Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., Emanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania
Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania, History of Nursing Seminar Series
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Place: 3R Conference Room, Claire Fagin Hall
Why were nurses able to involve themselves in the systematic murder of psychiatric patients in Nazi Germany? How did they reconcile their views of their professional ethics with active involvement in euthanasia? In 1939, Hitler authorized a programme of `euthanasia' of children and adults with physical and psychiatric disorders. Initially, gas chambers were established at six psychiatric institutions in Germany and Austria. This programme was officially discontinued due to community protests in August, 1941. But the killings continued on an individual basis. Physicians selected patients who were unable to work or who required extensive care, and ordered the nurses to administer lethal doses of sedatives to them. Meseritz-Obrawalde was a site for 10,000 of these killings This talk will review some of the ethical thinking and rationales of nurses involved in this period of so-called 'wild euthanasia' killlings at Meseritz-Obrawald which was locaed then in the province of Pomerania in Germany (now Miedzyrzecz in Poland).