 Welcome back. I am honored to introduce doctors Leah Wolfson, Katherine White and Mark Alexander from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. They will be giving the live talk entitled Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust Eugenics and Public Health through primary sources for workshop. Over to you, Dr. Wolfson. Thank you so much, Chris. I think if we can show Mark Alexander and Katherine White as well, Katherine is going to go ahead and kick us off. Thanks so much, Leah. So my name is Dr. Katherine White and I'm the campus outreach program officer at the Jack Joseph and more in Mandel Center for advanced Holocaust studies. I am here today with my colleagues, Dr. Leah Wolfson, the Roslyn Unger director of campus outreach programs and in the Mandel Center and Dr. Mark Alexander, the content developer of the museum experience in digital media in the Levine Institute at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. So over the last couple of days, we spent a lot of time thinking about various definitions of eugenics and the larger implications of how these definitions resonate in different contexts. Today, we'd like to delve into some primary sources from the Holocaust era that draw upon eugenics, but also bring in the ways that eugenics as a field of study informed how the Nazis thought about public health. I just want to note that we're going to work from one specific digital teaching tool that the museum has created for the college classroom. However, this tool is part of a broader landscape of US HMM resources on the topic of Nazi eugenics, medicine and public health policies. Other resources include the museum's Holocaust encyclopedia, the deadly medicine online exhibition, the museum's Facebook live series, and online resources relating to anti-Semitism and racism in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America. All right, so Leah, I'm going to turn it over to you. Would you please tell us a bit about the resources that we're going to be looking at today from the experiencing history online tool and where the materials on medicine and public health fit within? Sure. Thanks so much, Catherine. It's really lovely to be here with all of you. So experiencing history is a curated, translated contextualized primary source tool for the college classroom. And when we talk about primary sources, we are really talking about a wide range of materials. It can be diaries, it can be letters, it can be oral histories or posters, historical film footage, photographs, and only a few. And the real goal is to get students as close to having sources spread out across their desk as we possibly can. And we also aim for these sources to really be interdisciplinary so that it's just as useful for a course called utopias or the history of psychology as it is for a course called the history of the Holocaust. The site features three kind of major buckets of content, one that focuses on Jewish perspectives on the Holocaust, another that focuses on Americans in the Holocaust, which really comes out of the museum's broader initiative on that topic. And then a third section that looks at everyday life, roles, motives, and choices. And within these sections, we have curated collections of archival material around a particular source type or a particular theme. And each of these collections has a short annotated introduction that comprises of about 12 to 15 archival items, several of which we're going to see today, that also includes some really thick essays that give you a sense of what it is that you're looking at. And users can save those individual items and instructors can collect those together for their particular course. The two collections we're going to look at this afternoon, explore public health, medicine, and the legacy of eugenics in various ways. And the two we're really going to focus on are a collection on medical care, Nazism and Holocaust, and a collection on public health under the Third Reich. Interestingly, these collections were begun prior to the pandemic, and actually as a result of a lot of history of science and medical ethics courses really starting to use experiencing history. So these collections were really deployed as a response to what was an emerging audience and an emerging need back in December of 2019 and January of 2020, and then became really all the more relevant. So I think with that, we're going to turn to my colleague, Mark Alexander, who's really going to delve into some specific sources and talk a little bit more about those collections. Thank you so much. It's an introduction. Mark, I am going to pull up your first slide. Okay, can you hear me all right. Yes. Great. I apologize for not appearing on video. Apparently I'm having some technical difficulties that won't allow me to do so. But so before we start this video, let me explain just a bit about the framework for these collections. We wanted to show just the enormous impact really that Nazi racial ideology and theories of eugenics had on public health policies and medical care during the years of Nazi rule in Germany, as well as providing a glimpse into the different ways in which these principles were actually applied. Now, Nazism itself was highly influenced by theories of eugenics and the Nazi world view really centered on promoting the growth and overall health and strength of the so-called folks' community, which was the Nazi vision for politically, socially, and racially unified German society that would be somehow mystically linked by its so-called Aryan blood. Now, the regime promoted the growth and health of this so-called folks' combined shaft at the expense of others whom they deemed to be racial or biological threats, including Jews, Roma and Sinti, and people with certain mental and physical disabilities. People are, of course, familiar with these Nazi campaigns of forcible sterilization, mass murder or genocide, but what might be less well known is that the regime also engaged in pro-natalist eugenics campaigns and propaganda, such as the video that we're watching now. This is a 1937 propaganda film entitled Healthy Woman, Healthy Nation, and it provides some really startling insights into the way that the Nazis viewed public health policies and the role of women in society. It shows how the regime really encouraged outdoor exercise and healthy living, and specifically in this context it shows how the regime gendered its proposals for exercise. There are very specific graceful movements that teach the women how to work well together as groups and prepare them to become healthy, strong mothers so that the Nazi regime could help to grow their so-called folks' combined shaft in furtherance of the Nazi aims of conquest and territorial expansion. Now, we see a lot of images in this that are familiar in some ways to our students. College students are our primary audience, and these images of jogging or outdoor group exercises are evocative of things done in physical education classes today, or even in outdoor yoga classes one might see in the park. And so students can really relate to these, and they often come away from a video like this, surprised that the Nazi regime would pour its resources into these seemingly positive and apparently appealing, even maybe progressive public health initiatives, while at the same time embarking on campaigns of mass murder. Exercise was such a fundamental part of the regime in fact that exercise became a method of punishment and of public humiliation that was common in the Nazi concentration camp system. And so it's very interesting to see the different applications of these sorts of exercise programs. Would you please go ahead to the next slide. And we'll have another item from our featured collections here that we'd like to share with you. Now this is a poster from 1943, mandating a mass x-ray for tuberculosis in the German occupied Poland in the city of Jeja. Now tuberculosis was a terrible threat as a contagious disease during the Second World War, and the Nazi government was terrified of it. This order was printed in German and in Polish. And if you can see the details, you can see that all Germans are required to report for x-rays on 10 days from the publication of this edict. They're segregated by sex. Then two days later, Poles who work in close proximity to Germans are required to go, but only those Poles. The German authorities did not care about the Polish population's health at large, but just feared that the Poles whom many German doctors had characterized as a half civilized race of savages. I believe I'm getting that quote correct. They were a danger of spreading disease to the occupying German forces. And so those who were in contact with the Germans needed to be checked. Others did not. And if you were able to read more closely, you'd note that Jews appear nowhere on this edict. They didn't even merit consideration to the German authorities who often dealt extremely harshly with contagious diseases in Jewish ghettos. Could we advance to the next slide, please? In our collections, we also wanted to stress the ethical dilemmas that sprang from these policies and the magnitude of the individual choices and actions that medical providers in different positions took. This is a page or three pages from the diary of Dr. Maria Motti. She was a doctor in Budapest in Hungary, which was allied with Nazi Germany and in 1944 occupied militarily by German forces. After that conditions for Hungarian Jews deteriorated rapidly. And Dr. Motti found herself in a very uncomfortable and awkward position in which she was replacing a former Jewish colleague. These pages of her diary record her internal struggle over this dilemma. On the one hand, she noted that her community needed a doctor, that they needed a physician of her quality, and she herself needed the job. And yet she agonized over becoming part of this larger machinery of oppression. And in fact, she eventually became inducted into the righteous among nations because she sheltered a Jewish friend of hers and her son, excuse me, who were hiding in her apartment. Although interestingly, Dr. Motti, even though she sheltered them, still expressed anti-Semitic sentiments. A very complicated figure. So these are just a few of the items that we have. We try to provide a wide example of source types. You saw video, you saw some official propaganda as well as official documents. And then we try to provide some individual perspectives that aren't from the authorities like Dr. Motti's diary. Arrange not only of the source types, but of the perspectives and positions within society. I hope this gives you an idea of some of the things that we have to offer in the experiencing history collections on public health and medical care. Thanks so much, Mark. Leah, would you be able to tell us a little bit about how the things we've seen these types of sources work in the educational space? Sure, absolutely. So we've got a couple of fun statistics on this slide. This is kind of where we've been and where we are today, roughly between the same time period. So between January and November of 2020 and then of the current year. And as you can see, we've had a rather enormous amount of growth. Experiencing history has been in existence since around 2017. And we were previously not completely open access. And now you really see the result of kind of throwing the doors open and getting a lot of different kinds of access in different ways. And we're used in a variety of different types of courses, different institutions, and really from a host of disciplinary perspectives. And really, in short, we want to see these sources used across multiple disciplines across multiple institutions within higher education across multiple contexts and different student audiences. So we're just as happy as seeing an entire collection used in a course on the history of the Holocaust as we are three items being used in a course on medical ethics. So that's really something that's a goal for the site and a goal for us as a whole. Catherine, if you want to go to the next slide. I just wanted to give you a kind of a sense of these are, this is really just a snapshot of some of our highest user locations really just over the course of the last year. And it's a real variety of different types of places. The kind of legend that you see here is these are people who these are locations that have had more than 25 users in some cases far more than 25 users for more than two minutes on site, which in internet land shows us that you're doing more than just checking us out for a hot five seconds and leaving. And it really gives you an example of the different types of usage that we're looking at so we have everything from large flagship state universities like Ohio State University Iowa State University and UCLA to faith based colleges and universities like Illinois University of Chicago or Canisius College in New York to more regional state institutions like Utah State University or Montana State University, private institutions like Elon University and community colleges like Central New Mexico Community College are all pretty high users over the course of the last year. And to give you a sense of the types of courses in which experiencing history has been used. Yes, we certainly see history of the Holocaust or history of Nazi Germany but we also see introduction to psychology. We see history of human experimentation, we see minority studies. We see histories mysteries, we see courses on education and courses on on gender studies, as well as courses that touch on different aspects of disability studies. So really no matter the topic what we're really looking to do is to use primary sources to ask critical questions about the Holocaust through whatever lens our faculty and our students are bringing to it. The sources that we examine today, we really hope complicate some of the ways that we think about eugenics medicine and public health, and also ways that really bring us back to how policies become features of everyday life during the period. And I think that's something that really comes through very strongly in those three sources that Mark just delineated. And I think I'll close our presentation with the words of one of our faculty adopters Willa Johnson who's a professor of sociology from the University of Mississippi, who notes that experiencing history just opens students up because now they can see and touch the history in ways that no matter how many stories I tell them, no matter how many books they read it doesn't do the same. I strive to help students understand a single point from multiple dimensions multiple perspectives. And I think at the end of the day that's what we're really looking to do and that's what we're really looking to accomplish. So we thank you so much for your attention. I think we'll now turn it back to our NIH colleagues. We're going to present the next presentation and I think there's a Q&A for both of our panels together at the end. So thank you. And I look forward to your questions a little later. Thank you. Now, Zach, our public historian at the NHGRI will now discuss the NHGRI's developing of educational resources on eugenics and scientific racism.