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Previous Volume 351:417-420 July 29, 2004 Number 5 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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In democratic societies, the needs of public health sometimes require citizens to make sacrifices for the greater good, but in Nazi Germany, national or public health — Volksgesundheit — took complete precedence over individual health care. Physicians and medically trained academics, many of whom were proponents of "racial hygiene," or eugenics, legitimized and helped to implement Nazi policies aiming to "cleanse" German society of people viewed as biologic threats to the nation's health. Racial-hygiene measures began with the mass sterilization of the "genetically diseased" and ended with the near-annihilation of European Jewry.

The concept of racial hygiene had deep roots . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

From the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., where a special exhibition, "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," will be open through October 16, 2005. The exhibition examines the critical role German physicians, public health officials, and academic experts played in supporting and implementing the Nazis' program of racial eugenics, which culminated in the Holocaust.

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