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Dr. Patricia Heberer Rice

Director, Division of the Senior Historian and Senior historian
Areas of Expertise
  • Nazi-era eugenics policies

  • Persecution of people with disabilities during the Holocaust

  • The legacy of human specimens collected from 1933 through 1945 from Nazi victim groups for medical research

  • War crimes trials

  • Children and the Holocaust

Contact Information

Email  pheberer-rice@ushmm.org

Media contact  Raymund Flandez, Senior Communications Officer, 202.314.1772, rflandez@ushmm.org

Dr. Heberer Rice joined the Museum in 1994 and is now the Museum’s senior historian. She serves as a specialist on medical crimes and eugenics policies in Nazi Germany, educates groups inside and outside the Museum, and vets a wide range of Museum content for historical accuracy, including the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Dr. Heberer Rice is currently coediting Nazi Sites for Racial Persecution, Detention, Murder, and Resettlement of Non-Jews, a forthcoming volume of the Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945.

She serves as one of several international experts on the Max Planck Society’s “Victims of Euthanasia” committee to identify for proper burial any human brain specimens from Nazi victims that still remain in the organization’s medical collections.

She was president of the American Friends of the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance (2012–14).

Education

  • PhD, German and central European history, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, 2001

  • PhD Exchange Fellowship, Free University of Berlin, 1990–91

  • MA, European history, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, Illinois, 1989

  • BA, history and German literature, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 1986

Languages

  • English

  • German

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Select Recorded Presentations and Interviews