Recognizing the Past in the Present: New Studies on Medicine before, during, and after the Holocaust

Following decades of silence about the involvement of doctors, medical researchers and other health professionals in the Holocaust and other National Socialist (Nazi) crimes, scholars in recent years have produced a growing body of research that reveals the pervasive extent of that complicity. This interdisciplinary collection of studies presents documentation of the critical role medicine played in realizing the policies of Hitler’s regime. It traces the history of Nazi medicine from its roots in the racial theories of the 1920s, through its manifestations during the Nazi period, on to legacies and continuities from the postwar years to the present.

Sabine Hildebrandt is Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Department of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and serves as an anatomy educator at Harvard Medical School. She is the author of The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich (Berghahn, 2016).

Miriam Offer is Senior Lecturer in the Holocaust Studies Program, Western Galilee College and teaches Medicine and the Holocaust at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of White Coats Inside the Ghetto: Jewish Medicine in Poland During the Holocaust (Hebrew, Yad Vashem, 2015).

Michael A. Grodin (1951-2023) was Professor of Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health and was also Professor and Director of the Project on Medicine and the Holocaust at the Eli Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University. His books include the edited volume Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust (Berghahn, 2014).