Nurses in Nazi Germany [Hardcover]

Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0691006652 | ISBN-13: 978-0691006659 | Publication Date: November 1, 1999 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When Nazi Germany is the question, there are no easy answers. History looks back on those dark days and screams, simply, "Why?" In this careful book, Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke examines the Nazi euthanasia programs inflicted on the mentally and physically disabled between 1939 and 1945, which resulted in more than 100,000 deaths. Looking specifically at the psychiatric nurses who collaborated in treatments and experiments that abused or killed their subjects, McFarland-Icke finds an eclectic set of responses from a group of people who were, for the most part, ordinary Germans. "There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that people's choices in daily life did not, and could not, reflect a complete acceptance or rejection of National Socialism as a coherent entity representing a set of coherent principles," writes McFarland-Icke. This is a subtler work than Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Indeed, Nurses in Nazi Germany deliberately avoids sensational conclusions. Relying on previously neglected material, it is a sober study of human action under extraordinary pressure and strain. The focus of the book may make it seem specialized, but it addresses larger matters that concern anybody who is interested in the Holocaust, propaganda, and moral choices. --John J. Miller

From Library Journal

Many scholars have examined the "euthanasia" policies that took place in Nazi Germany. While most studies look at the role of higher-level administrators and physicians, McFarland-Icke questions how the lower-level staff, the "ordinary Germans," reacted to orders to participate in these programs. The author researched personnel files, trial testimonies, and articles from German nursing journals and textbooks to analyze the training and behavior of nurses employed in mental institutions. Based on her dissertation, the book describes the history of German psychiatric nursing in the years leading up to and including the National Socialism era. This analysis shows how nurses were treated and furnishes insight into the coping strategies they developed. Prior knowledge of Nazi terminology, history, and programs is assumed. Recommended for academic and bioethics collections.
-Tina Neville, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press; 1 edition (November 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691006652
• ISBN-13: 978-0691006659
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #959,029 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Removal of Responsibility, April 2, 2000

By 

Kayla Rigney "To save one life is to save the... (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Nurses in Nazi Germany (Hardcover)

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.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Coherent, Frightening, & Vivid Look At Nazi Euthanasia!, June 28, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nurses in Nazi Germany (Hardcover)

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.