is has a masters of divinity degree from harvard and he is the education correlator of the hand and plastic surgery department beth israel deaconess hospital in boston thank you very much for having me tonight my topic tonight is three bioethics cases on the holocaust it's a surreal topic it's hard to believe that these things ever happened but they did and i use as my cover slide also somewhat of a surreal image which will become clear as we move forward i have been actively involved in a project over the last several years several years on the case book on bioethics on the holocaust it's right now in the final stages of printing it's going to be published by unesco and the israel national commission for u out of heifer university and i was i was a collaborator with dr ted social louche who's a family physician in israel and a doctor of nursing susan benedict and this is but three of thirty three cases that are part of this case book tonight my focus is going to be on first the nazi euthanasia of the mentally disabled i put euthanasia in quotes and tallackson because euthanasia means a  good or a beautiful death but in actual fact in this case it was primarily murder the perkoff at atlas and third the midwife of would your luggage rachel hershon berg i start off tonight with two images of the body these were both created by adolf hitler's two of adolf hitler's top sculptures his most beloved and well liked sculptures the first the one on your left is by arnold brecker and it stood out outside the reichstag the one on the right was by joseph thor rock and this is hitler's view of beauty every true art must give it products the stamp of beauty for the ideal for all of us must lie in the cultivation of the healthy only the healthy is right and natural and so everything right and natural is beautiful it is our task to find the will to true beauty on the surface probably not a lot of people would disagree with this in our own society we spend billions of dollars on health and we spill bill and spend billions of dollars on beauty but the question in this context is who decides who is healthy who decides who is beautiful and what happens if you're not what happens to you as a member of a society and this is a young mentally disabled child and she would be killed murdered by ninjas in and injection about an hour after this photograph and she did not meet the standard and these are gypsies in auschwitz who were experimented upon and they did not meet the standard and these are jews in a murder pit in eastern europe and they did not meet the standards the nazis used genetic economic and political rationales to infect a healthy state as part of that within six months of adolf hitler becoming the chancellor of germany they established a sterilization law on january and july fourteenth  and many of the of the people who fit in those categories were sterilized over the course of from one nine hundred thirty three until the end of the war over four hundred thousand people would be sterilized in nazi germany now the process from sterilization to euthanasia occurs over the next six years from one nine hundred thirty three to one nine hundred thirty nine and how did they get there well one place they got there was through propaganda campaigns to desensitize to mis educate and to justify both racial and economic policies and in this context they would use the the the notion that people who are mentally disabled that congen lot had lives were unworthy of living were useless eaters and were burns to the state like this poster shows where you have the healthy man carrying upon his back the burden of the mentally disabled and the poster itself was would say in sixty years it will cost society fifty thousand rush marks to care for these people so it was like linking up both  economics and genetics and also the whole notion of a healthy state this is dr joseph go global's and he was the nazi minister propaganda in one nine hundred thirty nine and he would he would say this in his speech  starting point is not the individual and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry give drink to the thirsty or clothe the naked our objectives are entirely different we must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world again we also have to remember that at the time the germany car economy was was was being mobilized for war so in any budget there's always limited monies there's limited resources so the question is where do we place our priorities hitler's euthanasia to decree will begin that with the death of one child on july twenty fifth one thousand nine hundred thirty nine at ten a m and his name was gary hart herbert crche mar he was born blind deaf he was mentally deficient and he was missing an arm and a leg the boy's father wrote to adolf hitler asking him if he could  mercifully kill his child and hitler was very moved by the letter and he consulted with his personal care physician this is called braun tear on the side and he asked him if he could go visit the child visit the doctors who cared for him and see if it was ok to kill the child and that's actually what did happen it's somewhat unclear whether karl brandt killed the child or someone else killed the child but the child was killed hundred thirty nine on july twenty fifth on your right is dr karl brought which was hitler's personal care physician and on your left was dr leonardo conti he would be the equivalent to the surgeon general of the united states though he was the surgeon general of nazi germany at the time and they would kind of begin the process of creating the euthanasia program for the mentally disabled children the mentally disabled and others the program the t four program first it started with children and it moves from disabled children from the ages of one to three to older children and then to mentally disabled adults within six months it was formulated the policies were formulated and the plan was initially implemented from this building right here it was for tear garton strauss and then for short they called it the t for program the person on your right was one of the top administrators the policy makers his name was phillip bueller and another man who was it was one of the policy makers was a man named victor brock this is a memo that hit adolf hitler wrote actually in october of one nine hundred thirty nine but he post dated it back to september first in which it would read right leader buhler and dr brandt are charged with the responsibility to extend the power of specific doctors in such a way that after the most careful assessment of their condition those suffering from illnesses deemed to be incurable may be granite a mercy death now the question is why the memo already as early as one nine hundred thirty four hitler was quoted that if there ever was a war this would be an opportunity to take care of the useless eaters in the in society on the secondly many doctors felt it was it was illegal in germany at the time both as it relates to the law and as a rail it relates to the legislature to carry on these murders so doctors were afraid to do it and they said we need some type of cover and this memo becomes their cover now we're not going to go through this chart but the point is from this one letter and organize ational chart occurs this is hitler's letter to bueller to brand to other doctors right on down to kind of the local levels right across germany and austria the why i like putting this chart up here however is evil can come to us with a mask with a glock or with a semiautomatic rifle but it can also come to us as a memo as a protocol as a practice or even as a law and so all the people who are getting the mammal in this organizational chart they are choosing at some point to go along or maybe to resist or to do nothing and so that that's an important thing as we move forward these were the doctors who were the leaders of the program kind of the top of the hierarchy and the point is they all wore neckties they were all the elite of their societies they were intelligent they were cultured and it again proves the point where there is much intelligence there can also be much evil and intelligence in and of itself is not necessarily ethical these were doctors at steinhoff hospital in vienna and they murdered thousands of mentally disabled and their children and again you could wear a bow tie or you could wear scrubs and it would pass on down to the nurses the killings first begin in hospitals by pills and injections and these were the types of drugs that they used morphine bromide and verona and but the cause of death was never a drug overdose it was always other things and they were actually tested on how they can maximize this so the cause of death  always things like pneumonia or heart attack or stroke the s s often prepared and distributed the chemicals because it was easier to keep them secret and harder to trace very quickly they recognized that pills and injections were not necessarily the most efficient way to kill people it was very personal so they and they also realize that it's one thing to do it to children but what happens when the population's for mentally disabled adults so they realize they would going to have to kill more people and they had to discover a new method so they moved to gas and they actually experimented on the gas in january of  and others went to a mental hospital kind of in the pressure area of germany and they actually experimented on two groups of people like in a room like this eight would be injected and it would be gassed and they tried to discover which was the most efficient way to do that engineers who were involved chemist were involved and they actually measured how quickly people lived and how quickly they died henry freelander in his book the origins of nazi genocide would state the technology for gassing had to be invented these were the showers that were invented and these would be used in various centers euthanasia centers i also point out here like right here people would also watch people die on the other side of the room so this becomes a template ultimately in a model that will later be utilized in the final solution for even larger numbers of people this is actually was part of the of the of the trucks that would transport people you know just like the red cross even though it was a german red cross it wasn't the german red cross but it was a different company and this is from one of the the euthanasia centers where the smoke is going up and from cremation itself very quickly as even as early as one nine hundred forty they began to develop euthanasias centers throughout germany they would give them and here they here here's where they're located they were actually given letters be appear burned berg is given ve because they had to shut down brand burge brandenburg because people were starting to become it started becoming known to greater and greater numbers of the public so they shut down one and created another  every place you see a red circle was a place in which people were transported to every place you see a black dot were like funneling systems from hospitals where they would kill people both by lethal injections but they were also transport taishan places where you would move patients from one dot to a larger one so it was an entire process this is one of them in austria heart time kept castle which was a hospital for the mentally disabled they would actually develop the gassing on the lower levels the administration of offices would be on the upper levels this was the doctor in charge of part time in a i again i point out he was cultured he was educated he had a beautiful wife he had a child he could drink wine and so he celebrated and had a good time but at the same time during his day his job was to kill people at the end of the war he both the doctor lat lon our and his family would commit suicide the t four was a secret bureaucratic killing process initially began it with a small group and as it funneled out through society more and more people began to be involved initially they formed expert medical panels primarily consisting of nazi doctors who were supporters of the nazi regime and they authorized patients for treatment in this case treatment meant euthanasia or death there was no informed consent the medical experts would make their opinions based on one page forms which are actually carried out both by midwife and doctors across germany and austria the expert panel did not see the patients many of initially many of the doctors and midwives filling out this form they just got an order from the from the state from the executive branch of the state and they said fill out the forms they thought it was for research initially so they just filled out the forms and these forms would make the difference whether a person lived or whether they died there was no one to again no informed consent by patients by family members or by guardians or trustees and they also established nonprofit organizations cooperative nursing homes and hospitals charitable foundations for institutional care a central accounting office as well as a foundation for patient transfers that's would be trucks and the transportation system and all of these were covers for what they were doing this is one of the children who were reach high public officials but she was unsuccessful and these are other people's faces who would also be killed i don't know the names of these two particular individuals it would also move  to people who are not so sick and would move to young men and young women who are maybe a socials or maybe they weren't doing too well in school or maybe they weren't getting jobs they would send them to delinquent centers and they would get caught in in the in the funnel that moved them into these huge euthanasia worlds it would also expand to forced laborers who were had breakdowns or maybe had schizophrenia schizophrenia or who who were suicidal they would also get caught and it would finally move to the elderly itself and even german world war one veterans also were caught in the program and even the few german soldiers who were wounded would also find their way into this system they call it a disinfection process it began with the transfer transfer could be from a local hospital to one of the euthanasia centers took place in these trucks this is what it looked like when the truck drove into a hard time castle there was a reception area and so the the the patients would be received often times not in all cases but in some cases they were already being starved to death in some of the mental hospitals even several years up to this the men to the mental hospitals were were defunded they took away their funds and already hunger itself almost becomes a killing method they called them hunger howells's starving pavilions and differential diets differential diets were because they were experimenting on how much food a person could consume and also live once they got into the euthanasia center there was a stripping people were stripped naked there was a very brief examination by the physicians in charge why would the examinee not to select whether a person would live or die but they were looking at the body shape and what was wrong with the person so they would know how to best a den of fi their deaths on the death certificate they would mark a number some if they had gold teeth or silver teeth they would be marked with a cross on the back because later those teeth would be extracted they were photographed statistics are recorded and they were killed usually took about twenty minutes but it would take almost twenty four hours to cremate them  crush the bones then the people who worked in these centers they had they sometimes even had parties after the death there was one hospital after the death of ten thousand person they actually had coffin parties they had a dance and all the staff became drunk but it didn't stop with the killing they were dissections for research there was a collecting of gold teeth and valuables for profit there was the cremation and mass grave burials there was a false of the occasion of death records often times the cause of death was a lie often times the date of death was a lie because sometimes it would occur two months or three months after the fact because all the time that that was going on they were collecting payment either from an insurance company of family or from the state itself and they would accrued those those  funds and help support their program and finally they would maintain close to to sticks to attest the savings to the center as well as to the state what did the victims know it would obviously depend on the victim a young child probably would not know as much isn't as as as a teenager or as an adult it also would depend upon their condition or their disability or sickness this is one a letter from his son to his parents please get me out of here they are going to kill me a nurse who worked in one of these centers everyone talked about it even the children they were all afraid they would not come back the children played a coughing game we were astonished that the children understood where there protest there was one process not many this is a doctor who was asked to serve on an expert committee professor got free evolved and he chose not to and during the time when he was asked to serve on the committee he would he would stay on principle i would not le my hand to exterminate in this way patients intrusted to me he did he was he was actually a nazi supporter he never could get into the s s or the nazi party because he was a world war one veteran and had a disabled arm and so he was never accepted for whatever the reason into the special club but he refused to say to serve on the committee he also said that this is a way to break the trust relationship between a doctor a patient and or his or her family he would later write a letters to high medical officials and he would state i cannot choose a profession whose daily business it is to eliminate a sick person because of his sickness after he or his relatives have come to me trusting and looking for help he did not believe that all were being killed needed to be killed he did not think that any of them were many of them were incurable and he thought that this was not a good method to do it he's also somewhat controversial because after the war he would actually burn correspondence between some of these high officials and kind of protect them  by their lead by their letters and by the things that they had done so he's eat he was courageous at one point but he was not always courageous and all i can say is that we're not always consistent  standards the communist party tried to educate people what was going on this is a protest flyer on the deportation and murder of patients from austria primarily focusing on hospital there were jews this is a young jewish social worker also in vienna francey francey sara a lot of i think she got sara actually when jewish women were named sarah and men were called israel she was a social worker she tried to hide some of the mentally disabled and she worked very closely with viktor frankl who was the head psychiatry at rothchild hospital in  vienna ultimately they were unsuccessful they hid some children about forty of them for some time but ultimately they were unsuccessful and the children were deported as was viktor frankl and he would be  survivor and he would write the famous book man's search for meaning and he said even in auschwitz people had choices on the other hand many of these mentally disabled did not have choices so on on the surface most of us even in horrible circumstances have choices some days we might even choose how we will die but but in this is not the case with many of these victims they had very little choice or few choices the most successful group to protest after two years in which the program was running were some catholic and protestant church leaders the most famous was a sermon on august third of  gollan who was the catholic bishop of munster and he he would say in this in this sermon it is said of these patients they are like an old machine which no longer runs like a cow which no longer gives milk but we are not talking here about a machine nor a cow no we are talking here about human beings our brothers and sisters unproductive perhaps but have they lost the right to live so because of this because of these protests hitler himself begins to think that he should maybe shut down this program and i'd like to point out here also that while these protestant and catholic leaders were advocating on behalf of their parishioners they were not advocating quite as strongly for jews or for gypsies throughout throughout the period that the german government was  stripping jews of their rights and ultimately deporting them to eastern europe and other places my question always raises if they had been a strong with jews as they were about the mentally disabled would history be different one person however did speak on behalf of both groups and this was father bernhard licked him berg who was a priest at st head vic cathedral in berlin he spoke against euthanasia of the mentally disabled and children he also spoke a bit against the nazi treatment of jews they couldn't shut him up he ultimately was arrested and he asked if he could be sent to the ghetto of luggage with the other jews they refused and he died on his way to dhaka on november fifth one thousand nine hundred forty three he would later be listed as one of the righteous by yada sham the holocaust museum of about seventy thousand people had already been murdered but does it really and the last euthanize victim was richard jeni age four may twenty ninth one thousand nine hundred forty five one ten in the afternoon from call for burr in germany the person who killed him was the head nurse right here the war had already been over twenty or twenty one days the area was already occupied by the american army and they did not know what was happening in the hospital and that killing machine once it was started it just kept working it just kept working even though the war was was over the children's euthanasia program would continue beyond one nine hundred forty one adolf hitler never shut it down five thousand would be murdered t for program was implemented in occupied countries they estimate as many as two hundred seventy five thousand would be murdered the killing would be transferred to prisons and to hospitals under various names while euthanasia fourteen f thirteen the killing would expand to new and greater populations jews gypsies and others and the euthanasia program would serve as a template and training ground for murder of millions the consultants that established the killing centers scientists chemists engineers doctors would also serve as the consultants for the death camps that would later take place in poland what are some of the rationales for the killing some were true believers or sadist others were political academic or career opportunist these are some of their responses i acted out of compassion killing was an act of mercy that was actually one of the the statements of karl bronze he who would be executed after nuremberg i only followed orders it was war time i had many demands and was under great stress this is an interesting one i never looked at an actual gassing i did not want to see those things this was adolf gustaf kaufman who was an engineer and the head of the t four inspectors office he actually set up five of the six euthanasia centers and was also responsible for inspecting them and making them as a fission as possible but he never looked at an actual gassing i was afraid that i would lose my job lose friends or feared for my family or finally i'm not sure why participated in these killings i didn't know what to do i tried not to think about it i regret it now what are questions for today in the future how are the nazi perpetrator doctors nurses administrators engineers consultants scientist truck transporters different than us are they how does a social political or economic context affects our affect our ethical decision making budgets are moral documents how do we protect vulnerable patients in times of limited resources and economic hardships i like to close this section with a photograph of a young girl anne marie danner who who died at the age of four i believe in one nine hundred forty two hospital in vienna austria and i like to contrast her with this statistical a page that was found by the american army at one of the euthanasia centers and what this document is beginning in january of one nine hundred forty one nine hundred forty going a month at a time over several years ending in august these are many people were killed each month leading to over seventy thousand two hundred seventy three persons and this is how much was saved by the state for every one of these people dying i once participated many years ago when i was an advocate for the mentally disabled and in front of the legislature we were advocating they were they were saying they were finding savings in the system and i remember testifying at the time i said savings for whom and that's the question we always has to ask in our own societies whom we when when the administrators and politicians and other talk about savings and they talk about cuts ask who is the saving force and who is going to bear the cost of the cuts the next case we look at is the case of edward perkoff he was the creator the editor and kind of the lead the lead person for the development of one of the most famous atlases of an anatomy in world history and it was called the atlas of topographical and applied human anatomy edward perkoff was an extremely gifted man he was from austria he was intelligent creative had all the things to be like an amazing person no matter where he lived he joined the nazi party in one nine hundred thirty three he was a very avid nazi in one nine hundred thirty eight he was appointed the dean of the medical school at the university of vienna and during the war between one nine hundred forty three and forty five he was appointed rector at the university of vienna after the war he would be held in prison for about three years but he was never convicted of any crimes but coming out of prison he lost a lot of his professorships at the university of vienna but he continued to work on his anatomy book and i believe he died in one nine hundred fifty four nine hundred fifty five something like that it is this is an image from his atlas it is a work of beauty hitler would have loved it is seven volumes several decades to produce he hired artist who are also nazi supporters more than eight hundred color images and by all accounts it's a medical and artistic masterpiece so what's the problem he was in charge at the same time that the germans and next to the washing of streets and this is an example of that this is also from the spring of one nine hundred thirty eight in which jews are barred from the university at the university of vienna this is per cause atlas giving a talk to the faculty of medicine at the university of vienna you have the s s over here you have the painting or photograph of adolf hitler behind him and this is what the room looked like again the painting behind him and everyone giving the nazi salute as in this speech he would write or speak the methods by which racial hygiene proceed are well known control the marriage propagation of the genetically fit discouragement of breeding by individuals who do not belong together properly whose race is clash finally the exclusion of the genetically inferior from future generations by sterilization and other means questions about his illustrations began to surface almost as soon as they were published but they begin to crush endo in the in the late one nine hundred eighty s into the one nine hundred ninety s and it was image s like this that people began to become somewhat uncomfortable with because this is a little too realistic it looks like a person in a concentration camp or in a prison who was shaved the head was shaved  excedrin so people begin to ask questions where did these images come from but already even in one thousand nine hundred ninety in the new england journal of medicine there was a book review which brings out some of the debate but the but the author ends this outstanding book should be of great value to enter thomas and surgeons it's in a class of its own and also jama also had the same also had  book review in one thousand nine hundred and it would state a classic among atlases of anatomy in the first additions of the book some of the artists would write the s s in some of the descriptions the insignias and other things you can still find this book on amazon today though probably not in the first editions in one thousand nine hundred ninety four there was a call for investigation it kind of started with d men who was a professor of family medicine in toronto and professor howard israel who was an oral surgeon at cornell medical school in new york city both of them had utilize the atlas in the past they love the atlas and then all at once they begin to hear the rumblings like where did these images come from so they wrote back to these major medical journals and saying we need to do something about this we need to find out where these bodies came from that person cough was using and they would be joined by yada sham and the holocaust museum in jerusalem in one nine hundred ninety eight after about four years of investigation they discovered that thirteen hundred seventy seven cadavers were primarily austrian resistors from prison some of them would be killed by the guillotine about eight hundred of the cadavers were likely to be used by person cough and the research collaborators they can't prove it but it's that they would even say highly likely scientists were also associate it with brains of euthanized children and prisoner cadavers from alt and  goosen were also linked to the university of grosse what are the questions the use of prisoner cadavers do tortured and murdered prisoners have rights to the use of their bodies after death what is the ethical research and education and what is the role of informed consent both in life and after death there's another question how should we use the perkoff atlas today there are three primary views the first view is to use with no restrictions this view is that in wars we awesome often times have medical developments that help large numbers of people why shouldn't we use them if it can help save lives in the future and their view is kind of like once the horse is out of the out of the barren you can't go back anyway so if there's anything good out of it if it can teach young medical students we should use it the second view is use with restrictions this is the view of the national institute of health you cannot find the perkoff cough atlas on its open shelves you have to request it specifically when you request it there will be a little plaque in it that same quite likely many of these images are from austrian resisters and you should use it as an educational moment to educate people about the atlas but also where the atlas came from and the third view is this is also by doctors who are survivors of the holocaust is that it should never be used and their view is is do the ends justify the means is science should science ever ever be unethical and it says if we use if we use the perkoff atlas today we're more or less stating that as long as some good or a beautiful thing is made it's ok i think there's a fourth view as well and as i was thinking about this talk i was speaking to a young medical student named fatima from pakistan who knew very little about the holocaust but she was listening to my talk and actually critiquing it and i said you know fatima i think the other view is that ethical decisions and ethical debates are not the monopoly of any generation they are a debate and dialogue between the generation of the past the generation of the present and also for the generation of the future i said if tonight we asked those thirteen hundred seventy seven prisoners to come into this room and we remember that they were still taken from their families they were stripped they were tortured to death and then their bodies were used to create a beautiful work of art how would they what would they say about it now i won't don't know how they would answer but fatima said she said these images don't look so beautiful when you know where they came from the last talk today is about the ghetto of large and normally i give a talk on the ghetto it's about an hour or so long but this is going to be encapsulated but to give you kind of a flavor of what was happening in libya i'm just pointing out these statistics on september first over all this two hundred thirty three thousand they estimate about seven thousand people survived the war and that's three percent of the population so in a room of hundred people three people would stand up and everyone else would be dead now they died in the ghetto of luggage through diseases through starvation through execution and murder and finally through deportation and this is from one of those deportations and i like to point out someone a family member is trying to touch and grab that person for the last time the person who are going to speak about is called the midwife of luggage or woods if in polish and her name is hershon bird and she was one of those eight hundred seventy seven survivors and she when that when the germans first came into luge there was a conflict this is her twin sister a tauren chuck and anna and rachel are identical twins and anna and her family went to the soviet union and that's how they fled lloyd so there are also some of those seventy seven thousand survivors but rachel couldn't leave and were the reason rachel couldn't leave because she was caring for the the mother of her husband who was disabled so she couldn't leave but also the whole area was in chaos and she had lost her job and she didn't know how she was going to help support her family so and her twin sister said well i'm the head nurse of this hospital i'm leaving just appear to work the next day and no one will know that you're not me and i'm not you so that's actually what rachel did they would ultimately move into the ghetto and this is mr burke abraham and they had an only child named sala male and that's sad i'm a as a young girl and they lived in this house on the third floor this is taken from and this is solemn a as a teenager in the ghetto of luggage and she was a singer in the choir and this is an image from from the ghetto of luggage and the school and luggage was in existence for about two years and then it would ultimately be shut down when about twenty thousand western jews would come into luggage and they would actually be housed in the pub in the schools this is rachel eating in a cafeteria with other doctors and nurses that's where they would oftentimes get their food and she also had a pass which would allow her to go to any part of the ghetto night or day to help bring forth children this is another image from the hospital cafeteria the look at this is the final liquidation of the ghetto of luggage occurred on august thirtieth the thirty first hundred forty four a jewish photographer named mendel grossman is taking this photograph he's climbing up a church steeple to take it that's the reason the angles down below and when when when this was going on some people were in hiding some people chose not to join the group they didn't know really where they were going they were told they were going to a labor camp or to work i'm not sure people believe that some maybe did others didn't others went into hiding and then there were around six hundred people that were part of a cleanup crew and rachel and her family and solemn a were part of a cleanup crew and they were in charge of the stables as a matter of fact now is interesting she also tells a story earth daughter tells a story that when when there's a whole group of people were being an ass to be part of the cleanup crew she heard this name rosa hirshberg please come forward and she paused she waited and they said rosa hershon bird please come forward because she was something called rosa and she still for ols and did not move and she didn't know that but there was another rosa hershon bird in the ghetto of luggage that rosa came forward and that rosa entered into the line while her family became part of the cleanup crew about six hundred people in the ghetto of luggage know what happened the cleanup crew was in existence from the end of august and they were ultimately some of them would survive until the russian liberation on january nineteenth one thousand nine hundred forty five in the middle of the night the work up crew a man knocked on the door who was very distraught he was in hiding he wasn't part of the work up crew he was one of the jews who decided they would risk by hiding themselves he said my wife is is is bringing to birth a child and i'm afraid for both of their lives because she is bleeding profusely and i need a doctor or someone to come and help them there was a surgeon as part of the work work work crew and the surgeon when asked to do it refused he said it is too dangerous if i am discovered helping this man who is in hiding i will be killed and maybe my family will be killed too i refuse to risk my life i refuse to go the man didn't know what to do so he said is there anyone else that can deliver a child can help and this little five foot one woman named rachel herz from burke she said i'll go when she decided to go her daughter who was a teenager and as teenagers they're very vocal and her husband also said you shouldn't go mom she said we've lived in this ghetto more than five years and we know the russians are getting closer and if you go now and you're discovered we may lose you so please don't go and the mother decides to go anyway and her daughter will say she never listen to me anyway so and this is from her daughter's memoirs in a filthy well camouflaged cellar my mother examined the heavily bleeding woman remove the retain placenta by an ungloved and not to clean him and she waited till the bleeding stopped checked the baby and then returned to camp alone sally sala male it's a healthy and beautiful baby boy i am concerned however about the sterility i must see her the mother again again s said you can't go why are they having babies in this kind of situation they should know better than that it's like it's this is not a place to have the baby and her mother said you know babies happen in all circumstances and we don't always choose when that circumstance is and she said i'm going anyway and this is what she told her daughter the nazis took away from us the rights to be pregnant and to bear children i'm fully trained to deliver babies and babies are the promise of life they are the symbol of the rebirth of our nation and these are from the memoirs of dr solomon burke k the russian army would liberate luggage on january hundred forty five many in the work camp fled about two days before the russian army came and they had actually had prepared for them by the nazis these murder pits in which they were all go executed but they were then joined the father the mother and others in hiding and many of them would be saved some are ago i went to luge and if you go to the cemetery at the age you can see oh still see the of courage and there are many in the holocaust how can they help us in our own ethical and moral decision making i like to say that and one of the reasons i give these talks is because the courage of the photographers the courage of many mothers of fathers of children of archivist of direst and others they had such a profound courage they risked everything so that we would remember and so that we ourselves would live better lives and when i think of their courage i would hope in our own societies in our own times that we can be a little bit better in our own ethical and moral decision these images were taken from that hospital and they have a museum honoring the mentally disabled and the children who were murdered there during the war and during the nazi period thank you very much is now sorry i had i was really moved by that now is brilliant oh here we go and i wonder what do you think about this the question and the tragic question is that we see so much lack of ethics today in all areas of the world in how people are being treated women children everywhere worldwide we haven't spread perhaps the words of the whole cost far enough but perhaps we have many many decide not to listen choose not to i think i think it's an ongoing effort to teach people to be more ethical in every profession in every stage of life  wherever we are in society and i would agree we don't do enough in our society we probably don't do enough in our communities i think there's often times many of us in it i can't quite make the same analogy but we can be very we can it's very easy to fragment our lives like the nazi doctors who were drinking and had a good family they were a wonderful family man when they went home but what did they do during the day and i think one of the think there's also a tendency in our society to teach ethics from an individual basis and i think that's important but i think we also have to look at ethics within the context of organizations and organizational structures a lot more carefully because most of us work and most of us live within an organizational structure and those ethical values are more likely to come through mammals through protocols and through practices in which we just kind of do what we're told to do because it's easier to do that and i think it becomes more difficult when the economic times become harder i mean right now in this country we are debating the moral budget of the future and so the question is where do we put our money where do we put our values and we don't we don't know the answer to that yet but i i have to always think about the most vulnerable in our society the mentally disabled people with congenital illnesses people in nursing homes and others where do we leave them when the budget is done at and that's the thing i think we need to challenge with  policymakers and others yes question the thing that interests me the most about the holocaust or genocide in general is that there are a few people who resist but they're a very tiny number of people obviously because it's because of the numbers of people who died do you have any insight into what is the difference between those people who are strong enough to resist it and everybody else have you ever sort of landed on an explanation for why do some people like rachel hirshberg is that what you're referring to yeah i think i try to look at i don't know the answer where where discouraged come from where disc of courage come from in our own lives when we have to i think in general most people who made difficult decisions in the holocaust some more saints sometimes and i think if you really looked at every day of their lives there was sometimes inconsistency sometimes one day they were courageous and the next day they weren't so courageous i think it depends on a multitude of circumstances i think probably some who it was easier for they came from family backgrounds that made them secure that taught them ethics i think family background and the education of young children is important but i also think there was probably other days in rachel hersh's birds life where she wasn't maybe so strong either we don't hear about that we only hear about her strong days now one thing that's also interesting about her after the war i also learned this from her daughter saw the mail when the gypsies there were some still gypsies that were alive in the ligero and very few people would would treat them and very few people would deliver their babies rachael hirshberg even after the war would would be the midwife for the gypsies and sala mayor who was again kind of a late teenager she remembers going to the gypsy camp and they're all inviting her in because she was the daughter of the midwife so she was a very special person and we always have special people there's always there always that minority and i would hope that there would be a few more of us that join them i'm not probably answering your question because it's it's i'm not sure there's an answer but someone else may have the better answer t is there any documentation of the doctors or the nazi leaders having children who were deformed and mentally ill and what did they do with their own children they hide them did they kill them because they knew it was wrong i think well first thing it's kind of interesting like dr goebbels had a deformed leg so he was not exactly one of the most beautiful area and when you thought about he had a deformity himself there was a tendency among high nazi officials to be somewhat hypocritical where they would see the flaws in others but not always see the flaws in themselves there are some examples don't ask me for the to do exact sentence there are a few examples where some of the nazi folks did get captured in in this process as well once you were once you were in the killing machine no matter who you were if you were kind of caught it was hard to get you out however if you had influence if you had connections money and power it was less likely that you would fall into the machine there are probably very few of them that would would fall into this category so there was kind of i have as versus have not and societies that all societies have the question is is how big do we want to make that bridge my limited experience in interviewing catholic women and men concentration camp survivors was in a way what you said they came from families where the formally educated or not that taught them ethics this is the right because if they had just minded their business they wouldn't have ended up in the concentration camps they volunteered they became involved they did what they had learned at home was the right action to take and it's interesting because those decisions are not necessarily class based there's the poor that would make the right decisions there would be wealthy aristocratic type of people who rescue jews the intelligent the carpenters  those ethical lessons are not the monopoly of any one particular class or educational status sex or even class of any type thank you very very much for attending thank you