A01=Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke
Accountability
Action T4
Antisemitism
Attempt
Author_Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke
Bureaucrat
Career
Category=MBX
Category=MQ
Category=NHD
Category=NHTZ1
Category=NHWL
Category=NHWR7
Category=QDTQ
Communism
Complicity
Compulsory sterilization
Consideration
Decree
Deliberation
Employment
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Eugenics
Euthanasia
Everyday life
Exclusion
False accusation
Hadamar
Hitler's Willing Executioners
Hostility
Humiliation
Implementation
Indication (medicine)
Institution
Insubordination
Laziness
Left-wing politics
Lethal injection
Life unworthy of life
Marxism
Mass murder
Mental disorder
Moral responsibility
Morality
Murder
Nazism
Neglect
Nursing
Obedience (human behavior)
Opportunism
Optimism
Persecution
Politics
Precedent
Professional ethics
Professional responsibility
Psychiatric and mental health nursing
Psychiatric hospital
Psychiatrist
Psychiatry
Recommendation (European Union)
Refusal
Requirement
Result
Scarcity (social psychology)
Sedation
Sedative
Shortage
Single parent
Socialist state
State of affairs (sociology)
Suggestion
Suicide
Suicide attempt
Supervisor
Symptom
Thought
Uncertainty
Wrongdoing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691006659
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 21 Nov 1999
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke lives in Germany and is an adjunct lecturer in the University of Maryland's European Division.
