James Bailey, “Caring Corrupted: The Killing Nurses of The Third Reich” (2017)
A grim and horrifying film, all the more so for its clinical, matter-of-fact tone driven mainly by interviews of researchers and Holocaust survivors, “Caring Corrupted …” explores and explains in much detail the role of the medical and nursing professions in killing physically and mentally handicapped adults and children in Nazi Germany (1933 – 1945) and participated in the Holocaust. The film uses voice-over narration and interviews to give a detailed chronological narrative in which a context of military defeat, political and economic chaos, and government inability to deal with the Great Depression and pay outstanding war debts to the Allied victors resulted in the rise of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists to power in Germany in 1933 and their subsequent control of German society and culture with widespread propaganda resulting in the mass brainwashing of people, and of medical professionals in particular.
Chillingly the film details the Western political / cultural context of the early 20th century, built on Western imperialist policies seeking to justify the genocide and enslavement of peoples in Africa and Asia in order to steal their lands and resources, in which prevailing political, economic and scientific ideas and ideologies combined in birthing scientific racism and eugenics. The film shows that the ideology of racial hygiene to justify selective breeding of humans and getting rid of people deemed racially or genetically inferior was widespread in Western societies from the 19th century onwards well into the 1970s, not just in Germany; indeed, much of the inspiration for pursuing racial hygiene policies in Nazi Germany came from the United States. The nature of German society in the late 19th / early 20th centuries with its emphasis on hierarchy, junior doctors and nurses deferring to more senior doctors and nurses, and women deferring to men provides another aspect to the context.
The film’s chronological narrative follows the development of involuntary euthanasia programs (known as Aktion T4 programs) for handicapped people and children in hospitals, and the ways in which doctors and nurses participated in those programs – the nurses often holding children while the children were overdosed with sedatives by other nurses on the orders of doctors or senior nurses – and how those euthanasia programs developed into larger institutional programs that herded Jewish, gypsy and other groups deemed racially inferior into concentration camps and systematically killed them with the participation of medical and nursing personnel, many of whom had previously worked in the euthanasia programs. In a number of concentration camps in Germany and Poland, horrific and sadistic medical experiments were carried out on inmates: all these experiments were overseen by Dr Josef Mengele and suggested either by him or other physicians. In all these experiments, doctors and nurses were involved in carrying out tasks that amounted to torture, mutilation and murder. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II in May 1945, a number of doctors and nurses were tried and convicted for war crimes and crimes of genocide but many of the institutions they worked in and carried out the euthanasia programs still continue as working hospitals.
Unfortunately many of the root causes and the political / economic / cultural context in which the euthanasia programs leading to the Holocaust arose still exist in societies around the world. As the film concludes, the factors that turned Germany, one of the most culturally advanced nations in the world in the early 20th century, still exist in most nations: they are often factors rooted in human psychology and especially in human social psychology.
The film has become more relevant in the current COVID-19 pandemic era as medical and nursing professionals, particularly those working in hospitals, come under pressure from governments to administer injections of experimental drugs with often severe side effects (including death) and short-lived benefits, and to deny patients more appropriate and safer (but less profitable for large pharmaceutical firms) treatments. General practitioners in many countries are also under pressure to administer jabs of purported vaccines to patients or face the threat of losing their licences to practise medicine. Widespread government propaganda about COVID-19 and its supposed threat to public health to justify lockdowns and abolishing civil liberties, and at the same time discriminate against people refusing injections of COVID-19 vaccines, eerily echoes the Nazi propaganda that demonised Jewish people, gypsies, Slavs and others considered racially inferior and unfit.
It is no longer just enough to learn about the Holocaust and the roles that the medical and nursing professions played in it; we must also learn how we can easily be manipulated and brainwashed by governments and corporations into hate and following their agendas.