Burghölzli, named after the wooded hill in the district of Riesbach in southeastern Zürich where it is located, is the Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Zürich, a psychiatric hospital in Switzerland. As a research hospital, it is associated with the University of Zürich.

Ernst Rüdin was a Swiss-born German psychiatrist, geneticist, eugenicist and Nazi, rising to prominence under Emil Kraepelin and assuming the directorship at the German Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich. While he has been credited as a pioneer of psychiatric inheritance studies, he also argued for, designed, justified and funded the mass sterilization and clinical killing of adults and children.