Foreign volunteers for nursing for Germany during World War II

Foreign women volunteered for nursing for Germany during World War II. They were employed by the Navy, the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe or the German Red Cross as nursing assistants or nurses.

Wehrmachtshelferinnen numbered around 450 000 [including Germans], wherof ca. 148 000 had ties to the armed forces. Some of these were foreign volunteers, and some of these worked at Erholungsheimen (or reconvalescence homes) in occupied countries.

Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht and Navy

73 Norwegian women volunteered as nursing assistants for Luftwaffe, without being members of Red Cross.

Some volunteers worked for Wehrmacht or Kriegsmarine.

German Red Cross

Foreign volunteers in the German Red Cross worked in "pure SS-units and institutions - either at the front as part of combat units of Waffen-SS, or behind the combat zones in SS hospitals, KZ camps and Lebensborn institutions".

Foreign volunteers in the German Red Cross, "were women that volunteered for service in the nazified German Red Cross (DRK) during World War II. They hail from many European countries", according to Eirik Gripp Bay.

The number of these volunteers from various nations included: Belgium, cirka 730; Norway, around 500; Denmark around 180—225; in addition there were those from [Germany], France, Finland, Sweden and the Baltic states and the Netherlands. These volunteers were deployed in pairs.

The German Red Cross (...) "was not like today's organization, but an integrated and important part of the Nazi system", according to Eirik Gripp Bay (a lektor in History).

In a 2014 Master's degree dissertation, Eirik Gripp Bay states that the topic of these volunteers, as treated by authors and film directors, has had a "one-sided point of view that to a great degree has been based on the womens' own statements".

History

From 1942 the DRK was allowed to "accept Germanic volunteers from occupied areas".

From 20 January 1944 the SS Sanitätsamt took over all responsibility «the Germanic volunteers» after arrival in Germany, and "first and foremost one wished for nursing assistants—Sanitätshelferinnen—or volunteers without medical education", of whom the SS Sanitätsamt took upon itself to educate, also in regards to ideology and Weltanschauung, according to Anders Christian Gogstad (Dr.med. and an author).

They worked in field hospitals as far East as Kislovodsk in Kaukasus.

Education and training

Applicants received a Physical examination by SS physicians.

Trainees swore an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler.

"The SS was responsible for both the recruitment and training of the these volunteers, whose substantial education contained elements of military skills and discipline, co-training with the Wehrmacht and ideological education in the Nazi Weltanschauung" according to Eirik Gripp Bay. 100 hours of mandatory training in Weltanschauliche Schulung, arvelære and raselære, was later reduced to 40 hours.

During a half year training course, under SS leadership, one would be educated as a «Schwesterhelferinne»—specialized nursing assistant. DRK-nurses would receive additional education by the SS, and would thereafter become Wehrmachtsschwester.

Around 9.7 percent of the Norwegian volunteers were fully trained nurses when they joined the DRK.

"Dehumanization was naturally enough an important part of the race teaching and the idelogic education" of these volunteers according to Bay.

Participation in euthanasia and genocide

"[T]en thousands of DRK-Schwesters and foreign volunteers for nursing were witnesses and accessories to operations that caused terror and genocide (...) [and] conditioned to accept violence as a means to achieve the goal of the Thousand-Year Reich", according to Bay. (In a )

"[T]here are sources that indicate that Norwegian volunteers were participants in what one could characterize as systematic killings of civilians in occupied areas", according to Bay.

"History shows that the Norwegian volunteers not only were a part of the murderous regime, thru its connection with the German Red Cross, but that at least some were directly involved in the crimes", according to Bay. Furthermore, one Norwegian has said that as a nursing volunteer in a Waffen-SS unit she was ordered to gas handicapped children in Ukraine. (Eirik Grippe Bay has been denied access—by film directors— to the filmed interview, and Bay says that "it is a serious flaw in a production of a documentary film, when one chooses to focus on the woman's role as a victim (...) when one sits on first-hand information of this caliber".)

Marie Aakre (author and Senior Advisor of Ethics at Norwegian Nurses' Organisation) says that "Nurses had central roles regarding systematic torture and killings for example in the so-called euthanasia program in Nazi Germany. The most vulnerable, developmentally challenged and sick children; [the] psychiatric ill and eventually adults were forcible killed with methods that cause considerable suffering, and it is clear that nurses had central roles in Holocaust (...) How can we understand that nurses were active participants that actually killed more than 10 000 people" [as a part] of Nazi operations.

"[T]he SS-physician Ernst von Grawitz, leader of the DRK, was the main person responsible for the euthanasia program that took the lives of ten thousands of Germans with psychiatric- or physical ailments - This was performed by amongst others, nurses from the DRK, and the act[s] was to a degree counted as «humanitarian». Little of violent methods such as gas or lethal injections, were used. On occasion one starved the victims to death—a quite less expensive method".

Ethnic discrimination

Omer Bartov states that "the German Army, and also its contributors for medical services, where DRK was a main player, outright refused access to medical services to Russian prisoners of war. Only Russian physicians were permitted to treat their captive countrymen, and then only with minimal equipment (...) only Russian war material", according to Bay.

"Some foreign volunteers claim to have treated hostile, Russian [or Soviet] soldiers. This has not been confirmed. Danish Ebba Mikkelsen, also a foreign volunteer claims that she never saw a single Russian soldier during her years in the SS hospitals, in spite of fierce battles nearby", according to Bay.

Preferential treatment of "Germanic volunteers"

The volunteers from 'Germanic' territories, namely Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands, were viewed as something out of the ordinary by their German employers", according to Eirik Gripp Bay.

DRK-Schwesters did not have access to the Officers' messhall "like the Germanic volunteers had", according to Bay.

Links to SS

"In literature the women are understood as DRK Schwestern or nurses in DRK. But at the same time, literature shows that they were separated from regular DRK Schwestern, both by privileges and their tight links to the SS", according to Bay.

"[T]he Red Cross uniforms were switched with SS uniforms with Norwegian flags on the sleeve", according to Gogstad.

At least two of the Norwegian nurses were to be in a "direct employment relationship with the SS" after a trial period in DRK Schwesterschaft, and their salaries were the same as those of Freie Schwester.

Punishment after World War II

Volunteers were convicted after the war in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Norway, and some received prison sentences. As late as 1998, one of the Norwegian convicts attempted to have the courts perform "a renewed evaluation due to changed contemporary attitudes". In 1999, a retrial was denied.

Research

"The foreign nursing volunteers stories and recollections are unclear "in such a way that they frankly admit to having been a part of this system. They received ideologic schooling as instructed by the SS; they were linked to military units that unquestionably have violated the civilian population, and they were present in geographic areas where we know that genocide took place. At the same time they have displayed the same innocence that the Wehrmacht and SS soldiers tried to [display], until research of History caught up with them", according to Bay.

"The practice of sending foreign volunteers to front units gives little meaning viewing the experience, education and language skills with which they could contribute. But (...) reasons that the service was a vetting, a test of willpower and ideological persuasion, and a baptism of fire where the women were put in positions where they participated in the nationalsocialism's destined fight against the hereditary enemy in the East—then the service appears in a new, more nuanced light", according to Bay. Furthermore, the Germanic volunteers "became an integrated part of Nazi-Germany's Generalplan Ost thru what Himmler and the SS perceived as their inner Erbbild" [or genotype ]".

Films

• Solace [Belgian title] (Original title: Sju kammers); 2011

Foreign nursing volunteers

• Hanna Kvanmo, Frontschwester; later Member of parliament in Norway.

See also

• Wehrmachthelferin
• Krankenpflege im Nationalsozialismus

• Nursing sister/Sister

• Verband der Schwesternschaften vom Deutschen Roten Kreuz
• Nazi eugenics
• Erholungsheim

References

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