A Poisoned Practice

Health care providers are expected to follow the code of “do no harm.” During World War II, the medical community was faced with what happens when those who are trained to heal are weaponized on a massive scale to go against that code. The exhibition, A Poisoned Practice: The Holocaust, Medical Complicity, and the American Response explores the facets of American society that shaped much of the medical community's response to U.S. news coverage of the Holocaust. The exhibit also focuses on information available at the time to health care providers in Omaha, Nebraska.   

The exhibit pulls at the thread of one facet—American medical complicity in the Holocaust through the origins of eugenics. This thread draws back to the 1910s American eugenics movement, which directly contributed to rebuilding Germany’s eugenics movement after World War I and provided model legislation for establishing Nazi Germany’s racial hygiene laws. These laws led to the sterilization of hundreds of thousands of victims, euthanasia practices, and ultimately the systematic murder of millions of Jews and other minority groups through the Final Solution. 

A Poisoned Practice also highlights the experience of one University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Medicine graduate, John H. Brush, MD, who was involved in liberating the Ebensee Concentration Camp. His experience moving across France and into Austria is detailed through the photos he took and letters he wrote to family. These horrors that soldiers like Dr. Brush brought to light led to the Nuremberg trials and the establishment of the modern medical ethics we know today. 

This digital exhibition was produced by Darby Kurtz, special collections curator in the Robert S. Wigton Department of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Leon S. McGoogan Health Sciences Library. The exhibition was provided in partnership with the Calvin T. Ryan Library at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), the host of “Americans and the Holocaust: A Traveling Exhibition for Libraries” from January 20 – June 15, 2026, and made possible by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the American Library Association.