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This article, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg, reflects on the Nazi eugenics and "euthanasia" programsand their relevance for today. The Nazi doctors used eugenic ideals to justify sterilizations, child and adult "euthanasia," and, ultimately, genocide.
Contemporary euthanasia has experienced a progression from voluntary to nonvoluntary and from passive to active killing. Modern eugenics has included both positive and negative selective activities.
The 70th anniversary of the Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg provides an important opportunity to reflect on the implications of the Nazi eugenics and "euthanasia" programs for contemporary health law, bioethics, and human rights. In this article, we will examine the role that health practitioners played in the promotion and implementation of State-sponsored eugenics and "euthanasia" in Nazi Germany, followed by an exploration of contemporary parallels and debates in modern bioethics.1 (Am J Public Health. 2018;108:53-57. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2017.304120)
MEDICINEAND PUBLIC HEALTH IN NAZI GENOCIDE
The involvement of health practitioners in conceptualizing, initiating, and implementing Nazi mass murder remains an unparalleled case of medicine and public health's participation in genocide.2 By January 1933, more than half of the German medical profession had joined the Nazi Party and many participated in the murder of Jews, Sinti, and Roma; the disabled; the mentally ill; and other "unfit" persons under the guise of improving public health and Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene, the German version of eugenics).3,4
Doctors in Germany became tightly integrated into the Nazi Party and supportive of its ideals. During the Weimar period, a large number of German doctors were unemployed or under-employed and witnessed a decline in their honor and prestige. The Nazi Party seemed like an organization that could reestablish physicians with the power and status they had lost. In 1929, physicians within Germany formed Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Artzebund (The National Socialist German Physicians' League) and unified the goals of physicians and the State. Physicians joined the Nazi Party both earlier and in larger numbers than any other group of professionals. As the historian Michael Kater writes, "Physicians became Nazified more thoroughly and much sooner than any other profession, and as Nazis they did more in service of the nefarious regime than any of their extraprofessional peers."3(p4-5) By 1942, 38 000 physicians had joined the Nazi Party. In addition, the...