Sharon M. Harrison

Female Killers: Nurses and the Implementation of the Nazi Euthanasia Program at Hadamar, 1941-1945 Sharon M. Harrison

German women made a vital contribution to genocide within the context of the Nazi racial hygiene program. Female Killers examines the role played by female nurses in the crimes of the Nazi regime. Through a detailed study of nurses who participated in the Nazi euthanasia program at the Hadamar killing centre, Female Killers examines women's agency and their contribution to the crimes of the Nazi regime. This study applies sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's writings about modernity and Holocaust and evaluates the ways in which the organization of the killing enterprise impacted upon the conduct of female nurses and how they reconciled their involvement in the killings with their consciences. It argues that nurses' compliance with murder evolved incrementally as they became embedded within the bureaucratic-medical network of murder. By the time nurses grasped the depth of their complicity in murder, they had become too enmeshed in the machinery of murder to extricate themselves from its operations. This study contributes to broader historical understandings of perpetrator behaviour and the Holocaust. The appendices present previously unpublished documents.