Learning Objectives:

1. Describe the status of German the medical community in the 1930’s with regard to ethics, science and public health.

2. Outline the medical and public health rationales used by physicians, nurses and others to justify first programs of forced sterilization, then “euthanasia” of infants and children, and then the killing of adult Germans with disabilities, and then the Holocaust itself.

3. Identify ways in which racist laws in the US influenced Nazi racial policies, such as the Nuremberg race laws and the German forcible sterilization law.