The economic situation in Germany following World War I and the Versailles
Treaty led to the wholesale implementation of Hitler's policies.
They started killing children first and then a bit later on started killing
adults.
It's not surprising that the nurses in the Nazi era got caught up in all this.
The propaganda was everywhere about killing people who were considered life
unworthy of life.
Useless feeders was the term they used.
The nurses were the ones who held the children while they were being killed.
They gave them the overdoses of drugs.
They were the ones who put them out on the verandas to die of hypothermia.
The nurses were the ones who withheld the feeding so the children would die of
starvation.
After World War I ended in 1918, Germany went through severe economic
hardships and the nation saw the rise of different political factions and ideals.
One group that emerged was Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party.
Of course there was rampant inflation, there was great poverty and social
disadvantage because of the reparations which had to be paid back after the Treaty
of Versailles.
Money was devaluated and they saw a strong leader that was restoring order.
By 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party had taken control of Germany and this
began a period of racial hygiene laws, persecution and death camps.
Hitler wanted to create the master race and eliminate Jews and other people he
considered inferior to the Aryan race.
Innocent children and concentration camp prisoners suffered through horrific
medical experiments.
All of this was accomplished with the assistance of German doctors and nurses.
The basis for Hitler's plan of racial hygiene was a concept called eugenics,
which is the pseudoscience of developing a superior race.
Before Hitler came to power, across the world, the whole theory of eugenics was
something that many nations had embraced.
Eugenics is the belief that through selective breeding, whether it's cows,
sheep, people, whatever, through selective breeding, positive eugenics is the ability
to breed offspring that will carry the best traits.
This theory of eugenics, how people should be allowed to breed to the benefit of the
human race and those who weren't fit and healthy should not be allowed to have
children.
Caught on in England, the United States, Japan, Scandinavia.
Germany was not at the forefront of this.
And the Nazis actually learned much of their eugenics initially from the U.S.
Some of these eugenic health care policies were developed in the United States in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries.
These U.S.
policies were emulated by Germany and incorporated into the governing philosophy
of applied biology.
There were laws on the book in Virginia that said that you could sterilize people.
And the Nazis took their 1933 sterilization law and mimicked it after
the U.S.
law.
Yeah, in fact, there was a time in which there were letters in the U.S.
journals saying, look at the Nazis have gotten ahead of us.
We've got to catch up.
And so, of course, when Hitler came along with his racial theories, he realized that
this eugenics was a really good idea and he manipulated it to fit his racial
theories, all mixed in with the Jews, the Gypsies, everybody else who was
considered racially inferior.
All of this would lead to an appalling era in world history called the Holocaust,
a period of persecution and mass murder.
The Holocaust has been defined as the 12-year period from Hitler's rise to power
in 1933 until the end of the war in 1945.
It was a government-planned, government-supported mass extermination or
mass killing.
And while it was targeted towards Jewish people, there were many other groups of
individuals that suffered during the Holocaust.
Hitler convinced the German people that the Jews were their enemy and the cause of
their problems.
He then created an atmosphere of racial intolerance and hatred of people deemed to
be racially inferior.
So every genocide, whether it's Rwanda, the Holocaust, begins with we versus them.
So Hitler used the Jews and later other people as scapegoats for all that was
wrong in Germany, particularly the economic woes.
So he set up the we versus them.
He institutionalized them.
In 1933, the Nazi government passed the Nuremberg Laws for the protection of
hereditary health.
This legalized involuntary sterilization.
So Hitler found a perfect meshing of his Nazi ideology with the eugenic Nazi
medicine or racial hygiene movement.
Germany's sterilization laws led to the involuntary sterilization by doctors of
about 400,000 Germans.
Nazi doctors sterilized citizens against their will, euthanized 200,000 disabled
German children and adults, and created the gas chambers and crematoria that were
used for the mass murder of 6 million Jews, Poles, and Gypsies.
Without the full support of physicians, scientists, and nurses, the Holocaust,
as it unfolded, could never have happened.
In the U.S., there were laws that could require that people be sterilized against
their will.
Sterilization laws were widespread in the U.S., most notably in Indiana and North
Carolina.
But other states, including California and Virginia, allowed sterilization even into
the 1970s.
In fact, in the early 20th century, the U.S.
led the world in compulsory sterilizations.
A very famous law was passed in Virginia that said it was okay to sterilize the
retarded.
And it was brought before the Supreme Court, and Oliver Wendell Holmes said
three generations of imbeciles is enough, saying that it was okay to sterilize.
But it didn't go further.
While in Germany, it became the leading ideology, then it was implemented into
action.
Hitler promised the German people they were creating the master race.
I think the master race would have been the Nazis' view of a strong, blonde,
blue-eyed, healthy person who had no genetic defects and who was pure Aryan.
In the 1920s and 30s, Germany's medical community was considered the best in the
world.
You weren't a real doctor in the U.S.
unless you went to Germany to study, and then you came back and said,
you know, I studied in Germany.
I think with that came some arrogance and some feeling that we are so superior to
everybody else.
I studied medicine in Germany.
I know some of the best teaching of anatomy, physiology, and medicine came
from Germany.
Germany was very advanced, not only in the medical field, but Germany was the best
civilization among the European countries.
It was the height of technology, the height of science.
How was it possible that these people became murderers?
The majority of nurses were not members of the Nazi party.
However, to have a job in Germany, a nurse had to belong to one of several
nursing organizations.
There were five organizations for nurses.
Among these, the National Socialist Nurses and the Red Cross Nurses swore an oath of
allegiance to Hitler.
Additionally, the Protestant Nurses Organization said that it greets National
Socialism with an open heart.
Surprisingly, more physicians, percentage-wise, joined the Nazi party
than the population in general.
And I think physicians were very taken with the fact that we can use our science
to improve the human race.
Many physicians and nurses enthusiastically supported the Nazi regime
and were involved in all aspects of the Holocaust.
About 40 percent of German physicians were in the Nazi party, while the lawyers and
teachers and the other white-collar professions joined in much lesser numbers.
If you didn't join the Nazi party, there was no retribution.
Using inflammatory propaganda, Hitler and the Nazis began a campaign
against the Jews.
And I know that my father used to say that bad things are happening to Jewish people
in Germany.
They're being discriminated against.
Jewish children can no longer go to their regular school.
People cannot keep their jobs at the university or other professions.
Hitler said, follow me, never mind God, never mind religion, just follow me,
do what I am asking you to do.
And since the regime was totalitarian, and they were very good at public
campaigns and propaganda, and they had enough scientists and physicians that were
already marching to the drum.
Propaganda is an extremely powerful way to convince people to their way of thinking.
Germany's medical establishment began to support the Nazi party, except for Jewish
doctors who were ostracized.
The official journal of the German Medical Association started to have a swastika on
their journal, and they got rid of all the Jewish physicians, authors, people in
office of all the different associations and societies very quickly.
And in five or six years, they got them out of all the academic and professional
establishment.
After years of strong Nazi propaganda, Germany's doctors and nurses began to
accept the belief that racial hygiene would be good for the nation.
Social Darwinism said we need to eliminate these inferior people that were
handicapped, that were maybe mentally disturbed.
We want a healthy thriving society.
In Germany, the proponents of the eugenic movement were the most prominent,
the most powerful.
The establishment, the legal system became Nazified immediately.
Well, of course, it required lawyers, it required doctors, it required
bureaucrats, it required administrators, but many of the nurses were the ones who
actually carried out the injections.
But for a long time, nurses were the agents of the physicians, and the
physicians in the Nazi period were agents of the state.
So that's very important, because physicians were no longer asked to care
for patients, but to care for the state, the Volk, the German Volk.
And so what was good for the state was what was important, not what was good for
an individual patient.
Obedience was still very much a part of the way nurses were taught and the way we
thought.
So it's not surprising that the nurses in the Nazi era got caught up in all this.
Euthanasia programs were established in Nazi Germany in which children and adults
were killed if they were considered unfit for life and were a burden on the state.
The true meaning of euthanasia would be the mercy killing of a person with their
permission or their request.
However, this was not the case in Nazi Germany.
These killings were without consent.
They were murders.
In the 1920s, German lawyer Karl Binding and German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche
co-authored the book The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life.
This book greatly influenced Hitler's thinking about euthanasia.
Everybody had that propaganda thrown at them.
It was common.
It was everywhere.
And it espoused the idea that people who were in some way deficient should be
killed so that they didn't carry on the defective genes and so that they weren't a
burden on the state.
So the nurses, just as everybody else in society, were susceptible to this.
The nurses were working in hospitals where children with disabilities, people with
mental illnesses, a whole range of conditions were cared for.
They weren't coerced into becoming part of these programs.
Once you accept humans can be humanized, eventually you can engage in exterminating
them.
And this was a gradual and very powerful and unfortunately very effective process
that took place in Germany.
The Nazi euthanasia program first started in 1939 as a means to eliminate
handicapped children.
You have families who, because of all the propaganda, are believing that to have a
child with negative traits is a bad thing.
It's bad for the health of Germany.
They were killing children with disabilities, children with down syndrome,
children with cardiac anomalies, children with cerebral palsy, children who
didn't develop normally, who were considered to be useless feeders.
That was the term used.
Public health nurses would go to the families, promise them, if you will give
your child to us, your child will get the best care.
And so people were falsely led to believe that and relinquish their children.
The nurses were involved in the killing of children by giving them overdoses,
by taking them outside knowing that it was going to contribute to their death.
I got very interested in this when I found out that nurses actively killed their
patients.
And I became intrigued into how they could come to believe that killing was a
legitimate part of their caring role, which they did.
The propaganda around the whole idea of killing people for the exercises in their
school books on how much it costs to keep people with a disability, for example.
Midwives and physicians were mandated by German law to report any infant born with
a birth defect, and the infant would be placed in an institution.
Midwives were paid for each birth that they reported.
Midwives were licensed.
They had to go through a similar training period as nursing, and many of them were
independent practitioners.
So not long after the child was put into a home, he or she would then be moved to
another institution further away.
Of course, there was no consent, no nothing.
These killings were done without the parents' approval, more in the main.
The nurses and the midwives who were involved in the carrying out, maybe not
even the ideology, but were actually the doers of the euthanasia program.
Euthanasia is really a euphemism for murder because these were not terminally
ill patients.
These were children that were taken and murdered, mostly children who had handicap
or mental retardation.
I think one deciding point is in Germany, the notion that the health of the public
is more important than the health of the individual.
So consequently, to remove an unhealthy element was seen as good.
In September 1939, a decision was made to develop an adult euthanasia program for
patients in psychiatric facilities.
Hitler picked the date to coincide with Germany's invasion of Poland.
To expand it to include adults, the only way we're going to make this
acceptable is to say, we need these hospital beds for the war wounded.
Why should the state pay to keep totally disabled people alive when our young guys
are sent to the front, need to come back home and have care?
The name of this killing organization was T4.
Eventually, six killing centers were established.
Medical staffs were ordered to fill out questionnaires to evaluate whether their
patients should live or die.
Patients were placed in gas chambers that looked like showers.
Then lethal carbon monoxide was pumped into the chambers, killing the patients.
You have to justify and rationalize what you're doing because you're doing it.
But they actually believed it.
And they actually believed that what they were doing was saving the folk from its
contamination, from the infection, that there was a disease.
And the disease was the handicapped and the infirmed, and that they needed to be
cured through killing, healing through killing.
They were told they were being transferred.
The nurses packed their clothes, their lunch, rode with them on the buses.
The hospitals, these six, had specially constructed kind of breezeways that the
buses would go through so the patients could be unloaded into the hospital
without being viewed by the community.
However, it didn't take long for the communities near these hospitals to
realize what was going on.
People would see the buses.
The buses were very unique, painted gray.
The windows were painted over and so forth.
Buses would arrive, and within a very short period of time, this acrid smoke
would be billowing out of the chimneys.
Each hospital had a department to write condolence letters to the families.
And there were mix-ups.
They would write and say, we're sorry to tell you your uncle Hans died of
appendicitis, and maybe he'd already had his appendix removed.
People were becoming quite knowledgeable about what was going on.
Even children would taunt other children saying, they're going to put you on the
gray bus.
You're going to go up the chimney.
As knowledge of the gassing of patients became widespread, the decision was made
to end the T4 euthanasia program in August 1941.
This, however, did not end the killing of patients.
The children's euthanasia program continued unabated until the end of the
war.
After the end of the T4 program, physicians were granted permission to
provide a merciful death to any person they deemed to be suffering.
These killings, which took place at many hospitals throughout the Third Reich,
were known as wild euthanasia, or decentralized euthanasia, and were
carried out on an individual basis rather than by gassing.
Patients, usually selected by physicians but killed by nurses, were administered
overdoses of sedatives.
More people died in wild euthanasia than in T4.
Why did the nurses follow orders to kill?
We do know that the doctors were the ones who signed the certificates that said
whether the child was to live or die.
It was the nurses who carried out the killings.
The doctors didn't necessarily carry out the killings themselves.
They may have dictated who was to die, but it was the nurses who carried out the
killings.
There are episodes where the nurses decided themselves to take things into
their own hands and kill the patients because they knew they were going to die
anyway, so he was suffering, so I'll do it now.
He's going to die anyway, so I might as well do it quicker.
There's the most mesmerizing quote from one of the nurses who talks about how
lovingly we held them in our arms while we got them to drink this medication.
We didn't want them to suffer more than necessary while they were killing.
More than 70 years later, the question of how Germany's nurses became involved in
these killings still intrigues historians.
Well, it is of course a multi-faceted phenomenon, I think, what happened there,
but it is a very good example of you start one thing and then it leads to something a
little worse and a little worse.
So at first if they were asked to hold a patient while somebody else did something,
an injection or whatever, they could do that and they could say to themselves,
I'm not the one taking any action here.
And then from there it's a shorter step to, well, you give the injection.
For some nurses, I can see that this could, they could easily fall into the
trap of thinking that this was the right thing to do.
To me though, the whole issue is interesting because there's a line that as
a nurse that you cross.
And I think also in that era, nurses were very subservient and very obedient and
whatever the doctor said they should do, they felt they had to obey and do that or
fear the consequences.
And similar to their obedience to physicians, nurses were also educated to
be obedient to senior nurses, who at times also ordered killings.
Nurses were involved in actually the killings themselves, either through active
means or through passive means, letting patients starve or exposing them
to hazards where they would get pneumonia and other things and die.
In 1939, World War II began when the Germans attacked and invaded neighboring
Poland.
Our building was actually also hit.
Polish survivor Anna Steinberger recalls the bombing.
And I could see the flames on the roof of the building.
I asked my mom, what is going on?
Do I go to school?
And she says, no school today.
Just go hide in the cellar.
Polish Jews were rounded up into ghettos and later moved to other institutions for
medical experiments.
A decision was made by the Nazis in January of 1942 at the Wannsee Conference
to go further with the final solution and move the Jews into death camps.
So there were four camps that were specifically created as death camps.
Belzec, Kalmo, Treblinka, and Sobibor.
There were two additional concentration camps that developed a killing portion.
That would be Madonek and Auschwitz.
Some skilled workers were kept alive to work in the camps.
And the infrastructure, and the know-how, and the personnel of the 64 centers was
actually transferred to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
And they have built the first gas chambers.
And then some of the same doctors and nurses who were involved in the euthanasia
program took the gas chambers down and reassembled them east in Poland at the
concentration camps, were doctors selected at the ramps, and were involved in
supervising the gassings and killings.
So physicians were involved in all aspects.
Ravensbruck, located in Germany, was a camp for women.
Most of the women were Polish.
There were some Jews there, but most of the women were dissenters or women who'd
caused trouble to the Nazis when the Nazis occupied Poland.
Ravensbruck was located close to one of the largest and most important hospitals
in Germany, where a lot of research was going on.
Reinhard Heydrich was the Nazi protector of Czechoslovakia, who in 1942 was killed
by a bomb.
He died from infection of the wounds that he got.
He died several days later.
Hitler demanded that doctors should find a cure for these deadly infections.
And so Ravensbruck, which was close by, had all these women there that they used
as lab rats, basically.
The women were operated on by the surgeons from this hospital.
They had things like wounds created in their legs that were filled up with
sawdust, dirt, ground glass, to see what would happen to the wound, how wounds
developed, how bone became infected.
Some of these women were sent to the gas chambers afterwards.
They were killed.
Some of the women died, of course, from the experiments.
And some of the women survived to give testimony in the trials.
But nurses were definitely involved in those experiments.
Many German physicians and nurses participated in medical experiments
related to racial hygiene in the concentration camps and hospitals.
One of the worst was Dr. Josef Mengele, a member of the SS.
Then the cattle car doors opened and we stepped down onto a little strip of land
called the selection platform.
We had no idea where we were.
All we really knew that we did not arrive in Hungary, but we were taken to Germany,
which meant to us that the end was near.
Because there were a lot of rumors for four years under Hungarian occupation that
Jews were being taken to Germany and murdered.
Eva Moses Kor is a survivor of the notorious Auschwitz, where she and her
twin sister Miriam suffered under Dr. Josef Mengele and his experiments on
twins.
There were four of us in the family, children and parents.
My mother grabbed my twin sister and me by the hand because we were her youngest
children and she was hoping that as long as she could hold on to us, that she could
protect us.
Everything was moving very fast.
I was on that little strip of land called the selection platform not longer than 10
minutes.
And in my childish curiosity, I looked around trying to figure out what that
place was when I realized that my father and two older sisters disappeared in the
crowd and I never saw them again.
So as we were holding on to mother, a Nazi was running, yelling in German,
Zwillinge, Zwillinge, twins, twins.
We did not volunteer any information because we really had no idea what worked
in that place.
We were extremely troubled, confused and exhausted.
And he noticed us, approached us because we were dressed alike and we looked alike
and he demanded to know from my mother if we were twins.
And my mother didn't know what to say.
She asked if that was good and the Nazi nodded yes and my mother said yes.
Then another Nazi came, pulled my mother in one direction.
We were pulled in the opposite direction.
As I look back, I remember my mother's arms stretched out in despair as she was
pulled away.
I never got to say goodbye to her, but of course I didn't really realize that
this would be the last time we would see her.
And all that took no longer than about 30 minutes.
Miriam and I were alone.
We had no idea what would happen to us and all that was done to us for no other
reason except that we were Jewish and we really didn't understand why that was a
crime.
Then they lined us up for registration and tattooing and when my turn came,
I decided to give them as much trouble as a 10-year-old could.
Four people, two women prisoners and two Nazis restrained me.
They pinned me on a bench while they heated a gadget that it looked like a
writing pen with a needle at the end.
And then when the needle got really hot, they dipped it into ink and they burned
into my left arm the capital letter A-7063.
The twins were housed in barracks according to age and sex.
We became part of a group of little girls, all twins.
In our transport there were certain sets of little girls age 2 to age 16.
That is the way they housed us in our barrack according to age and sex.
After roll call we would go back to the barrack for Dr. Mengele's daily
inspection.
He would always come in dressed in his shiny uniforms, gleaming black boots,
white gloves and a baton in his hand and he would count us.
He wanted to know... After breakfast, the twins would be readied for
experiments.
We would walk to Auschwitz I and placed naked in a barrack, maybe 20, 30 sets of
twins for six to eight hours.
Every part of my body was measured compared to charts, compared to my twin
sister.
Those experiments were not dangerous, but they were unbelievably demeaning.
And even in Auschwitz I couldn't cope, to cope with it for six to eight hours.
The only way that I could is by blocking it out of my mind.
So even today I have very limited information on those long hours.
Three days a week the children would be taken to a blood lab.
There they would tie both of my arms to restrict the blood flow, take a lot of
blood from my left arm.
At the same time, they would give me a minimum of five injections into my right
arm.
The content of those injections we didn't know then, nor do I know today.
To the best of my knowledge, they were germs, diseases and drugs, because the
German pharmaceutical company was very heavily involved in the experiments in
Auschwitz.
After one of those injections, I became very ill with a very high fever,
a fact I desperately tried to hide.
The rumor in the camp was that anyone taken to the hospital never came back.
So I did not want to be taken to the hospital.
My fever was high, both of my legs and arms were swollen and very, very painful.
And I had huge red patches throughout my body, the size of a small apple or an egg.
According to the Auschwitz Museum, at least 1,500 sets of twins were used by
Mengele in his experiments.
Less than 200 survived.
Some died as a result of the conditions in the camp, but the majority died as a
result of the experiments.
Oh no, they were truly monsters.
The stuff that happened was horrendous.
There's no ethical justification for most of what they did under the name of medical
science.
It was done totally without informed consent.
The people used as lab rats had no choice.
They were often killed immediately afterwards.
They had the most horrendous things done to them.
In the sterilization experiments performed at Auschwitz, it was often the nurses who
would select and prepare the patients for the experiments.
Then they assisted whatever the physician needed the nurse assistant to do and kept
it secret from the patients as to what was going to happen, giving false reassurance
that everything is going to be all right.
We're taking good care of you.
At Dachau, a variety of unethical medical experiments were made using the prisoners
as guinea pigs.
Some of the cruelties are almost unbelievable.
They had a purpose for each one of these, usually to benefit downed German pilots in
freezing water or some other battlefield result.
Author Vivian Spitz was an eyewitness court reporter for the Nuremberg war
crimes trials of Nazi doctors.
She refers to her book, Doctors from Hell, as she recalls the trial testimony she
reported.
The victims were German, Czech and Polish gypsies who were deprived of food and
given only brackish yellow seawater for days, resulting in, of course,
excruciating pain and foaming at the mouth and in most cases madness.
Many of these patients died.
They did experimentations where they would keep people in freezing temperatures until
they were almost dead, revive them and then expose them again.
Lower the temperature, raise the temperature until they froze and died.
And then they took them directly to the autopsy table in what they call terminal
experiments.
And so they did low pressure studies where they took concentration camp prisoners and
put them into specially designed rooms where they sucked out the oxygen,
let in the oxygen until their lungs exploded and they died in terminal
experiments.
There were studies of bone and muscle and infectious diseases.
They were trying out new antibiotics.
So they took concentration camp prisoners and cut open and filleted and infected
their legs and wounds to create simulated wounds.
We know that the sterilization program, the mercy killing program and the unlawful
human experimentation program were masterminded, planned, suggested,
implemented by physicians.
Dr. Joseph Mengele was able to escape from Germany after the war and avoided
apprehension by authorities.
Joseph Mengele was the worst that we never got.
Mengele's family was very wealthy manufacturers in Bavaria and they managed
to hide him until they could get him out of Germany.
Dr. Mengele lived in South America until 1979 when he reportedly drowned while
swimming at a resort in Brazil.
Finally, in May 1945, the war in Europe ended when the Germans surrendered to the
Allies and the guns were silent.
After the war, the Allies conducted the famous Nuremberg Trials and the world
became aware of the atrocities of the Nazi doctors and nurses.
We don't know the figures of the nurses who were involved because they were the
workforce in these hospitals.
Although nurses were not named as defendants in the medical trials at
Nuremberg, the results of some of their actions during the war were brought to
light.
For example, the horrific experiments done on young Polish women at Ravensbruck and
the killing of the disabled persons in the so-called euthanasia programs were made
public.
Nurses, however, were not exonerated for their crimes.
Many stood trial later on and several were hanged for their actions, including two
male nurses from the Hadamar euthanasia site.
Numerous subsequent trials of nurses resulted in prison sentences.
At other trials, nurses were acquitted despite admitting their guilt.
There was a trial for the nurses and I think over 14 in all and none of them were
convicted.
The first trial of the first nurse and the first physician was in 1946 and it was the
nurse and physician at Meseretz.
And interestingly, both of them received the death sentence and were hanged.
The nurses who were tried in 1965, there were 15 nurses from Meseretz to be
tried.
One killed herself the for the trial.
So 14 nurses were tried.
And the reasons they gave were, I thought I was relieving people from
their suffering.
These people had no life at all.
I needed to keep my job.
I think probably loss of memory and other things that had changed during that time,
the nurses were not held accountable.
And they used the defense too that I was only following orders.
Just following orders was not going to be an acceptable defense to murder,
to genocide.
And one of the things that came out of Nuremberg was the notion that everybody is
responsible for their own actions.
But the baffling thing to me is still the trial in 1965 of the 14 Meseretz nurses.
They had had 20 years to think about what they had done.
Those nurses did not deny what they did.
One of them said, yes, I probably killed 210 people.
Now the nurses from Spiegel-Gruen were tried after the war.
Anna Kachinka is one of them.
And received several years in prison.
Not all of the nurses under the Third Reich were compliant with the Nazi
ideology.
One Austrian SS nurse, Maria Stromberger, showed great compassion toward prisoners
at Auschwitz.
She had heard some of the things that were going on at Auschwitz and just could not
believe it.
Because she said, we're a good and moral people.
We wouldn't do this.
So she went and said, transfer me to Auschwitz.
I want to work there.
So her goal was to work caring for the inmates.
Eventually she gained their trust and would smuggle out letters, documents,
photographs.
She smuggled in ammunition.
She saved the lives of many of them.
Perhaps the most famous of the trials held at Nuremberg before an international
military tribunal was the so-called medical case, or the doctor's trial.
Karl Brandt, who was the chief physician of Hitler, said, I did what needed to be
done.
This was good what we did.
We made German people healthier.
So people were convinced that they are doing something positive in all these
atrocities.
Twenty-three physicians and scientists were tried for crimes against humanity.
Crimes against humanity was a new concept, which was whether it be wartime,
not wartime.
There were certain things beyond the pale that we were going to hold people
accountable.
So genocide was a classic example of a crime against humanity.
And so the doctors went on trial.
Today, many of these killing centers are memorials open to the public.
But in spite of the bucolic setting, they were centers of inhumane experiments,
mass murder, and extermination.
Many of these institutions remain working psychiatric hospitals even today.
It looked like a college campus.
It was beautiful.
I've been to prisons, death camps, in both Germany and Austria.
It's not quite the same because the place is more or less clean and, of course,
empty.
And so you have to stand there and be there to kind of think how would it have
been when it was so crowded and it was so dirty and they didn't have water to drink.
One of the patients I'm familiar with drank water from the floor and died from
an infection.
And it's just hard to be in those places and realize the conditions that were
there.
Spiegelgrund is still a large active hospital in Vienna.
During the Holocaust, it consisted of a children's ward and became infamous for
the euthanasia of the children there.
The brains of many of these children were saved for years in the basement of
Spiegelgrund.
I think it is good that they're open to the public because you can read about it
and you can see pictures.
But until you are actually there and standing there, you don't get the emotions
and the feeling that you would otherwise.
All right, it looks like he might have a rhythm back on the monitor.
It's sinus, but slow.
Although current health care in the U.S.
is regarded as among the best in the world, there are elements that should
cause us to reflect upon the similarities to German medicine in the 1930s.
So it's important that for us, both as nurses who are looking at history
and nurses working today, that we know about this history.
Because unless we know, we can't stop it happening again.
And it will happen again.
Today, nurses are involved in the legal euthanasia of patients in Belgium,
Holland and Switzerland.
Nurses are also involved in executions in the countries where the death penalty is
legal.
My take on it is that the nurses working in those areas should know the history so
that they themselves can determine whether it's relevant to what they're doing and
ask themselves the question, is this an ethical area in which I want to work?
We physicians, nurses, have a power that if we are not careful, can be abused.
So by learning about how this power was abused in the worst way, we hope that
you'll inoculate yourself and be conscious and aware and reflective.
Or how does any person know what is right from wrong?
And I think that I have to have a conscience and a moral compass.
That if somebody has no morality, then it's very difficult for them to
really understand or judge for their own knowledge what is wrong and what is right.
But if it hurts another human being, I think that it's morally wrong.
I'm just amazed, even today, to ask someone who's a freshman in high school
what they knew about the Nuremberg trials and they don't know what you're talking
about.
Many young people today are not aware of the Holocaust and its place in history.
They know that it was something happened, what they think is a long time ago,
and it's over and it's never going to happen again, so why should we keep
bringing it up?
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
And that is exactly what is happening.
I think it's important for all healthcare professionals to study what we've done in
the past and to learn how those particular doctors and nurses and dentists and other
health professionals got involved in the acts that they got involved in because
we're dealing with the same issues today and we always need to be alert.
Regulatory procedures in the nursing profession today are more stringent than
in the 1920s and 30s.
There is an American Nurses Association.
They have a code of ethics for nursing that guides the ethical conduct of
nursing, but there is no regulatory backup for that code.
It is simply a guidance.
I think what is happening today is medical errors where sometimes nurses and others
don't speak up when they see an error that's possible and that's likely to occur
and they don't speak up for fear of, well, the doctor must know what he or she
is doing and I don't want to embarrass myself by saying something and then it
turns out not to be true.
Today, medical experts are facing new technological and social issues.
So, I'm quite concerned about the physician-assisted suicide movement in the
U.S.
I think it's easier to get yourself killed than it is to get health care.
I'm concerned when you have 40 million people who have access to no health care
that you offer them euthanasia, you offer them persisted suicide.
With these new developments, could the world see another era of unethical medical
practices and experiments?
You know, after the Holocaust, the motto was never again, never again
should a Holocaust happen.
I think the lesson we have learned from the Nazi era and the Holocaust is that we
are all vulnerable to outside pressures, influences, and that things can happen
that we may not see at the time, that things are going awry.
And that's why we have to all be on our guard and we have to monitor ourselves,
we have to monitor each other because the health care environment is very
challenging.
A couple of takeaways from what we learned about the nurses in the Holocaust,
I think the first one is how easy it is to become involved, especially in the
beginning.
How easy was it for those nurses just to take a patient to a special room?
They didn't know what the room was for, they were simply taking a patient to a
special room.
How long did it take them to actually find out that every patient who went to that
room did not come out alive?
That could take quite a long period of time.
Once you've started doing that, then maybe you're asked to help give a
patient medication.
So slowly the nurses could have gotten involved and not even known what they were
doing.
Learning about the Holocaust is a very powerful way to learn empathy and
compassion.
Only by educating people that we must learn to live in peace and harmony with
each other, regardless of color of the skin or background or economic situation
and so on.
But the question of course is how did one of the most advanced societies,
advanced in art, music, theater, writing, medicine, you weren't a real
doctor in the U.S.
unless you went to Germany to study.
And then you came back and said, you know, I studied in Germany.
And so it was the height of technology, the height of science, how was it possible
that these people became murderers?
It's easy to believe the Holocaust could never be repeated.
The factors leading up to it are not unique to Germany.
They are human factors that are present in every country, every culture, and every
generation.
If it could happen in one of the most advanced societies in human history,
it can happen again anywhere.
If it happened in Germany, then it can happen anywhere else.
So we must be very, very vigilant.
It's up to each of us to learn from the past and be ready to interrupt the forces
that may try to exploit the few for the benefit of the majority.