Apr 01, 2025
Medicine under National Socialism - How doctors became criminals
In the ZDF format Terra X, Prof. Florian Bruns, Director of the Institute of History of Medicine at TU Dresden, sheds light on the role of medicine under National Socialism. Doctors deliberately broke ethical principles, supported the ideology of the National Socialists and were actively involved in forced sterilizations, euthanasia programmes and cruel human experiments. The article shows how doctors such as Werner Catel and Carl Clauberg used their expertise for murder and human experimentation - and how many perpetrators remained unchallenged for a long time after 1945.
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The involvement of paediatricians in Nazi crimes will soon also be the subject of an exhibition in Dresden's Dreikönigskirche church.
From April 29 to July 3, the exhibition "In Memory of the Children" by the German Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine will be on display for the first time in Saxony. Using 24 panels, it traces the path from eugenic thinking in the 1920s to the organized killing of minors and highlights the individual fates of disabled children using specific locations.
The Institute of History of Medicine at TU Dresden has brought the exhibition to Dresden and supplements it with the role of the people of Dresden and the children's clinic of the Dresden-Johannstadt City Hospital, predecessor of the University Hospital, during the Nazi era.