Remember the Holocaust...

One word for everyone: REMEMBER. April 15th is a very important day to acknowledge for all religions and cultures alike. We must take aside a moment to honor those who survived one of the greatest tragedies in human history: The Holocaust.

April 15th is Yom Hashoah, the day established to remember the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews and millions of others deemed unworthy for life by the Nazi regime. The Nazis killed two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population, along with the Roma (Gypsies), the handicapped, and many Slavic people (Poles, Russians, and Romanians). Also targeted for their lifestyles were Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

Remembrance of the Holocaust is particularly important in the medical community. In order to carry out Hitler’s vision of a “perfect race,” doctors and scientists were given free reign to perform experiments to cleanse the German race of perceived impurities. This allowance created a slippery slope of devastating medical procedures. Among the horrific pursuits were hypothermia experiments, infectious disease injections, testing of interrogation and torture thresholds, testing of pharmacological agents on prisoners, and infliction of traumatic injuries for the study of effective treatments and surgeries.

Sterilization was forced upon those with hereditary conditions such as schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, blindness, deafness, physical deformity, and alcoholism. Hundreds of thousands of innocent victims were tortured and killed in “the name of medicine and discovery.”

Thanks to the Nuremberg Trials, today we have laws in place and guidelines to follow as physicians and researchers. No longer will such experiments take place on innocent men, women, and children.

It is important to remember on this day and on all days, the atrocities committed only decades ago. As we continue on in our careers, we are given the gift of knowledge and power. It is up to us to remember the past and ensure medical care is given to all patients equally.

Please visit the United States Holocaust Museum website for more information at http://www.ushmm.org/. Please take some time out and REMEMBER. Thank you.