Nurses in Nazi Germany

When Nazi Germany is the question, there are no easy answers. History looks back on those dark days and screams, simply, "Why?" In this careful book, Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke examines the Nazi euthanasia programs inflicted on the mentally and physically disabled between 1939 and 1945, which resulted in more than 100,000 deaths. Looking specifically at the psychiatric nurses who collaborated in treatments and experiments that abused or killed their subjects, McFarland-Icke finds an eclectic set of responses from a group of people who were, for the most part, ordinary Germans. "There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that people's choices in daily life did not, and could not, reflect a complete acceptance or rejection of National Socialism as a coherent entity representing a set of coherent principles," writes McFarland-Icke. This is a subtler work than Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Indeed, Nurses in Nazi Germany deliberately avoids sensational conclusions. Relying on previously neglected material, it is a sober study of human action under extraordinary pressure and strain. The focus of the book may make it seem specialized, but it addresses larger matters that concern anybody who is interested in the Holocaust, propaganda, and moral choices. --John J. Miller