Nurses in Nazi Germany

Rating:
Summary: A Coherent, Frightening, & Vivid Look At Nazi Euthanasia!
Review: 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 one reverberating with the murderous potential of the Nazis so early in their tenure in Germany. After all, had the world known how ready ordinary Germans were to kill their own mentally ill, physically handicapped, and inconvenient older and chronically sick citizens, perhaps we would have acted differently in accepting much larger number of Jewish and other expatriated Germans than we did. Such is our own American complicity in this legacy of human shame.

Rating:
Summary: The Removal of Responsibility
Review: Nurses in Nazi Germany is not a bad book by any means. It simply covers too many ideas in too little space. In other words, it lacks depth.

In what could have been a ground breaking work, the authors seem compelled to encapsulate profound ideas into easily digestible sections. I'd get drawn into a chapter, only to have it end before a subject was fully developed. There are simply better books on T4.

However, there IS reason to own Nurses in Nazi Germany. It provides one of the BEST explorations of the use of official language to re-educate medical personnel to accept the idea of "euthanasia"-- while at the same time completely distancing them from taking responsibility for the act of murder.

As nurses in the Nazi hierarchy -- and indeed the medical profession as a whole at the time -- were expected to follow doctors' orders without question, there was a built-in "buffer" between the nurse and culpability. This distanced killing center nurses from moral responsibility as well. In a sense, the medical culture "forgave" them their actions because, technically, nurses didn't "know" what they were doing! This rationale comes up again and again in interviews with former killing center staff. It's chilling.

The idea that language can act as a buffer between morality and murder is incredible to me. The language of "distancing" is dangerous -- and second nature to most of us.

Even though I cannot rate this book highly, I think it does make a solid contribution to the study of medicine in Nazi Germany.

Rating:
Summary: The Removal of Responsibility
Review: Nurses in Nazi Germany is not a bad book by any means. It simply covers too many ideas in too little space. In other words, it lacks depth.

In what could have been a ground breaking work, the authors seem compelled to encapsulate profound ideas into easily digestible sections. I'd get drawn into a chapter, only to have it end before a subject was fully developed. There are simply better books on T4.

However, there IS reason to own Nurses in Nazi Germany. It provides one of the BEST explorations of the use of official language to re-educate medical personnel to accept the idea of "euthanasia"-- while at the same time completely distancing them from taking responsibility for the act of murder.

As nurses in the Nazi hierarchy -- and indeed the medical profession as a whole at the time -- were expected to follow doctors' orders without question, there was a built-in "buffer" between the nurse and culpability. This distanced killing center nurses from moral responsibility as well. In a sense, the medical culture "forgave" them their actions because, technically, nurses didn't "know" what they were doing! This rationale comes up again and again in interviews with former killing center staff. It's chilling.

The idea that language can act as a buffer between morality and murder is incredible to me. The language of "distancing" is dangerous -- and second nature to most of us.

Even though I cannot rate this book highly, I think it does make a solid contribution to the study of medicine in Nazi Germany.