Nurses and Midwives in Nazi Germany

In 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The philosophies of the Nazi party, of which he was head, were based on eugenics – a pseudoscience that had much traction around the world at the time.

Eugenics dictated that only the healthiest and fittest be allowed to procreate and to live. The Nazis’ racial policies, which divided human races into levels of fitness for life, synergised with eugenics to support programmes declaring certain people ‘life unworthy of life‘ or ‘useless feeders.’

Under such policies, people with mental illnesses, physical and intellectual disabilities, and conditions such as epilepsy, chronic alcoholism and a range of genetic diseases, were considered a burden on society and should be annihilated.

To this end, in 1939, Hitler, through his personal physician Dr Karl Brandt, set up the ‘T4′ programme – the systematic, state-sanctioned murder of the disabled and chronically ill. The first people to be killed were disabled children.

The main killing centres were hospitals and homes for the disabled. Parents and carers were encouraged to place their loved ones and children into institutions. They would then be moved to another institution a long way from home, and contact between child and parent ceased.

After some months, parents received a letter saying that their child had died of something like pneumonia or appendicitis and that the parents could come and collect their ashes and pay for the funeral.

Doctors would assess the patients and make a mark on a standard questionnaire that dictated whether the person was to be killed or allowed to live.

While doctors made the decisions about who should live or die, the nurses did the killing. The killings took place in hospitals. Who constitutes the largest proportion of the workforce in a hospital? It’s the nurses, and it was the nurses who killed.

They used intravenous injections, lethal doses of drugs such as phenobarbitone, or starvation or hypothermia from exposure.

Memorial to the Children Victims of the War, Lidice, Czech Republic.

What made the nurses do this, surely they were there to care for patients?

In Hitler’s Germany, propaganda underpinned everything.

Propaganda about ‘life unworthy of life’ and ‘useless feeders’ was everywhere, even in arithmetic exercises for primary school children.

Many people genuinely believed that by removing these burdens on society, Germany would be a better place. Nurses, too, succumbed to the propaganda. Many believed that they were doing the right thing, that Germany would be a better place because of these policies.

Of course, there were many who disagreed and would not take part. These nurses were not punished, nor ostracised – they were moved to another hospital or another ward.

In other words, the nurses who participated in this murder did so willingly and voluntarily.

Eduard Wagner (1 April 1894 – 23 July 1944) was a general in the Army of Nazi Germany who served as quartermaster-general in World War II. He had the overall responsibility for security in the Army Group Rear Areas, and thus bore responsibility for the war crimes committed by the rear-security units in the occupied areas under the army’s jurisdiction.

He was born in Kirchenlamitz, Upper Franconia. After service in World War I he was a member of the Reichswehr. In World War II he served as the quartermaster-general from 1941 to 1944 and was promoted to General der Artillerie on 1 August 1943.

On 24 July 1939 he drew up regulations that allowed German soldiers to take hostages from civilian population and execute them as response to resistance. He personally welcomed the idea of future invasion of Poland, writing that he looked to it “gladly”. He had a central role in the death sentences for ten Polish prisoners taken in the Defense of the Polish Post Office in Danzig. In May 1941, he drew up the regulations with Reinhard Heydrich that ensured that the Army and Einsatzgruppen would co-operate in murdering Soviet Jews. On the Eastern Front he had a role in ensuring that suitable winter clothing was supplied to the German forces and on 27 November 1941 he reported that “We are at the end of our resources in both personnel and material. We are about to be confronted with the dangers of deep winter.”

In the summer of 1942, before his visit to inspect the 6th Army during the Battle of Stalingrad, he informed Hitler of the “lack of sources of fuel.” By that time, “all the generals avoided contradicting Hitler” as “all feared the hysterical outbursts of this lofty dictator.”

Wagner even was well informed about planned war crimes of the future. In late February 1943, Otto Bräutigam of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories had the opportunity to read a personal report by Wagner about a discussion with Heinrich Himmler, in which Himmler had expressed the intention to exterminate about 80% of the populations of France and England by special forces of the SS after the German victory. Before, Hitler had called the English lower classes “racially inferior”.

He became a conspirator against Adolf Hitler. When Claus von Stauffenberg sought approval for an assassination attempt on 15 July 1944, he was cited as being definite that the assassination of Hitler should only be attempted if Heinrich Himmler was also present. On 20 July 1944, he arranged the airplane that flew Stauffenberg from Rastenburg back to Berlin after the bomb believed to have killed Hitler had exploded.

After the failure of the coup attempt, he feared that his arrest by the Gestapo was imminent and that he might be forced to implicate other plotters. He committed suicide by shooting himself in the head at noon on 23 July 1944.