"Medical Ethics and Nazi Ideology"

Dr. William Meinecke's, lecture explores the dangers of medicine in the service of a political ideal. He asks: What is the role of government in determining the health of the nation? How did Nazi doctors decide who was a "burden" on the community and justify "medically" induced killing in light of the Hippocratic oath? What are the safeguards against the perversion of medical ethics in a multi-cultural democracy like the United States today?

The shower stall that's actually a gas chamber is perhaps the ultimate symbol of the Holocaust. And while most people undoubtedly associate it with Auschwitz, the first time this tool of hygiene was perverted into a mass-murder weapon was as part of the Nazi campaign to clear Germans with mental and physical defects out of state institutions by any means necessary.

As many as 200,000 men, women and children deemed undesirable were killed in this program between 1939 and 1945, and many of the doctors who carried it out moved smoothly into concentration-camp employment.