‘Our work was in the service of the suffering of mankind’: a case study of the motives of the Easternfront Ambulance nurses, 1941–1944

ABSTRACT

During World War Two, a group of Dutch nurses chose to join the Nederlandse Ambulance (‘Easternfront Ambulance’), a controversial though currently relatively unknown field hospital for the eastern front. In doing so, they supported the German war effort. This case study elaborates on the motives of these women to make a choice that was ultimately determined as ‘wrong’, by emphasising their unique gender role of nurse in the public sphere. By providing an insight into a relatively small group of ‘wrong’ women, this article aims to act as a call for further research into the gender context of limitations and opportunities of Dutch women during the German occupation. These nurses appear to have had various intentional and unintentional motives for enlisting. Nearly all of them later claimed they had pursued a ‘calling’. They had all been Nazi or Nationalist Socialist Movement in the Netherlands sympathisers and they had all enjoyed material benefits due to their position with the field hospital. In a few cases, it seems they had longed for interaction with soldiers, or men in general, and sometimes they had simply craved for an adventurous life far from home.

KEYWORDS:

• Nederlandse Ambulance
• Easternfront Ambulance
• nurses
• ‘wrong’ women
• Second World War
• Dutch Red Cross

Acknowledgments

With special thanks to Cees Kleijn, Jocelyn Krusemeijer, Stijn Reurs and Cecile aan de Stegge in providing me with several names of nurses of the Easternfront Ambulance, and to the sons of one of the nurses, who brought their mother to life for me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The German sociologist Christina Herkommer was the first to use the term ‘scope for action’ in the context of women under National Socialism. With it, she tried to indicate the action potential of all these women to contribute to the Nazi objectives, directly or indirectly, and each in her own specific situation (Herkommer 2008).

2. I have published a shorter article about the nurses of the Easternfront Ambulance in Historica, Dutch-language scientific journal about gender history. Due to the gender focus of that publication, I left out some medical aspects, which are now included in this article. Moreover, the objective of this article to function as a programmatic call is broader, and thus the conclusion is also somewhat more elaborate than that of the Dutch publication.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sietske van der Veen

Sietske van der Veen (1992) is an historian and journalist. She graduated in History from the University of Amsterdam (UvA), her master’s thesis concerning the nurses of the Easternfront Ambulance. After working freelance in public history for a few years, she is currently a PhD candidate at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Huygens ING), where she researches the social mobility of Jewish Dutch with a high(er) social status (1880–1940).