Caring Corrupted—The Killing Nurses of The Third Reich

by David R. Bates, Communications Director Cizik School of Nursing

The WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival has honored a 56-minute film produced by Cizik School of Nursing at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) with a Platinum Remi Award given for a documentary under 60 minutes. The original documentary film, Caring Corrupted: the Killing Nurses of the Third Reich, is a grim cautionary story about nurses who participated in the Holocaust and abandoned their professional ethics during the Nazi era.

Cizik School of Nursing Director of Educational Technology Linda L. Crays, M.A., production coordinator for the challenging three-year endeavor, said: “Thanks to everyone involved for their hard work on this project. It is nice that others have recognized all that we have put into this effort!”

Caring Corrupted casts a harsh light on nurses who used their professional skills to murder the handicapped, mentally ill and infirm at the behest of the Third Reich and directly participated in genocide. During on-camera interviews, experts and survivors ponder the causes and meaning of such horrifying ethical violations in medical care. The film premiered during a January 2017 reception at the Holocaust Museum Houston.

“These Third Reich nurses lost their moral ‘true north’ – and, instead of easing the suffering of vulnerable individuals and defying immoral orders, their ethical compasses were diverted, and they lost their bearings of professional responsibility and compassion,” said Cizik School of Nursing Dean Lorraine Frazier, Ph.D., R.N. “We earnestly hope that none of our nursing students are ever faced with such conscience-searing moral choices as were the nurses in the film, but this will be a reminder to each of us to never forget.”

The WorldFest film festival, now in its 50th year, is one of the oldest and largest film and video competitions in the world. More than 4,500 category entries vied for a Remi Award this year. (The Remi Award takes its name from artist Frederic Remington, who captured the spirit of Texas and the American West with his dramatic paintings and sculptures.)

No awards are given in any category unless the scores from the juries are high enough to place for honors. Overall, only 15-20 percent of total entries actually win an award at WorldFest.

Medals are given out in platinum, gold, silver and bronze categories. If a film gets a score of 93-94, it wins platinum. A score of 95 or higher merits consideration for a special jury award, and only those entries are considered for the grand winner. Everyone who attended the WorldFest Grand Awards Gala on April 28 at the Marriott Westchase HQ Hotel had won an award, as only the actual winners are invited to the gala event.

Caring Corrupted: the Killing Nurses of the Third Reich was produced by Sunset Productions, Houston: James Bailey, Producer and Screenwriter; Mark Susman, Editor/Director of Photography; Susan Benedict, Ph.D., CRNA, Script Consultant; Alan Varner, Narrator; Fast Cut Films, Post Production.

Undercover Epicenter Nurse blows the lid off the COVID-19 pandemic.

What would you do if you discovered that the media and the government were lying to us all? And that hundreds, maybe thousands of people were dying because of it?

Army combat veteran and registered nurse Erin Olszewski’s most deeply held values were put to the test when she arrived as a travel nurse at Elmhurst Hospital in the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. After serving in Iraq, she was back on the front lines—and this time, she found, the situation was even worse.

Rooms were filthy, nurses were lax with sanitation measures, and hospital-acquired cases of COVID-19 were spreading like wildfire.

Worse, people who had tested negative multiple times for COVID-19 were being labeled as COVID-confirmed and put on COVID-only floors. Put on ventilators and drugged up with sedatives, these patients quickly deteriorated—even though they did not have coronavirus when they checked in.

Doctors-in-training were refusing to perform CPR—and banning nurses from doing it—on dying patients whose families had not consented to “Do Not Resuscitate” orders.

Erin wasn’t about to stand by and let her patients keep dying on her watch, but she knew that if she told the truth, people wouldn’t believe her. It was just too shocking. Willing to go to battle for her patients, Erin made the decision to go deep undercover, recording conversations with other nurses, videos of malpractice, and more. She began to share what she found on social media. Unsurprisingly, she was fired for it.

Now, Erin is standing up to tell the whole horrifying story of what happened inside Elmhurst Hospital to demand justice for those who fell victim to the hospital’s greed. Not only must the staff be held accountable for their unethical actions; but also, this kind of corruption must be destroyed so that future Americans are not put at risks. The deaths have to end, and Erin won’t rest until the bad actors are exposed.