HOL 6635 A Study in Contrasts: The T4 Program and Jewish Health Care in the Holocaust

The Nazi T4 program is considered by some to be the precursor to the Holocaust. Beginning in 1939, the National Socialist regime embarked upon a strategy to murder institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany. The program is characterized by several distinct phases, but today historians estimate that the Nazi euthanasia program claimed the lives of 250,000 individuals. While the National Socialist regime organized the killing of the disabled, Jewish physicians and health care workers struggled to improve the health of those interned in ghettos, labor and concentration camps. Many were guided by the Jewish value of Pikuach Nefesh and saw it as their moral responsibility to provide care to save human lives.

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