Nurses in Nazi Germany: Moral Choice in History

by Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke

This book tells the story of German nurses who, directly or indirectly, participated in the Nazis' "euthanasia" measures against patients with mental and physical disabilities, measures that claimed well over 100,000 victims from 1939 to 1945. How could men and women who were trained to care for their patients come to kill or assist in murder or mistreatment? This is the central question pursued by Bronwyn McFarland-Icke as she details the lives...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691006652
• ISBN13: 9780691006659
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A Coherent, Frightening, & Vivid Look At Nazi Euthanasia!

Nowhere is the collective madness that Nazi Germany descended into better documented than in this story of its policy of euthanasia of its own infirm citizens. Although it is just an overview, it does provide the reader with an excellent starting point in learning about just how comprehensive and ambitious was this "ethnic cleansing" effort on the part of the National Socialists. Author Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke surveys the wide range of Nazi extermination programs as visited by the government on the mentally and physically handicapped based on their medically based crackpot theories associated with more positive programs of eugenics. It's a little known fact, for example, that physician and medical researcher Josef Mengele, later the Auschwitz "Angel of Death", was a respected member of the greater European medical research community in the late 1920s-1930s. This work is frightening in its examination of how easily these ideas and medical practices were incorporated into everyday practice, so that doctors, nurses and other medical personnel adopted and practiced them with little or no immediate feelings of either guilt or shame over the collective practice of eugenic ritual murder they were introducing into society. Interestingly, although this is a sensational subject, the author does not dwell on these elements so much as she asks some penetrating and intriguing questions regarding how easily and universally the German medical community adopted such practices starting in 1939 without asking any questions. Of course, while it is easy in retrospect to see how horrific these policies were, the social, political, and cultural situation in the Third Reich were hardly tolerant of such questioning attitudes or inconvenient questioning. Most fascinating is the systematic denial of knowledge or culpability on the part of the psychiatric nurses involved in the euthanasia programs. Rather, their responses suggest the same kind of ritual denial; of the "I only work here" sort of cultural excuses that one must recognize the degree to which such individuals were subjected to the extraordinary cultural pressures and collective denials that the National Socialists used throughout Germany to such chilling advantage. This is not, of course, to suggest a lack of personal responsibility or culpability for their collaboration and criminal involvement in the euthanasia programs, but rather to recognize how powerful a social force the kind of cultural pressures of living in Nazi Germany can be. It is a damning indictment of all of us who shun our own moral responsibilities in what happens around us. Indeed, the true legacy of the Nazi experience is the degree to which we must all accept responsibility for the moral choices we either make or avoid by our actions and inaction. This is a worthwhile, well-written if difficult book, one written on a specialized and quite specific aspect of the experience of the Holocaust, yet