The Rotation publishes an annual post for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is observed this year on Tuesday, January 27. Read past posts.
As the last living survivors of the Holocaust pass away, the world loses their eyewitness accounts and testimonies of the atrocities that occurred during this dark period of the 20th century. The history of the Holocaust and the important messages it offers are being operationalized in new ways to underscore its relevance to contemporary professional practice in healthcare.
A recent publication in the Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing deals with one such attempt. In their article, "Legacy of Medicine and Nursing During the Holocaust and Its Contemporary Relevance: Addressing Implicit and Explicit Bias and Health Care Inequities," Julie Kruse and Hedy Wald report on a two-hour seminar that provided nurses an opportunity to learn and critically reflect on the role of doctors and nurses during the Holocaust, and the outcomes the seminar can help nurses achieve, including heightened awareness and mitigation of implicit and explicit bias.
Wald, a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine at Brown University, is also the Commissioner of the Lancet Commission on Medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust. The Lancet Commission was convened in 2023 in order to, in part, help develop educational approaches to the subject of the Holocaust which "promote ethical conduct, moral development, and the formation of a professional identity based on compassion..." (Czech et al., 2023).
The Lancet Commission requires Holocaust history to be taught across health professions education in order for this professional identity formation to be history-informed. The history of the Holocaust involves many threads, including "the complicity of health professionals in the persecution and dismissal of Jewish health professionals, forced sterilization and 'euthanasia' murder of the disabled, coerced 'experimentation,' and the genocide of Jews and mass murder of other groups" (Kruse & Wald, 2025).
The curriculum was introduced as a two-hour continuing education seminar which met the implicit bias requirement for CE in nursing, which is required for licensure in Michigan (where the seminar took place). The learning objectives of the seminar included: describing why it is a moral imperative to learn about egregious ethical violations committed by health professionals in Nazi Germany; explaining the history of healers becoming killers and providing examples of health professionals in the Nazi period who exhibited moral courage; identifying social and professional factors contributing to the complicity of health professionals in the Holocaust's mass atrocities; and examining the legacy of the Holocaust for relevance to implicit and explicit bias, healthcare inequities, and preservation of human dignity (Kruse & Wald, 2025).
The 63 participants in the seminar were surveyed prior to and following the activity on a number of aspects of their knowledge of the subject prior to the seminar, and the effectiveness of the training following the seminar. Nurses participating described "new awareness of [the historical facts of] medical experimentation, euthanasia programs for children, and health care institutions as execution sites" (Kruse & Wald, 2025). Nurses reflected positively on the opportunities given for them to reflect creatively, both in writing and in an art interpretation activity. Participants were instructed in the STOP technique (stop , take a breath, observe, proceed) for self-reflection in order to mitigate bias. Nurse educators attending the seminar indicated they planned to incorporate Holocaust content into their "ethics content, research modules, and classroom discussions" (Kruse & Wald, 2025). Overall, the authors found that the seminar underscored the importance of bringing together historical, ethical, and bias education for nurse professional development.
Viewed more broadly, healthcare practitioner education can only benefit from future practitioners developing deeper awareness of the atrocities of the Nazi period, more specifically as they pertain to the ways in which practitioners were derelict in their duties as caregivers, and more broadly in terms of the lessons the Holocaust provides that may help avoid implicit and explicit bias.
References
Czech, H., Hildebrandt, S., Reis, S. P., Chelouche, T., Fox, M., González-López, E., Lepicard, E., Ley, A., Offer, M., Ohry, A., Rotzoll, M., Sachse, C., Siegel, S. J., Šimůnek, M., Teicher, A., Uzarczyk, K., von Villiez, A., Wald, H. S., Wynia, M. K., & Roelcke, V. (2023). The Lancet Commission on medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust: historical evidence, implications for today, teaching for tomorrow. The Lancet (British Edition), 402(10415), 1867–1940. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(23)01845-7
Kruse, J. A., & Wald, H. S. (2025). Legacy of Medicine and Nursing During the Holocaust and Its Contemporary Relevance: Addressing Implicit and Explicit Bias and Health Care Inequities. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 56(12), 527–534. https://doi.org/10.3928/00220124-20250926-01
