Pliny Was Right – Dr. Emma Nalianya on Teaching the Holocaust in Africa
Photo of Dr. Nalianya, Kenya, 2026
When the Republic of Kenya gained independence in 1963 the literacy rate was less than 50%. Today it is over 80% and rising. At independence there were very few hospitals. Today there are over two hundred spread across the land.
Today there are thousands of Kenyan doctors trained at home and abroad and whom, through a combination of private and public health care, do their best to live up to their Hippocratic oath, “First, do no harm.”
And so, it is indeed curious, in the extreme, that given the hundreds of millions of dollars given to Kenyan institutions of health and education, especially by European and other foreign donors, not one European or American donor or institution, has contributed in any meaningful way to the teaching of the Holocaust and medical ethics from an African perspective.
That is changing now, and not because of international development assistance. It is a Kenyan initiative pioneered by one woman.
Dr. Emma Nalianya is a well trained, articulate, cheerful, and outgoing Kenyan physician. She has been involved in the work of the Lancet Commission on Medicine, Nazism and the Holocaust since she was a medical student.
Today she teaches and coordinates a voluntary online course on Medicine during the Holocaust and its Contemporary Relevance for African health professionals and students.
She has supervised more than six thousand successful graduates of this program from the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, and the numbers of applicants is rising.
Although I am not a formal student of this program Dr. Nalianya graciously sent me a copy of her own lecture and which is part of a wider series and which I summarize here. I have added a few details taken from the original Lancet report for readers not familiar with the topic.
According to Doctor Nalianya the Holocaust was a near successful effort to kill off the Jews of Europe (and the near east, which was part of Rommel’s North Africa campaign) according to a warped concept of racial hygiene, when Nazi and German scientists claimed Jews were like a disease and if allowed to live and reproduce, they would ‘infect and debilitate’ the body politic of the German people and nation.
The root causes of the Holocaust were a lethal combination of anti Semitism that goes back to the Middle Ages, eugenics, and extreme German nationalism.
It was a dynamic process that grew with the rise of the Nazi party and their eventual takeover of the German state during the 1930s.
Given the Nazi belief in a racial hierarchy with Aryan Germans at the top and Jews at the bottom, they created a bureaucratic state where supposed racial ancestry determined your opportunities for advancement or even survival within the state.
By the mid 1930s Jews were given ID cards that showed that their ancestry barred them from most working positions in Germany.
All these disabilities were made legal through the infamous Nuremberg laws of 1935. The German medical profession succumbed to the Nazi party and at least half joined willingly often knowing full well that the ‘science’ behind the racial and anti semitic hierarchy of the Nazis was not supported by proper research.
All this culminated with the adoption of the Final Solution by the Nazis in the early 1940s and which led to the extermination camps that killed six million European Jews.
The conquering Nazis were not alone in their persecution of the Jews. With each conquest of a European country, local citizens joined official and unofficial groups to persecute and kill local Jews and hand them over to the Nazis for extermination.
This took place in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Baltic countries and on a massive scale in countries like Romania and in the Ukraine.
Although the Nazis saw the Jews as the ultimate biological threat, they were part of a deeper and wider category of expendables, people deemed not worthy of reproducing.
And so, it is hard to believe that as the Nazis started imprisoning, murdering and later exterminating Jews, they also killed hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish German men, women, and small children who they deemed to be genetically unfit.
Another over 300,000 Germans were sterilized but allowed to live. Many of them have only come forward in their old age in recent years to tell their stories.
Dr. Nalianya drives home her point about the perversion of Nazi medicine and science when she recounts a Jewish concentration camp inmate who asked the Nazi doctor Fritz Klein why he was violating his Hippocratic oath to do no harm.
Klein had no problem answering and explained to the horrified inmate that he and his colleagues were treating Jews like a gangrenous appendage that had to be cut away if the body was to survive.
She then goes on to drive home the point that this body of pseudo science and pseudo medicine masquerading as Nazi medical ethics (or lack thereof) was one of the driving forces behind the Holocaust.
Nalianya then delicately points out that what the Nazis did in Germany and to the Jews had a prequel when the German state controlled large parts of southwest Africa in what is now called Namibia.
As European and German colonists moved in from the coast, they realized that the Nama and Herero tribes lived on the best land. The Germans decided that they wanted that land and so in 1904 an official order was given to the local military authority to exterminate these two tribes.
Given the fact that they had modern weapons and military organization the Germans quickly decimated these two tribes. It is estimated they killed ninety per cent of them and then herded the rest into concentration camps. 100,000 people were murdered.
The new pseudo science of Eugenics was growing in pre–Nazi Germany and so there were requests from scientific institutes for skulls and bodies of murdered Nama and Herero for pseudo research.
The often-surviving women prisoners oversaw cleaning the skulls of their murdered relatives before they were shipped off to the burgeoning German anthropological institutes for further study.
Although it is not widely known, as the Nazis took over Germany any mixed-race child from colonial Namibia who managed to make a home in Germany in the 1930s was shunned and many were killed by the authorities. Few survived.
Dr. Nalianya points out that most of these ideas and attitudes were clearly expressed in Adolph Hitler’s book Mein Kampf but few educated Europeans at the time believed that he was serious about them.
I am relaxing in the gracious sitting rooms of the Fairview Hotel in downtown Nairobi. My work has taken me to Kenya for a month, and I have taken this opportunity to meet Dr. Nalianya whose work so impresses me.
She is articulate and well mannered and has that polite and friendly Kenyan style of speaking and having a conversation that is their hallmark. She tells me,
‘I was a very well-behaved girl. I was not rebellious and I studied hard. My parents were hard working and when it came to gifts, books were the preferred item. I devoured them and have read widely. I wanted to become a doctor and I am one now.
The training was vigorous and unlike decades ago, with the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, there is now no way any student or professor of medicine can say that they do not have access to the journals so they cannot be up to date. And so, my training was as good as anything you can get in Europe the UK or America. I am proud of that.
The Holocaust and Nazi medicine were mentioned incidentally, here and there during my studies but never in any systematic way. So, when I was exposed to the findings of the Lancet Commission on the Holocaust and Nazi medicine, I immediately got involved.
It became near instantly clear to me that Nazi medical ethics and medical malpractice was one of the major factors of the Holocaust and had been rehearsed by the Germans in Southwest Africa in the early 20th century, a few short decades before the Holocaust.
I realized that what the doctors who joined the Nazi party had done goes against all the values and ethics that we had been taught as medical students. And so, I drew certain conclusions which I teach and explore in my online course.
I took a sip from my coffee as I listened to this remarkably articulate young woman. She continued.
The first is that it is easy to lose your way when you are a young and impressionable medical student or doctor. Medicine is a very hierarchical world and if the leaders are on the wrong moral path it takes enormous courage to buck the system.
Second modern medicine as it has come to Kenya is a European institution. It has a history and it has baggage both good and bad, and doctors must know medical history. Our profession should not be ahistorical.
Third teaching about the Holocaust and medical ethics contributes to professional identity formation. It is like an anti malarial that can protect you from the dangerous idea that all men and women are not to be treated equally.
It has made me wary of Big Pharma who often try out their vaccines or medical treatments in Africa and other developing countries before they are ‘rolled out’ in the developed world. Without sounding impolite, we here in Africa must make sure we are not treated like guinea pigs in the modern medical world.
Finally, the history of medical failure in Nazi Germany is not a one lecture topic. It is a profound series of medical lessons that must be taught in every medical school in Europe, the West and the developing world. It takes time to absorb and reflect upon and to internalize the necessary lessons.
This has not yet happened, and yet we have all the material to do so. I have supervised over six thousand students so far. That is what you call a spit in the bucket. In my own way I am pushing back, but one hopes that intellectual leaders like Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne should at least follow suit.
As Dr. Nalianya is a practising Christian, I asked her if her religious belief was the motivation behind her dedication to exploring this subject. Surprisingly, she said,
It is not. It just seemed clear to me that Nazi medical practise was and is the anti type and opposite of all the values that I have been taught as a Kenyan doctor. It was the moral inversion of the Hippocratic oath. It must therefore be taught universally and in depth.
Given what has happened here in the Congo and during the Rwandan genocide of the nineties, the teaching of medicine in Africa cannot and should not be ahistorical. And so, I continue my work.
By the way I am not alone. I have worked closely with Prof. Sabine Hildebrandt and Dr. Hedy Wald. I am professionally close to some members of the Commission especially one of its co-chairs, Doctor Shmuel Reis in Israel. I have met him at conferences overseas but have yet to visit him in Israel. I hope to do so soon and talk about my work there.
We finished our coffee, shook hands, and said goodbye.
(The full Lancet report can be found at this link:https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)01845-7/abstract)
Around two thousand years ago the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, actually Gaius Plinius Secundus wrote in Latin, ‘Africa semper aliqui nova,’ meaning that out of Africa there is always something new.
Doctor Nalianya is living proof that Pliny was right.