Nursing: A major international conference has heard harrowing accounts of how many nurses in the Nazi-era turned their attentions from caring for patients to actually killing them.
The 1st International Conference on Nursing and Midwifery in the Third Reich is the first gathering of its kind since the Nuremberg Trials in Germany after the second World War.
Delegates gathering at the Castletroy Park Hotel in Limerick examined the role played by nurses in implementing the Nazis' shocking euthanasia, sterilisation and eugenic programmes.
Focusing on nurses' roles in concentration camps and human experimentation, the conference attempted to address how many nurses became willing participants in killing patients in their care.
In a keynote address, Prof Susan Benedict, of the Medical University of South Carolina, told delegates that years after the killings many nurses who were willing participants in the slaughter saw nothing wrong with their actions.
"Nurses were socialised into an acceptance of euthanasia through school texts depicting the care of the mentally handicapped as a needless expense.
"Several films were produced using the most popular actors of the day to advocate euthanasia," said Prof Benedict.
However, the prevention of reproduction of people with physical and mental disabilities was not sufficient for the Nazis so they started killing children with disabilities, the conference heard.
Hosted in association with the University of Limerick's Research Office and College of Science, about 120 delegates attended the event last Thursday and Friday.
Organisers said the conference raised important questions about the nursing profession's role in fundamental human rights and the preservation of human dignity.
Prof Benedict told delegates that nurses were key participants in the killing of these children - they identified those with disabilities, they talked the parents into placing children in special hospital units, and then they killed the children by starvation or drug overdose.
Staff at the "killing centres", where the euthanasia programme was carried out, swore an oath of silence and nurses accompanied patients on special buses with windows blacked out to the gas chambers.
Delegates heard that at one such "killing centre" at Hadamar near Frankfurt in Germany in 1941, nurses and staff drank beer to celebrate the killing of their 10,000th patient in a special ceremony right outside the door of the gas chamber.
In a poignant address to delegates, Dr Barbara Dobrowolska of the Polish Nurses' Association recounted publicly for the first time the wartime experiences, recollections and attitudes of Polish nurses working in Nazi-occupied Poland during the second World War.