Nurses and human subjects research during the third reich and now

Abstract

While the roles of nurses in the crimes of National Socialism have not been as well studied as the roles of physicians, nurses both carried out the orders of physicians to kill their patients and personally selected and killed patients in the “euthanasia” programs. Nurses also participated in human subjects research in the concentration camps. For example, prisoner-nurses were assistants to Drs. Horst Schumann and Carl Clauberg in their sterilization experiments in Auschwitz. Interviews with two of these assistants and one subject of the experiments form the basis for the first part of this chapter. Nurses employed by the SS (Schutzstaffel) assisted with the wound infection experiments and pharmaceutical studies at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Several were tried after the war and were hanged or sentenced to prison.