Norwegian Nurses in the Service of the Third Reich: A Criminological Study of Atrocity Perpetration and Claims to Victimhood

My project is located in perpetrator studies and atrocity criminology (Aydin-Aitchison et al, 2022). Using archival sources, it expands and deepens the limited research on the Norwegian nurses in the German Red Cross (1942-1945). I will compare this group with the better-known Euthanasia Nurses of the Third Reich (1939-1945, see e.g., Benedict and Shields,2014: Bryant,2005: Copeland,2020). Both groups were prosecuted after the Second World War, despite claiming the status of victimhood, but remain marginal in historical research and completely absent from criminology of atrocity. Studying these two groups of female nurses will enable us to better understand female participation of perpetration during times of atrocity, but also, by using the organisation of the Red Cross as a frame, explain how an organisation dedicated to humanitarian activity came to serve anti-humanitarian regime. Further, I will use Christie's (1986) concept of 'ideal victim' to explore post-war memory and claims to victimhood, interrogating how these nurses shift between categories of perpetrator and victim.
In response, this project will use archival material and apply criminological theories and concepts to resolve the puzzle about the nurses' participation. The main research question is: What explains Norwegian nurses' contribution to Nazi atrocity crime in their role as part of the German Red Cross?
More recent studies have abandoned the ordinary/extraordinary dichotomy, and recognised that perpetrators of atrocity crimes display various drivers and should be understood as ordinary individuals within extraordinary circumstances (Anderson,2017: Mann,2004: Jensen and Szejnmann,2008: Smeulers and Grunfeld 2011: Smeulers,2015). Within this field, women were rarely studied as perpetrators until the late 1980s and early 1990s (Zroka,2015: Lower,2014: Jensen and Szejnmann,2008). Since then, the importance of women as facilitators of Nazi policy have been demonstrated convincingly (Lower, 2011), but the role of women in nursing remains understudied and under-theorised. Most work concerning nurses' role in the Holocaust deals with German women and the German Red Cross (Der Veer, 2019: Benedict and Shields,2014).
Little is also known about Norwegian nurses in the German Red Cross. Nothing is written in English, while Norwegian literature is under-theorised. What we do know is that around 447 Norwegian women volunteered to serve the Nazified German Red Cross; by the end of the war around 300 nurses had served at the Eastern Front; only 10% were fully educated as nurses. After the war, 450 nurses were prosecuted and sentenced for treason (Sæther, 2016: Gogstad,2008: Bay, 2014:2017). Subsequently, in 2015 the Norwegian Red Cross publicly apologised to the convicted nurses for failing to support them, in spite of evidence of their complicity with Nazi aims. Many were members of known Nazi families (Gogstad,2008); 229 of the 447 nurses had active NS memberships (Sæther,2016): and one oral source interviewed for a documentary stated that she knew of Norwegian nurses stationed at Dachau concentration camp (Bay,2014: 2017:Sju Kammers, 2011). To expand on and enhance the limited scope of existing research there is a need to use archives that have only recently become publicly available. This is theoretically significant, because, unlike German nurses already enrolled in an institution that underwent a dramatic reorientation, Norwegian nurses volunteered. The additional degree of agency and intentionality is important to examine nurses' subsequent claims of victimhood in terms of Christie's features of weakness, respectability, blamelessness and relatedness.