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Steele, Charlsie Rachel

During the Nazi regime in Germany between 1939-1945, 300,000 patients were murdered as part of the Nazi Euthanasia Programs. These were systemized killing programs targeting mentally ill and disabled Germans, Jews, and later, foreign nationals in the aim eliminating anyone in the Third Reich deemed to have “lives unworthy of living.” Nursing played an integral role in the success and continued functioning of the Nazi Euthanasia Programs, directly killing tens of thousands of patients. This SPAR Project is a historical inquiry into the histories of Nazism, German nursing, and German psychiatry analyzing the progression and development of their disciplines and ideologies from late 19th until mid-20th centuries. Much of the literature written about the Nazi Euthanasia Programs suggest that German nurses were powerless and inherently subservient to medicine. However, under Nazism, nursing was recognized for its ability to achieve the aims of the Nazi state and was elevated as a profession as had not been achieved before. Nursing’s engagement and acceptance of Nazi ideology cannot simply be explained as being the result of a corruption, but rather it was the intricacies of the structures, principles, and ideologies of nursing that contributed to how it functioned and flourished under Nazism. Nursing’s legacies of violence extend far beyond Nazism and the Nazi Euthanasia Programs. The results of this inquiry use German nursing’s complex history to highlight a need for its inclusion in nursing curricula to bridge the connections between violence of the past and the realities of nursing’s present. This period of nursing history is used as an exemplar to addresses the complicity of nursing within violent systems and emphasize the implication for contemporary nursing practice and education.

Text

University of British Columbia. NURS 595

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0445183

Applied Science, Faculty of; Nursing, School of

Reviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/