Transformative Learning Experiences

Thanks to a donor’s generous support, CMATH embarked on a transformative journey to the medical sights central to the Holocaust with the third-year class of The University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School, specifically focusing on the medical atrocities of this dark period.

The order of the selected sites mirrored German medicine’s slide down the slippery slope from the idea of eugenics to the mass murder of Jews in death camps. We first visited the Karl-Bonhoeffer-Nervenklinik, a hospital from which patients were removed for involuntary sterilization and/or euthanasia. The Bernburg Mental Hospital and Euthanasia Center was one of six euthanasia centers, with a gas chamber and two crematoria in the basement. Next was the beautiful Wannsee Villa, the site where Nazi officials met for 90 minutes for the “organizational, logistical and material steps for a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.” The participants decided that Europe’s 11 million Jews would be killed using the gas chambers and crematoria designed by physicians in the adult euthanasia program. The Final site was Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a million Jewish children and adults were gassed or worked to death.