Ch. 1. Ordinary Germans revisited: nurses, psychiatry, and morality in historical context -- Ch. 2. Neither riffraff nor saints: the ambivalent professionalization of the psychiatric nurse -- Ch. 3. Educating nurses in the spirit of the times: Weimar psychiatry in theory and practice -- Ch. 4. The evasiveness of the ideal: private and professional obstacles -- Ch. 5. Cleaning house in Wittenau: 1933 and the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service -- Ch. 6. Reeducating nurses in the spirit of the times: Geisteskrankenpflege in the service of national socialism
Ch. 7. Politics and professional life under national socialism -- Ch. 8. War, mass murder, and moral flight: psychiatric nursing, 1939-1945 -- Ch. 9. Concluding remarks
Summary
"This book tells the story of German nurses who, directly or indirectly, participated in the Nazis' "euthanasia" measures against patients with mental and physical disabilities, measures that claimed well over 100,000 victims from 1939 to 1945. How could men and women who were trained to care for their patients come to kill or assist in murder or mistreatment? This is the central question pursued by Bronwyn McFarland-Icke as she details the lives of nurses from the beginning of the Weimar Republic through the years of National Socialist rule. Rather than examine what the Party did or did not order, she looks into the hearts and minds of people whose complicity in murder is not easily explained with reference to ideological enthusiasm."--Jacket
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 317-335) and index
