Abstract
In recent years, there has been increased recognition of the significance and relevance of Holocaust studies to nurses. However, these studies are rarely integrated in the nursing curriculum, and even when they are, the focus is usually on healthcare personnel who collaborated with the Nazi regime. This article aims to bridge this gap by analyzing a comprehensive requisite curriculum on the Holocaust for graduate nursing students. We emphasize the work of Jewish healthcare professionals during the Holocaust and the dilemmas they faced, as well as the trauma and resilience of Holocaust survivors, their treatment today, and implications for treating other patients. This article examines how studying these issues affected the graduate students. It analyzes the reflective accounts written by the students, using qualitative content analysis and Grounded Theory. The findings suggest that students received tools to act professionally and empathetically while demonstrating greater sensitivity to the patients’ identity, past experiences, trauma, and how the hospital as a “total institution” affects them. Many of the students developed conscious leadership. The program used a personalized pedagogical approach that contributed to experiential learning but was also emotionally challenging for the participants. We recommend including Holocaust studies as a requisite component in nursing programs worldwide.
Highlights
The Holocaust provides many lessons in medical ethics
The findings suggest that students received tools to act professionally and empathetically while demonstrating greater sensitivity to the patients’ identity, past experiences, trauma, and how the hospital as a “total institution” affects them
The situations faced by the Jewish healthcare professionals can teach us about “choiceless choices,” or “crucial decisions [that] did not reflect options between life and death, but between one form of abnormal response and another, both imposed by a situation that was in no way of the victim’s own choosing” ([57] p. 72)
Summary
Lessons can be learned from the horrific violation of human rights by Nazi doctors and nurses, which included medical experiments on prisoners, forced sterilization, and “euthanasia” [1,2]. These healthcare professionals participated in “medicalized killing,” i.e., medically supervised killing in the name of healing [1]. They played a key role in genocidal projects that perceived mass murder as a therapeutic imperative [1]. More than half of the German physicians and nurses voluntarily joined the Nazi Party relatively early [2–5] Those who opted out of the genocidal programs were not punished [6,7]. It should be noted that Nazi healthcare personnel did not act in an ethically-free vacuum: a code of medical ethics existed prior to
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