Nurses in Nazi Germany

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 of nurses from the beginning of the Weimar Republic through the years of National Socialist rule. Rather than examine what the Party did or did not order, she looks into the hearts and minds of people whose complicity in murder is not easily explained with reference to ideological enthusiasm. Her book is a micro-history in which many of the most important ethical, social, and cultural issues at the core of Nazi genocide can be addressed from a fresh perspective.


McFarland-Icke offers gripping descriptions of the conditions and practices associated with psychiatric nursing during these years by mining such sources as nursing guides, personnel records, and postwar trial testimony. Nurses were expected to be conscientious and friendly caretakers despite job stress, low morale, and Nazi propaganda about patients' having "lives unworthy of living." While some managed to cope with this situation, others became abusive. Asylum administrators meanwhile encouraged nurses to perform with as little disruption and personal commentary as possible. So how did nurses react when ordered to participate in, or tolerate, the murder of their patients? Records suggest that some had no conflicts of conscience; others did as they were told with regret; and a few refused. The remarkable accounts of these nurses enable the author to re-create the drama taking place while sharpening her argument concerning the ability and the willingness to choose.

Genres: Nursing, History, Medicine, Health, Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1999

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was a bit disappointed in this book. It included a lot of material, I felt, that had nothing to do with Nazi Germany and the choices the nurses had to make. That section was short in comparison to the rest of the book, as I recall. I was so excited to receive this book in the mail since I was doing research on this very topic, but it didn't tell me what I wanted to know, which is what life was like for the nurses and why they made the choices they did.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had really high hopes for this book and I was pretty disappointed. As the title and the jacket description suggest, I was expecting the book to be mostly made up of psychiatric nurses' experiences during the Nazi reign in Germany and how it impacted their moral choices.

Instead a lot of the book was about the history of the psychiatric movement pre-National Socialist government and pre-World War II, how nurses were treated by their superiors, what kind of people were hired as nurses, and then discussion regarding the National Socialist government and how it affected the nurses involved in psychiatric care. Only one chapter was devoted to the actual killings in psychiatric hospitals and even then a lot of the discussion was about how nurses choices were made for them, and not how they made their own moral decisions. It left me with a lot of questions about the role of nurses in the psychiatric units in Germany and their role in the euthanasia program.

Also, while this may seem a little nit-picky, the author uses italics all the time, at least once per page, often more than that. It was actually annoying because it interrupted the flow of the argument often.

This book could have been really amazing, but it just wasn't.