Lecture “From Healers to Killers”
Lunch & Lecture featuring Thorsten Wagner, M.A., Executive Director for Strategy and Academics at Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, hosted by Columbia’s Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. For inquiries, please contact us at [email protected].
About the Presentation:
During the era of Nazi Germany, medical professionals became willing participants in mass atrocities. Only a minority resisted the allure of becoming proponents of Racial Hygiene and National Health. What motivated their involvement in Nazi organizations, advocacy for forced sterilization, and roles in “euthanasia” and other crimes? How did they perceive themselves, and what does this disturbing chapter in modern medical history signify for contemporary questions of professional ethics?
About the Speaker:
Thorsten Wagner, a German historian born in 1970 in Sønderborg, Denmark, completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and graduate studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Technische Universität Berlin, and Freie Universität Berlin. He continued his postgraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 1993, he has held various positions, including educator at the Jewish Museum of Berlin, research fellow at the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Copenhagen, and the Department of Scandinavian Studies at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
From 2010 to 2019, Wagner served as an Associate Professor of Modern European History at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad-University of Copenhagen. Since 2019, he has been the Executive Director of FASPE — Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, based in New York City.
Wagner is a historical consultant for the acclaimed documentary “Germans and Jews” (2016), addressing contemporary Germany, its relationship with its Nazi past, and the resurgence of Jewish life. He has numerous academic publications in Modern German and European Jewish History, antisemitism, Holocaust studies, cultures of memory, and Israeli history and society.
Thorsten Wagner resides in Manhattan and Tuxedo Park with his wife Johanna and their two children, Dahlia (age 6) and Caleb (age 5).
Time: 1:00 pm EST
Free!
