Annual Raphael Lemkin Lecture & Award Ceremony

7 p.m. | Thursday, April 25, 2019 | Anderson University Center – Scandinavian Cultural Center
Free and Open to the Public

From October 1939 until the final days of World War II, the “euthanasia” (T4) program claimed the lives of an estimated 250,000 disabled patients residing in institutional settings throughout Germany and in certain regions of German-occupied Europe. Who were the victims of Nazi “euthanasia” policy? Until recently, relatively little research has attempted to reconstruct the lives and fates of T4 victims. Scholarly preoccupation with the over-arching killing apparatus has helped to overshadow the individual identities of these individuals. Lack of adequate documentation has heretofore presented a major obstacle: many patient files have been lost or destroyed, while German privacy laws have ensured that the bulk of these records remained inaccessible to researchers. Utilizing patient files from the Bezirkskrankenhaus Kaufbeuren, formerly a notorious “euthanasia” facility near Augsburg, this presentation will offer a much-needed perspective to a field in which the analysis of process and perpetrator often precludes important questions about the victims themselves.

Dr. Patricia Heberer-Rice

Dr. Heberer Rice is one of the leading scholars on the Nazi Euthanasia murders. She has been based at the Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (former U.S. Holocaust Research Institute) since 1993. Heberer Rice completed her undergraduate degree in Historical Studies and German Language and Literature at Southern Illinois University as the graduating class’ valedictorian. She conducted her doctoral studies at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Maryland (UMD)-College Park, where Heberer Rice earned a PhD based on her dissertation on the Hadamar killing facility and its role in the Euthanasia program. She is the author of many articles and book chapters on the Euthanasia killings and other aspects of the Nazi state’s murder programs. Dr. Heberer Rice (co-)authored two books, Children during the Holocaust, a volume in the Center’s series Documenting Life and Destruction(AltaMira Press, 2011) and Atrocities on Trial: The Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes in Historical Perspective, co-edited with Jürgen Matthäus (University of Nebraska Press, 2008). Dr. Heberer Rice is currently the Director of the Division of the Senior Historian, The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.