is a valuable endeavor worth exploring, keeping in mind the need to provide an age-appropriate presentation that recognizes the developmental milestones in our capacity to think critically. To that end, a look at how schools are handling the Holocaust is a valuable launch point for future implementation of this framework. In a cross-sectional analysis of Holocaust education in textbooks from 1970 through 2008, Patricia Bromley and Susan Garnett-Russell outline the degree to which different countries address the Holocaust. They found that more globally connected countries were more likely to teach their students about the Holocaust. Of more interest to me was the notion that there has been a “shift in the nature of discussion, from a historical event to a violation of human rights or crime against humanity,” in presenting the Holocaust to students (Bromley and Russell 2010). This development seems to demonstrate a changing focus away from the distancing sort of treatment we would give to the Holocaust, describing it as a historical event to which we are unconnected. I am comforted by the fact that this study implies we have begun to realize the importance of keeping such events connected to human rights and a modern context, rather than dismissing them as historical events without contemporaneous relevance. In looking at the current American perspective on Holocaust education specifically, the United States Holocaust Memorial website demonstrates a promising initiative to educate teachers on how they can handle the Holocaust in a manner which does not shy away from addressing the complexities of such a difficult topic. An appreciation for the complexity is vital to being able to critically evaluate the Holocaust, and thus I think this is a very important facet of education to be cultivated. Regardless of how we treat the Holocaust in an educational context, being critical of our own perspective should be at the very foundation of how we educate futuregenerations. In order to make sure we do not go down a similar path, we need to keep in mind that as a country we are susceptible to something similar happening, and it may occur slowly over time without us even noticing. Vigilance and a critical eye are essential in moving forward as we continue to turn over stones in our quest for the progression of humanity. Fostering this awareness through a more realistic portrayal of the Holocaust in our education seems like a profound way to take meaning from its atrocities as we shape tomorrow’s leaders.