The Nazi Nurses of the Bełżec Extermination Camp

This is a COVID safe event and attendance restrictions are in place. 50 physical attendees are welcome at the UQ Centre for Clinical Research Auditorium, Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital Campus https://www.cornerstoneparking.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/RBH-Campus-Map.jpg (click on image to enlarge - venue is located at the central bottom area of the map),90m from the RBWH bus station. Please register for a ticket (free) here through Humanitix. The exhibition as well as the accompanying lectures and film screenings (part of the program accompanying the exhibition) are fit for viewing by persons aged 15 years or more.

 Between 1963 and 1965, four male nurses were tried in the First District Court in Munich for their participation in the March to December 1942 murder of 360,000 Jews in the Bełżec extermination camp. The camp was located south of Lublin in German occupied Poland.

Only one Jewish survivor of the camp lived post war to provide testimony. The sole purpose of the Bełżec camp was systematic murder by gassing of victims with carbon monoxide.

Despite free acknowledgement of participation in the Bełżec operation by each of the nurses at trial, the defence argument of "putative duress" (Putativnötigungsstand) diminished the nurses responsibility to the point of exoneration. The indictments for all four nurse perpetrators were dismissed.

This lecture explores the pre and post Bełżec history of these nurses. I argue that their collective participation in the systematic murder of patients at one or more of five German psychiatric institutions between 1940 and 1941, along with the benefits participation entailed, informed their willingness to continue to participate in the same 'line of work' in Bełżec.

The expectation of the utilisation of their newly mastered nursing/killing skill/expertise in facilitating mass murder, was the value they now brought to killing on a far greater 'industrial' scale at Bełżec. Pre-existing knowledge of, and relationships with, senior staff was collaborative, respectful, at times collegial, given the nature of the 'secret work' they were undertaking together, to the point that renders the defence argument of putative duress specious. The nurses committed to killing at Bełżec and continued in the same 'line of work' after Bełżec, often under the same managers.

Dr Darren O'Brien

School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland

Sydney Nursing School, University of Sydney

Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Darren is author of The Pinnacle of Hatred the Blood Libel and the Jews (Jerusalem, 2011).