Nurses' participation in the Holocaust: A call to nursing educators

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The number of people able to provide first-person accounts of the atrocities of the Holocaust is dwindling in numbers. Prior to the mass extermination of Jews at Auschwitz and other extermination camps, nurses actively participated in the execution of tens of thousands of mentally, physically, and emotionally ill German citizens. Nursing educators must ensure that nursing students not only know about the Holocaust, but that they know that ordinary nurses were directly involved in the identification of vulnerable humans to be killed, and actually murdered them. Social, economic, and political pressures existed enabling the Nazi regime to involve nurses in this way. Similarly, social, economic, and political pressures today have the potential to encourage nurses to act in ways that violate personal or professional values. This paper provides four learning objectives that can be incorporated into existing nursing curricula to ensure that nurses do not forget how and why nurses in Germany came to murder more than 10,000 people in their care. With the passage of time comes the risk that the legacy of the Holocaust will be forgotten, nursing educators must participate in preventing that from happening.