In the interest of eliminating “undesirable elements” to preserve the ideals of Nazism, Germany’s medical community was responsible for the murder or sterilization of thousands of its most vulnerable citizens.

“It is the story of medicine under a notorious dictatorship,” said Dr. Patricia Heberer, a specialist on medical crimes and eugenics policies in Nazi Germany at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, who described the policies as “one of the under-reported chapters of this era.”

“We like to think that medicine is a noble profession, but it was compromised under the Nazi regime, resulting in some of the worst crimes of the Holocaust,” she said at an Oct. 24 program of the Holocaust Council of MetroWest held at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany.

Following a growing international interest in eugenics — Latin for “good birth” — and in an effort to preserve resources in the wake of World War I, Germany sought to weed out segments of society considered a “genetic, biological, and financial burden,” including Jews, Gypsies, and other groups.

The medical community divided Germany’s population into “valuable and unvaluable” categories, Heberer said, using the latter word as code for those suffering from a variety of conditions — real or perceived — such as hereditary deafness and blindness, alcoholism, physical deformity of any kind, schizophrenia, manic depression, and “feeblemindedness.” The term served as a catchphrase for other conditions deemed incompatible with Aryan perfection. Those suffering such maladies were considered a drain on valuable resources and targeted for compulsory sterilization, at best, or euthanasia, at worst.

Heberer described the process of designating someone for compulsory sterilization. Members of the medical community, including doctors, nurses, and midwives, were obligated to report anyone suspected of fitting the “unvaluable” profile; that person was then “tried,” sometimes in absentia, in proceedings that took “10 minutes or less and where the tribunal could call on any witness they wished,” negating any notion of doctor/patient confidentiality, Heberer said. The tribunal was authorized to compel such persons adjudged unfavorably to present themselves, either voluntarily or by force, for sterilization.

More than 40,000 people were subjected to such treatments, said Heberer, adding that the figure did not account for thousands of others who were sterilized extra-legally or experimentally.

The eugenics program was not solely a German concept, she noted. It developed from an international interest — led by the United States and Great Britain, as well as Germany — that developed at the dawn of the 20th century.

The euthanasia program, given the code designation “T4,” was a secret state policy aimed at eliminating institutionalized adults and young disabled children even before the beginning of World War II. More than 200,000 people — about 60 percent of all Germany’s institutionalized patients — died as a result of such institutionalized murder, Heberer said.

She screened a 1936 silent propaganda film designed to show such groups at their worst. Images of patients from hospitals and mental institutions were juxtaposed against those of hard-working, productive, “good” Germans. Title cards railed against the waste of funds and resources needed to care for a “subhuman population,” with Jews especially reviled as despoilers of German society. And this happened, Heberer pointed out, during a time when Germany was hosting the Winter and Summer Olympics and “anti-Semitic propaganda was toned down.”