Today is ‘HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY‘. A day to remember the liberation of Auschwitz, 80 years ago, and the 6 million Jews murdered during the Third Reich. I find it hard not to mark this occasion. Allow me, therefore, to quote from the last chapter of my recent book ‘HITLER’S FEMALE PHYSICIANS Women Doctors During the Third Reich and Their Crimes Against Humanity’:

Both the nature and the severity of the crimes committed by the female physicians vary greatly. Some ‘merely’ promoted the Nazi ideology of race hygiene and thus became instrumental in the elimination of what the Nazis called ‘human ballast’. They might not have committed crimes as such but they certainly induced others to do so. Those women who actually participated in the murders can be differentiated into several categories. Some of them did it because they were misled to believe “euthanasia” had become legal, while failing to consider that what the Nazis had chosen to call “euthanasia” was, in fact, murder. Others seemed to have killed with considerable enthusiasm. And others again were nothing short of sadistic monsters torturing prisoners of concentration camps. All these categories have in common that they blatantly violated the ethical norms that, even though not yet formalised, had long and firmly been enshrined in medicine.

The thought of 38 women doctors being in one way or another involved in Nazi crimes may seem shocking to some readers. To assume that brutality and violence are not feminine characteristics and that women are incapable of mass murder has obvious appeal: it allows for the hope that at least half of the human race will not devour the other and safeguard the future of the humanity. Yet, it also creates a false shield against a confrontation with disconcerting realities. Others might argue that the number 38 is insignificant compared to the much larger number of male doctors who committed crimes during that period.

However, to put the figure of 38 into context, we ought to consider firstly that my research almost certainly failed to generate a complete list of implicated female physicians. Secondly, women were grossly under-represented in the German medical profession. If we account for this factor, their proportion does not differ significantly from that of male doctors who became guilty of criminal acts.

Studying the information about the crimes of male physicians that I added via multiple ‘boxes’ to this book, we cannot fail to realize that the crimes committed by these doctors were often more severe than that of their female colleagues. Does this perhaps indicate that brutality and violence are, after all, not feminine characteristics? It would be comforting to think so, yet I fear that other explanations might be more important. It is clear from reading the 38 biographies that the female physicians were mostly young and inexperienced. Consequently, they tended to be employed in relatively subordinate positions and often found themselves on the receiving end of orders from their male superiors. Thus they usually had less power and less opportunity than their male colleagues for committing crimes against humanity.

The question of what drove these female doctors to commit atrocities on vulnerable patients in their care is important but far from easy to answer. Based on the biographies reviewed in this book, it seems obvious that different motivations played a role and that generalisations would be problematic.

• Some women evidently were convinced of the Nazi ideology and followed it naively hoping to help create a ‘master race’.
• Others may have felt that they were doing something good and even ethical by relieving severely disabled children from lifelong suffering.
• Most felt they had to follow orders in order to avoid punishment. (There is, however, no evidence that refusal to commit a crime disadvantaged physicians.
• Many might have believed that they were not breaking the law. They almost uniformly claimed after the war that they were told their actions were legal.
• Others might have acted under financial pressures. During the Third Reich, women physicians were grossly under-privileged within the medical profession. Thus, some struggled to find paid employment. Once they had achieved this goal they were reluctant to risk it by objecting to orders from their superiors.

As can easily be seen when comparing the post-war fates of the male and female doctors, the punishments of the women was frequently more lenient. For instance, the 1948 trial of Helene Sonnemann concluded that her involvement in the murder of her patients was indisputable. Yet, the court decided that her actions were not convictable because, at the time, she did not think of them as unlawful. This judicial rationale was applied to many of the cases against female physicians. On the one hand, this has been interpreted as a legal perversion which allowed many guilty individuals to escape punishment. On the other hand, it might be the expression of a more general degree of leniency towards women.

Soon after the war, the courts seemed to have become increasingly slow and reluctant in the prosecution of the Nazi crimes. One might even sense a general feeling of shame and embarrassment about the Third Reich resulting in a collective urge to forget that besieged the German people. In some instances, this may well have impeded the will to punish the perpetrators. Many of the physicians, even those who admitted murdering patients during the Nazi era, were thus permitted to continue practising medicine. Some even made prominent careers, while others received prestigious awards. Significant areas of German medicine, such as psychiatry were, during the first post-war decades, dominated by doctors who had been members of the Nazi party. The German medical profession tended to turn a blind eye to these developments, and whenever new horrific details emerged of past monstrosities, the predominant feeling was one of embarrassment.

I was born in 1948, and when I studied medicine in Munich during the 1970s, some of the ‘doctors of infamy’ became my teachers, either in person or through the textbooks they had published. My generation had the option to ignore all this by insisting “it has nothing to do with me”. Most of us did exactly that. However, some took a different path, and it is not least thanks to their research that today we know more about the involvement of the German medical profession in the horrors of the Nazi period. If my book can make even just a small contribution to this still ongoing task, the laborious and often depressing process of writing it will have been worthwhile.