Sept. 17



USA//NEBRASKA:

Nazi medical practices to be lecture topic

The role of Nazi medical practices in the development of medical ethics
and the lessons todays physicians have learned from the period leading up
to the Holocaust is the focus of a series of public lectures by the
American Medical Association and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

A public lecture at 5 p.m. Wednesday at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Great Plains Art Museum at Hewit Place, will focus on how medical
atrocities of the Holocaust have affected modern medical ethics.

The lecture, The Nazis and Medical Ethics: Contexts and Lessons, and a
4:30 p.m. reception are free and open to the public. The host for the
event is the Humanities in Medicine program.

Alan Wells, an expert in medical ethics, and Patricia Heberer, historian
at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, will lead the discussion.

Nazi Germany has been described as a biocracy, a national culture that
justified the killing of millions of undesirable individuals through
appeals to pseudo-science and eugenics. Within this framework, healers
became killers, and medical research evolved into torture.

An important impetus for medical ethics in the 20th century was
international reactions against Nazi war crimes of a medical nature. World
War II-era Germans were extremely advanced in medicine, technology and
public health research, according to Wells, but those successes have
largely been overlooked by history because of the medical extremes of the
Holocaust.

For example, Germany was the first to have a high-powered electron
microscope, the first to document the link between asbestos and lung
cancer, and an innovator in developing high profile public health
campaigns for a variety of health issues such as anti-smoking campaigns
and promoting breast self-examination to help detect tumors at an early
stage. These advances and campaigns, however, were eventually aimed
exclusively at the Aryans the Nazi ideal of the master race.

Other lectures are planned for Sept. 20 in Omaha at the Jewish Community
Center and at the Maimonides Society, an affinity group for Jewish health
care professionals.

(source: Lincoln Journal Star)



************************


USA//CALIFORNIA:

Holocaust Collection to Be Housed at USC----Steven Spielberg's Shoah
Foundation has 52,000 testimonials of survivors and witnesses.


The Shoah Foundation, a repository of Holocaust testimonials established by
filmmaker Steven Spielberg, will become part of USC's College of Letters,
Arts and Sciences, officials announced Friday.

Under an agreement between the university and the Survivors of the Shoah
Visual History Foundation, the repository of 52,000 testimonials from
Holocaust survivors and witnesses will be transferred to USC in perpetuity
Jan. 1.

The collection comprises the largest visual history archive in the world,
officials said in a statement.

In addition, the new USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and
Education will conduct research and scholarship in the humanities and social
sciences.

"The foundation's preeminent collection of Holocaust materials will advance
academic research and scholarship for centuries as we continue to honor the
memory of Holocaust victims and survivors," said USC President Steven B.
Sample.

Spielberg, the foundation's chairman and a USC trustee, said moving the
collection to USC would ensure its preservation and access to the public.

"All of us know that the survivors and witnesses have given us a precious
gift whose wise use will build a better world for this and future
generations," Spielberg said in the statement.

The testimonials will be housed in the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Library,
which has helped pioneer development of digital libraries.

The Shoah Foundation's stated mission is to overcome prejudice, intolerance
and bigotry through the use of the visual history testimonials.

(source: Los Angeles Times)